I’m a fan of short titles. One word is the ideal for me. The reasoning is, if you can boil the essence of your story into as few letters as possible, you’ve got some skill on display. So what explains this story of mine, The History of Value Shopping in 12st-Century America, which is probably the longest title I’ve ever chosen? Is it unfocused? Does it suck?

Suckiness, for lack of a better word, is subjective, and apparently this insanely long titled story did not suck as per the folks at Monkeybicycle, who published it here.

What I think happened, regarding the title is this: sometimes you’ve got to let the story (and title) be whatever it is.

The History of Value Shopping in 21-st Century America is a deceptively simple story. Ellie Sears is a college student working on her thesis (hence the story’s title) by visiting dollar stores. She meets Lucinda, a clerk, a mysterious girl with a secret, and Lucinda brings Ellie along on an adventure. It’s a story of exploration and attraction (non-sexual) and escape. Hidden selves and alter egos. Maybe.

It’s also one of my shorter stories, clocking in at under 1600 words. It began life in a writing workshop as a power prompt, where you’re given two characters, a genre, a trope, a setting, and the POV/tense, and then you write a story. I came up with the bones of this one, and I thought I maybe had something, so I revisited it, and here we are.

I think at the time I was also in love with Bud Smith’s short story collection Double Bird. He’s great at detail and absurdity, so undoubtedly I was trying to incorporate some of his literary styles, play around with them, try them on, and while I would never consider myself an absurdist, I definitely like tossing in a drunken screaming circus clown now and again.

The moral of this post? I don’t know. Maybe it’s don’t insist on having every title be only one word. And let the story be whatever weirdness it insists on being, so it will find its place in the world.

Photo by Cam Ballard on Unsplash