{"id":549,"date":"2008-04-03T05:00:04","date_gmt":"2008-04-03T13:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/03\/draft-titles\/"},"modified":"2008-04-02T21:29:57","modified_gmt":"2008-04-03T05:29:57","slug":"draft-titles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/writing\/draft-titles\/","title":{"rendered":"Draft titles"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog-images-08\/ulysses-ms.jpg\" alt=\"ms detail from joyce's ulysses\" height=\"249\" width=\"435\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Some book titles feel so much a part of their texts that that the works&#8217; draft titles seem like oddly fitted hats, discarded in the dressing room; others &#8212; including some forced on authors by their publishers &#8212; read like images aspired to but never quite met. And then there are the flat-out clunkers, to be files under &#8220;What were they thinking?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It might be a curious exercise to gather together some of those discarded titles and parade them back out into the light. I can think of a few to get started, though I know I&#8217;m forgetting many.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Catch-18<\/li>\n<li>Like Water for Hot Chocolate<\/li>\n<li>Trimalchio in West Egg (<em>The Great Gatsby; <\/em>one of several discarded titles)<\/li>\n<li>Ten Little Niggers (<em>And Then There Were None,<\/em> A. Christie)<\/li>\n<li>The Snatch (<em>The Moving Target,<\/em> R. Macdonald)<\/li>\n<li>Stephen Hero (<em>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man<\/em>)<\/li>\n<li>Slaves (&#8220;I Sing the Body Electric,&#8221; Whitman)<\/li>\n<li>The Man Who Disappeared (<em>Amerika,<\/em> Kafka)<\/li>\n<li>The Sisters (<em>The Rainbow,<\/em> Lawrence)<\/li>\n<li>A Paean (&#8220;Lenore,&#8221; Poe)<\/li>\n<li>A Prayer (<em>The Power and the Glory,<\/em> Greene)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>.<\/p>\n<p><em>Shown: detail of Joyce&#8217;s manuscript of <\/em>Ulysses, <em><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.guardian.co.uk\/books\/2007\/03\/should_we_stay_out_of_writers.html\" title=\"cummins\" target=\"_blank\">via Anthony Cummins<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some book titles feel so much a part of their texts that that the works&#8217; draft titles seem like oddly fitted hats, discarded in the dressing room; others&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}