All Change – My relationship with titles

After much deliberation and finally after talking it though with some members who came to the SCBWI Manchester critique group yesterday I’ve decided to change the titles of my Holocaust projects, associated blogs and Facebook pages. Potatoes in Spring now becomes The House on Schellberg Street and The House on Schellberg Street turns into Clara’s Story.

One of my beta readers anyway has already told me that they preferred The House on Schellberg Street as the title for the first story.  It did worry me a little that only one strand of the story actually takes place at the house but in fact only one third of Clara’s story does anyway. Possibly the first story does overall have more to do with the house:

Renate thought she was going to live there when she was being sent to England.

The strand of the story that happens there is really important and leaves the way open for a third book set in this era.

It poses a question at the end.

For a short while anyway, The House on Schellberg Street did become the title of story number one. However, I then decided it was excellent for number two. Now that Clara’s story is becoming more complex it seems less appropriate.  

I think yesterday I talked myself into this.  It wasn’t really so much that my friends persuaded me. The allowed me to persuade myself.

I rarely use the title I’ve worked with for the eventual title of a text. It’s the one thing I’d never worry about if an editor wanted to change it. I’d assume they knew better than me. I’m not good at titles and blurbs but am good at names and synopses. Each according to their strength.

I never worry about the title, though. I’m fairly confident usually that the right one will present itself. I fell reasonably satisfied with the decision I’ve made here.  

Reaction from beta readers

Most of the comments are in now from my beta-readers. Most of the commentary is around the Nazi voice. This is something I wasn’t all that sure about myself in fact. Should it be there? Was it strong enough? Was it too strong?

I’ve concluded, after hearing what everyone has had to say, that it should be there, but that it isn’t yet quite right.

Interestingly, some people have interpreted it as purely a Nazi voice and some that it is really just Renate thinking. I actually mean it to be both at once. If it should be made into a play, I would imagine these words spoken by an actor dressed in an SS uniform and that this figure would appear on a balcony, in the auditorium or if on stage all lights would be out except for a spot on him and maybe he would be upstage right.

I decided in the end to extend that voice a little. I’ve now reread every single scene where it occurs and in nearly every case I’ve lengthened it.  

It constantly reminds Renate that she is neither German, English nor Jewish, that she belongs nowhere, that she is a disgrace and that she doesn’t deserve any happiness.

I think I may now be about to send it out to agents, followed by small press.

It would be useful to get it out internationally.  

Marianne Wheelaghan The Blue Suitcase

There are many parallels between this and Potatoes in Spring. And there are some subtle and some less subtle differences.

We have both used material produced by young German women. Marianne Wheelaghan’s “account” covers the years from 1932 to 1947 and mine form 1938 to 1947. Both of our accounts are more intense as we lead up to the outbreak of World War II and both take bigger leaps towards the end. We have both translated from German and have had to fill in the gaps when we couldn’t read the writing. We both feel that we have brought something of a young German woman’s voice that isn’t a 21^st century one to what we have written, and that our reader may need to work a little to understand that voice.

Both works add something new to a topic that has been much discussed. Both of us have complemented the fantastic primary resources we have had with much research about the era. Both books end with some hope but neither the reader nor the central character in each know how it will work out. Marianne and I actually do. Our stories are about real people we know well.

The reader learns from The Blue Suitcase what it was like for one German family, who had a Polish-sounding name, and who eventually had to move from their home to the American zone after the war, pushed out first by the Russians and then by occupying Polish families. Potatoes in Spring of course is the story of a ‘Mischling’, of a miraculous escape for some children with severe learning difficulties and of the daily life of some ordinary German girls who had little idea if what was actually happening in their country. Somehow many of the issues are nevertheless similar. And we both have teenage girls behaving … like teenage girls.           

The Blue Suitcase is a mixture of letters and diary entries, some of which are quite long and read like fiction. Potatoes in Spring is a mixture letters and short scenes, some of which are based on written and verbal accounts from the central character. I have possibly strayed a little further away from my primary resources than has Weelaghan but I’ve had to do that partly because otherwise I would have had too many characters and I didn’t have quite as much material in the first place. In spirit, actually, the two books have much in common.      

             

Markus Zusak The Book Thief

This is another fictionalized account of something that could have happened during the Holocaust. The main character is Death and s/he arrives at various intervals to take someone away. But this person also lingers and tells us of some of what else is happening. “I witness the ones who are left behind, crumbling amongst the jigsaw puzzle of realisation, despair and surprise. They have punctured their hearts,” says death. The story s/he tells is of:

• “A girl
• Some words
• An accordionist
• Some fanatical Germans
• A Jewish fist-fighter
• And quite a lot of thievery.”

The girl, Liesel Meminger, is the book thief. Her mother, unable to look after her, leaves her in the care of the accordionist. Liesel steals three books and reads a lot of words.  Zusak writes a lot of words. The fanatical Germans are as fanatical here as they are in any other literature, factual or fictional, and the Jew Liesel and her family protect is a fist-fighter. Many of the characters steal in order to survive.   

Zusak was not there at the time. He has had to use imagination in order to work out how it was then. He has used his writerly method-acting to create the persona of Death. We get close to Liesel, too, and learn of her encounters with communist, fascists, Nazis, and Jesse Owens. Zusak gives us a strong hint of how life was there and then by putting us amongst the people who lived that life.  

The voice is strong and unusual in this novel. The layout too is quite different. All of this brings our attention more closely to this so important story.