Brevity

In Hamlet, Polonius begins a speech with, “Since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief.” 

Centuries later, an episode of the Simpsons (“Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington”) cleverly edits Shakespeare with a writing competition banner that reads, “Brevity is…wit.”

Browsing through this week’s New York Times Best Seller titles, I found myself giggling. It’s not that any of the titles or their subject matter are particularly funny. Rather they appear to contradict a modern cardinal rule of writing: edit to the bone. We are told by nearly every teacher, agent, and successful author that editing one’s manuscript is essential to telling a story well. If a sentence or paragraph isn’t strictly “needed to move the story forward”, lose it — limbs and outward flourishes be damned. When you’re done editing, re-read your manuscript and edit it again. Then give it to an editor.

Yet book titles continue to fly in the face of this long-held advice and grow ever longer. If the blurb is a teasing recap of the story inside, the title is now the essence of the blurb.

Here are four of the five titles on the NYT Paperback Nonfiction Best Seller list as of this writing (October 24, 2018):

Sapiens
A Brief History of Humankind

Beautiful Boy
A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction

On Tyranny
Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

White Fragility
Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

Book covers have become movie posters.

It got me to thinking: what if this odd trend had started long ago? What titles might high school and college students be reading at this moment?  Here are a few book titles that 21st century publishers might have felt compelled to tweak a little:

The Great Gatsby
Crime Can Make you Money, but Money Doesn’t Make you Happy

Gone With the Wind
Love, Loss, and More Loss During the American Civil War

Animal Farm
Why People Always Ruin Things, as Told by Animals

Little Women
Yes, You Are Probably Just Like One of Them

Frankenstein
It’s the Name of the Scientist, Not the Monster

Fahrenheit 451
You Can’t be Offended by a Book that Doesn’t Exist

Feel free to share your ideas for other “modernized” classic book titles via my contact form!