"I do have trouble with titles"
About this Quote
“I do have trouble with titles” reads like a shrug, but it’s really a small manifesto in plain clothes. Jim Harrison is signaling distrust of the packaging that literature is forced to wear. A title is the book’s handshake with the market: a promise, a brand, a lure. Harrison, whose work often prized appetite, landscape, and blunt emotional weather over clever architecture, admits that the most public-facing part of a book is also the most artificial.
The line carries a craftsman’s embarrassment, too. Titles aren’t just labels; they’re summaries pretending not to be summaries. They compress mood, theme, plot, and tone into a few words that have to look effortless. Harrison’s “trouble” implies he’s allergic to that kind of compression-not because he can’t do it, but because it feels like negotiating with the wrong part of the process. The real work happens in sentences, in the slow accumulation of sensory fact and moral pressure. Titles demand a different talent: rhetoric, seduction, a little bit of salesmanship.
There’s also an authorial humility here that’s easy to miss. By admitting difficulty with the first thing readers see, Harrison flips the usual myth of the genius in control. He makes room for the messy truth: writers can be fluent in entire worlds and still stumble over a few words on a cover. In an era that rewards “the hook,” Harrison’s confession is a quiet refusal to treat literature like a tagline.
The line carries a craftsman’s embarrassment, too. Titles aren’t just labels; they’re summaries pretending not to be summaries. They compress mood, theme, plot, and tone into a few words that have to look effortless. Harrison’s “trouble” implies he’s allergic to that kind of compression-not because he can’t do it, but because it feels like negotiating with the wrong part of the process. The real work happens in sentences, in the slow accumulation of sensory fact and moral pressure. Titles demand a different talent: rhetoric, seduction, a little bit of salesmanship.
There’s also an authorial humility here that’s easy to miss. By admitting difficulty with the first thing readers see, Harrison flips the usual myth of the genius in control. He makes room for the messy truth: writers can be fluent in entire worlds and still stumble over a few words on a cover. In an era that rewards “the hook,” Harrison’s confession is a quiet refusal to treat literature like a tagline.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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