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Don Taylor
"The Deductive Title"
Last month I took a lease on an office in the Ames Building,
downtown Des Moines, third floor, with a view of the corner
at Locust and 8th Streets.
Living and writing in my cabin on the Racoon River outside
Dallas Center was highly warm to my interests when finishing
my 'socialistic' novel about an under-achieving man in his 40's
and his 16 year-old wife living in a trailer in south Winterset,
a couple surviving only to the tune of welfare benevolence.
After I finished the novel, I gave it the title, "A Course of Life
Uncharted," -- a title that seemed appropriate to the theme,
but in a way, after the fact, unsatisfying. I knew my new novel
required a different venue and approach.
It is rare when a writer decides on a title for a work before get-
ting to work on the work, but such would turn out to be the case
in this case. I knew right away, to follow my new understanding,
I had to settle on a title before I started writing. The best title
possible would be one that directed the writing, one that control-
led every sentence, every paragraph, every chapter-- right from
the beginning right to the end.
With that 'theory-of-the-purpose-of titles' in mind, one day I
went to the window of my new office, looked down, and saw
a lady I guessed to be in her late twenties walking north on 8th
Street on the east sidewalk. By her brisk pace she appeared
high-spirited, provocative, quite sophisticated, and special. At
the corner she stopped, looked around, and then stepped off
the curb and walked west toward the other side of the street.
And my perception changed-- maybe because of the wind that
suddenly whipped-up from the north. High flapped-up her skirt
and her hair blew willy-nilly, scarecrow-like. Her walk changed
from a kind of lusty confidence to a defensive gawkiness.
Suddenly the lady looked ordinary, pedestrian.
That's was it! I knew that was it, and the title of my new novel
came as a revelation. I started my computer, put in a floppy and
went to Word Pad. I pulled up a window and in bold Arial
(Western), 14 point, I typed,
"Suddenly She Looked Pedestrian."
Tales of The Ordinary by D. Taylor
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