Author Sasha Karepina Source — her blog
How to write slogans.
download video
The movie “Julie & Julia” shows a technique that is useful for all writers — a technique for coming up with headlines and slogans. … In the film, the editor of the Knopf publishing house helps Julia Child come up with a title for the book. The editor convinces Julia that the title is what sells the book, and takes the title seriously. We see on the screen how she puts up stickers with words related to the topic of the book on the board, moves them, combines them, and finally gets a ready-made heading. We are shown only part of the process — what does it look like in its entirety?
To collect a phrase using «sticker technology», we first need to determine what this phrase should be about. In Julia Child’s case, it’s about learning how to cook French cuisine.
When the essence is formulated, you can start brainstorming. First you need to write on the stickers as many nouns as possible that we associate with the topic of the book. You can start with the obvious ones: books, recipes, dishes, cuisine, cooking, France, chefs. Then move on to more abstract, colorful, figurative: craftsmanship, art, gourmet, taste, tricks, riddles, mysteries, secrets …
Then it’s worth adding to the list of adjectives: refined, subtle, noble … And verbs: cook, study, comprehend … The next step is to draw analogies between cooking and other areas of activity — and add words from these areas: conjure, magic, love, passion, soul …
When the assault is over and we have a collection of stickers in front of us, it is important to choose the words that we most want to see in the title. Firstly, these will be keywords by which the reader will understand what the speech is about. In our case, these are words denoting cuisine, France and cooking. Secondly, these will be the brightest, figurative, catchy words that you managed to throw.
And when the words are chosen, it remains to combine phrases from them. To do this, we move the stickers, adjust the words to each other, change the endings, add prepositions and questions like “how”, “why” and “why”. From some parts of speech, we can make others — for example, from nouns, verbs or adjectives.
It is this last stage that we see in the film. On the board in front of Julie and the editor are stickers with the words «art», «French chefs», «in French», «French cuisine», «master», «why», «cooking», «art».
From these words, «Learning the Art of French Cooking» is born — but «The Mastery of French Cuisine», and «The Art of Cooking in French», and «Learning the Art of French Chefs» could also be born. «Learning to cook like the French.»
Either way, stickers help us see the big picture, summarize ideas, take a bird’s eye view of them, and choose the best. This is the meaning of «sticker technology» — which perhaps (if the screenwriter did not lie) helped to create one of the most famous cookbooks in its time!