I won’t say it’s my all-time favorite movie, but I’ve seen it a few times. Stephen King’s book turned flick… The Shining.
When Nicolson busts through that door holding that axe?
Poking his head through the shredded door, wild eyes and mussed hair announcing… “Here’s Johnny!”
Who else could put a laugh in the middle of a suspense scene of a horror flick?
I noticed something after that though.
John Grisham came out with novels like The Client, The Witness, The Firm…
Which is alright? He took the two word title kind of as his writer’s moniker. Got tons of success. But then I noticed something.
Authors climbed out of the woodwork with two word titles starting with “The.”
I’d see a book titled, “The Street,” (just made that up here) and thought… oooh a fresh John Grisham read. Only to find some copycat author horning in on the Grishamite title brand.
Supposed creative people having trouble creating a fresh title moniker of their own.
Take Debbie Makeover’s Cedar Cove books.
They are all addresses. Now, she didn’t come up with that idea, but she didn’t copycat someone already using it as a branding of book titles.
Hundred bucks says you got authors ridin’ the best-seller pockets of Debbie’s “address title” brand trying to cop a read from bookworms.
It’s just not being original when someone does that.
Neither is writing lyrics with sentiments which we’ve all herd ten thousand times.
For instance, I could write a line like, “She was killing me in that mini-skirt.”
It’s a line in a major Tim McGraw hit which we’ve heard bzillin times in that genre.
Or a line like, “Her blue eyes saw right through to my heart.”
Pegs the interest and emotion meter, none. We’ve all heard that kind of line before.
Happily, there is a really methodical way of fixing this which just about anyone can do.
Something to take “The Dulling” right out of those well-worn lines.
Make ‘em stand out like the grim reaper in the front pew on Easter Sunday.
All disclosed in, the soon to publish, May’s TuneBooster. Meanwhile April’s is still available.. Hook up at https://www.tunesmithtips.com/newsletter/