Title generator #001: Great titles for your poetry or prose!

          One way to jolt your creativity is to come up with a list of new titles for pieces you HAVEN’T written yet. One way to do that is to make a mashup of OTHER titles. For instance, I recently bought a copy of Force Field: 77 Women Poets of British Columbia. Here’s a bit of the math I did with some of the titles, to give you an idea:

East Side Diary + Visit to My Mother’s Grave = DIARY FROM THE GRAVE

Something Lost + Recipe for a Sidewalk = SOMETHING FOR A SIDEWALK or RECIPE for GETTING LOST

Schizophrenic + First Love = SCHIZOPHRENIC LOVE

Here’s a list of some other titles I created yesterday, using this approach. See something you like?

Red Earth * Gift in Exile * Mechanical Man * When I Have My Accident * Body God * Ladder Hunting * Seven Lines About Sex * Long Explanations * Midnight Sculptor * Beware of the Bottom * Found Dog * The Blue Song * Secret Machine * Sin Rituals * Tourist Omens * Singing at the Dumpster * Death Spa * At the Edge of Two * Pinhole Paths * A Notion of Flow * Secrets of Glass

What I appreciate about this approach is that it brings together words I might not normally THINK of combining, which leads to unique ideas about the stories they might tell or the poems they may inspire.

Try this:

Two things to try today:

1. Choose one of the titles in red above and come up with a poem or the beginning of a piece of prose that might have that as its header.

2. Find an anthology and do a mashup of titles of your own. Aim to come up with at least ten!

Coming tomorrow: Another strange technique for generating title ideas!