Undiscovered Titles
There is a certain Japanese woman whom I tutor in English while meeting her once a week in a coffee shop. It’s not a liaison. That’s how many private English lessons are conducted. She buys me dinner, pays for my time and I tutor her in English. This woman is interested in taking the TOEIC Test - the Test of English for International Communication - periodically, and our sessions are meant to keep her conversational English up to a certain level and, when another go at the TOEIC approaches, to try to raise it - raise the grammar and the reading comprehension. Admittedly, some of those kinds of tests’ grammar and reading comprehension questions can be ridiculously challenging, and I get stumped. For a few years now this student has kept a journal for me. She often writes about films she sees, or going on lunch dates with her friends or trips with her husband. I read it, check and correct it, then listen to her read it back to me so that I can hear how it sounds in her own words.
There came a time when I suggested that her journal entries - only one per week - be accompanied by a title as a means to help focus the story and as an aid to the reader. But since her journal writing regularly involves only three topics - lunches with friends, trips with husband, and films - her titles would almost always be the same: “Lunch with friends,” etc. So I began suggesting titles to her, and that quickly led to me giving her titles as homework - to use as prompts when she writes her journal at home.
Quickly she commented that my suggested titles had nothing to do with the writing.
“That’s okay,” I said. “These are exciting titles. First get readers interested, and then once they start to read you keep their attention with good writing and good story telling.” Eventually it occurred to me that title like the ones I gave her could be legitimate book titles if they came from the mouth of someone other than myself. Here is a sample:
Diabolical Plans from St. Mary’s Convent
12 Ways to Cheat the Elderly and live happily ever after
Cheese that Kills
Flying in Space Without Digital Machines
Xena and the Sea Monsters from Mars
Super Sam and the 4-Dimentional Trapezoid
The Hot and Sticky Kablooie!!
The Great, Big, Fantastic Thing
Mikine* and the Great Fantastic Blowout
Mikine* and the Turtle, an Okinawan Love Story
The Fantasmagoric Adventure
Stories from the Diary of a Beautiful Nude Model
Peluche** and the Great Jupiter Invasion Plan
The Great Bag Contest or, Why I Learned to hate Rice and love Bread
Beyond My Own Membranes
Life Cycles of the Myopic Owls of Guatemala
Human Rights and Other Urban Legends
People who eat People
The Mentally Retarded as Marriage Partners
Our lives are stories, and whether they are true or not is not the point.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Mikine is her husband’s name.
** Peluche is her dog’s name.