Give Piece a Chant

There's a Grateful Dead song, on Workingman's Dead, if I recall, that begins "Well the first days are the hardest days..." As much as I hate to attribute worthy bits of philosophy to heroin-soaked rock stars, that quote could easily be rewritten to read "the first words are the hardest words." And they are. Like other famous sayings -- "If you don't know where you're going, how will you know when you get there?" -- it provides insight into error magnification. If you want to go to New Orleans, for example, and you start out in Chicago but point yourself one degree in the wrong direction, you will miss New Orleans by quite a bit.

The same holds for writers. If you intend to write the Great American Novel, but start to write about how sick you are of all this Paris Hilton crap, you'll probably end up writing just another diatribe. The secret, as they say, is in the sauce. Actually, that's something Fannie Flagg said in Fried Green Tomatoes and the Whistle Stop Cafe, and it refers to the dead man who wound up rendered for barbecue sauce. It probably has nothing to do with good writing, other than the fact that Fried Green Tomatoes, etc. was well-written.

No, the secret is actually in the words, the very first words you use. Nobody has ever actually read Moby Dick, for example, but everyone can say "Call me Ishmael." And who can forget "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." You know right away, when you see those words, that you have a pot boiler. Or a barn burner. Page turner? Lana Turner. Lone Ranger.

Sorry. You can get carried away when you drift into free association, which can distract you from the task at hand. In this case, the task at hand is coming up with a title for this piece. Give Piece an Chance? Probably not. Once you start down that road, there's no turning back.