Penguins in Pants

Titling. I am so terrible with titles. When I was in college I turned in my first few essays without titles for two reasons. The first being I have a lot of anxiety over title writing and the second being I don’t really believe school essays need titles. Unless it is a dissertation or something you are submitting for publishing I feel that the three, five, whatever page essay’s job is to make the argument, so why do we need titles telling us the point of the essay?

I have a lot of anxiety over title writing because most essay titles sound grandiose and therefore stupid because it is a three page college essay dudes, you can get away with a single word title, probably. I really hate the compound essay title. You know what I mean. “Over Thinking It: The Metaphysical Act of Writing About Writing” or whatever minor detail your hungover and barely functional mind had decided to place an overabundance of importance upon that week. I rebelled strongly against those and only began using them my Junior year due to complaints from professors. Seriously. Not that I don’t love my professors but I smell creativity being stifled.

Now, titling my Romance novel is causing even greater anxiety because Romance titles almost demand to sound idiotic. As a being who abhors and avoids cliché I am having great difficulty feeling comfortable with my current title. The book is about an A-list actor who falls in love with his personal assistant while working on a small independent feature film. The novel is the first in what I hope to be a series of four other novels concerning characters who work in the New York film industry. I want the titles to sound like Romance titles and involve well-known filmmaking terms. I don’t want the titles to sound really stupid. The first one is currently being called:

Love and…Action!

What do you think? Please comment, please be honest, I don’t have much of an ego when it comes to my writing, and especially not my titling!

I worked 49 hours this week and it is only Thursday. This means that I am not going to write a five-page essay like I usually do.