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Nobody writes subheadings anymore.

Think about 19th century English novels with the great chapter divisions that read "In Which Our Dashing Hero Meets The Damsel Of His Dreams And Loses Her To An Untimely Accident." I've loved the technique since I was a kid, and I don't even know if there is a literary term for these sub-titles.

So imagine my suprise when I read Spaceman Blues by Brian Francis Slattery, a first-time novelist who broke up his hallucinatory novel with helpful subheadings--a term we will christen "literary headlines." 

Slattery's our special guest this week, and today, he convened The World's First, Briefest Writing Workshop Dedicated Solely To The Art Of The Literary Headline. 

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
Why did you pick the form? How did you choose the names for the subheadings?  Any advice for writers looking to use this technique, any books we should read that exemplify the form?

Brian Francis Slattery:

I don't know if there's a term for it either.  Continue reading...

I used headlines in part because I knew the book was going to be composed of lots of little sections--it makes it a lot easier to jump around from character to character, place to place, and time to time, which I knew I wanted to do--and it seemed like it would be a lot more fun to give them all titles rather than just having line breaks or little asterisks.

I also think that they help the reader, too--without them, the book might be even more disorienting than it is already. (I like a little disorientation--like what you might feel if you're on an amusement park ride--but too much isn't much good to anyone.)

Anyway, I got the idea specifically from William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch and Andrei Bely's Petersburg (and Petersburg much more than Naked Lunch).

Petersburg is one of my favorite books. It's a Russian novel from the early part of the twentieth century; I heard that it was hobbled by a disfiguring translation into English at one point, but the translation by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad... well, I don't know anything about the Russian language, but I can say that the book as they have translated it is fantastic--hilarious, scary, beautiful, and moving.

Bely has headlines all over the place, evocative and entertaining (e.g., "The Inhabitants of the Islands Startle You"; "A Dead Ray Was Falling through the Window"; "He Ceased Steering"), that really do help pull the reader through a very complicated but really amazing story.