I never could decipher the adage “Don’t put the cart before the horse” to my satisfaction.  That frustration was partial motivation for writing “The Case of the Carriageless Horse,” Detective Castilblanco’s first case as a homicide detective—the story appears in the collection World Enough and Crime.  The conundrum: Why would anyone want a horse if s/he didn’t already own a cart? Maybe the implication is that a horse has a lot more uses than just dragging a cart around?  That’s true, but it begs the question.  If someone has a little cart, s/he’d get a little pony, like you see in kiddies’ parks; if someone has a huge cart loaded down with bricks, s/he’d get a Clydesdale.  The correct horse for the cart should obviously be chosen AFTER the cart!

Or maybe I don’t understand the adage because I have it in the wrong order?  Maybe it’s supposed to be “Don’t put the horse before the cart”?  The only horses most of us worry about anymore are those in their cars, and not so much of that anymore unless you’re into muscle cars—modern cars have been “tuned” to a T for max performance from min horses.  But I grew up in the Big Valley, farm and ranch country, so I was exposed to a lot of equestrian lore.  Even though I left that agriculturally rich area when I was 18 and didn’t look back much, that lore stuck with me.  (The main character’s life with his horse in the first part of Survivors of the Chaos was inspired by my father’s early life.)  I had a brother and cousin who broke horses, after all.  My brother broke one of Mom’s little porcelain horses; my cousin broke real horses, rancher-lingo for training a horse to tolerate a rider.

No matter the order of the saying or how we interpret it, it’s segue to the following question: What comes first, the book’s audience or the book? In a previous post about story forms, I said something like “build it (the story) and they will come (the readers).”  Unlike the cart and the horse, this is pretty clear: an author can’t build an audience for a single book, he can only “build a book”! S/he has a story to tell and, when she tells it, s/he can only hope there will be an audience to read it.  That can be helped along by pre-publication publicity and previous books, but neither one offers guarantees.  In fact, previous books can kill the audience s/he has, although readers can be forgiving if they like the premise of the new book.

The problem is that an author thinks s/he can game the system, convincing her- or himself that an audience already exists.  S/he writes Gone Boy because Gone Girl was so successful; s/he writes Fifty Shades of Pink because Fifty Shades of Grey was a blockbuster. Maybe a few readers fall for this ploy; most don’t.  Same goes for plots.  If all an author can say about her or his book is that “it’s like X,” s/he’s in trouble.  (A reader might hate X!  I have more patience for “it differs from X.”)  Book blurbs and book titles are also important and need to be as original; so does the prose.

And that’s segue to another important question: Can you put the title before the book? In other words, can you choose a title like Fifty Shades of Pink and then write a story for it?  If your answer is yes, here’s the follow-up: Should you?  I usually have a working title.  Gaia and the Goliaths, a crime story I hope to publish next year, started out as C&C #7 at first. Completely non-commital, except that it implies it’s the next novel in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” but it could have become just a short story or novella too.

I agonize over titles.  The list of possible ones often grows.  By the time I finished Rogue Planet, for example, I had about two dozen possibilities.  The final title wasn’t even in the list!  Rogue World seemed the best in the list and least confusing, although “rogue planet” has a double meaning in the sense that a planet not orbiting a star could actually exist.  But I settled on Rogue Planet because it sounded better.  Given the plot, it made sense too—“rogue nations” are often brutal dictatorships or theocracies that flaunt international norms of behavior.  (That almost deserves a spoiler alert.)

In any case, I never pick the title BEFORE the story.  You shouldn’t either.  It’s like putting the horse before the cart.

In libris libertas!

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