Title.

It’s like your first name, the first thing that people learn about you, their first impression of you. A title decides everything: how you call your child so it will go. Some titles readers remember for their whole lives, some titles vanish from reader’s mind already at the end of the first page. A title should be some words that hit a reader, words that create the tone of the book. Titles are like diagnosis – after a doctor named a disease it acquired a shape and a color, and a patient now can imagine what he is fighting with.  A title should surprise you and conquer your imagination so that you would long for reading everything that is behind the title.

How are titles born? Sometimes it’s just random words, picked from the air, put together and tied somehow to a story after all. It’s one of the exercises for poetry writing class – all students write one random word on the piece of paper, then pile them together so that everyone picks up two random words and should write a poem with a title made of these two words.  Sometimes even the whole story, the whole book starts from the title – you catch on a word or a phrase that seems being very essential for you and start thinking about it every day. Suddenly, your story just comes up from nowhere.

Sometimes a title makes you to wait as a girl who is 10 minutes late for a date – you know that she will come, you look forward to seeing her, but she is still somewhere on her way. Your story is finished but it still doesn’t have a title and you read it over again and again to find couple of words that will emerge from the book’s soul, that would be more than just a title, and that would be the whole book itself. So that in the end while closing a book a reader will be hit with a sudden flash of realizing that now he completely understands the title and that now all the small pieces made a whole picture. A title is the first and the last words you see when you open and close a book. So a title is like the first and the last chord of a sonata – something you will remember.