““And it stoned me”“
(Van Morrison, 1970)

The title of my novel in progress is And The Buntings Flew.

It’s a title I agonised over for a long time, so I’m not surprised when some people ask me, why does a self-confessed Grammar Prig have as the first word in the title of her first book, such a glaring example of bad grammar? As we were all taught at school, one should not use a coordinating conjunction to start a sentence. If you’d forgotten all about coordinating conjunctions, take heart, there’s only seven of them: and, but, or,nor, for, yet and so. 

It’s true that it would be unusual to use one of these words to start a sentence often, and definitely not if writing formally. Apart from anything else it would get boring very quickly. Don’t believe me? Take a quick read of the King James version of Genesis, Chapter 1. My CTRL-F search counted more than 100 uses of the word and; the age-old technique of listing out repetitions to aid learning also makes such writing rather heavy going, if not turgid, when read for entertainment.

I can’t say that messing with grammar conventions was the only reason I used and in this way, but it was definitely a contributing factor. If used sparingly, starting sentences with coordinating conjunctions evokes for me a slight remove from correct diction and formality, giving writing an informal, true to life and I think, a dynamic feel. 

For me the title is a way of dropping straight into the action, the lives of the characters, the history and natural surroundings I’m writing about in the novel. I want to evoke a sense of the reader stepping into that world and experiencing it first hand, in an everyday, matter of fact way, no matter how momentous the events described may be, to the characters or in history.

I did check to see if there were many written works with And as the first word of the title: I found a few, mainly poems: “And Oh, That The Man I Am Might Cease To Be“ by D.H.Lawrence, and “And there was a great calm“ by Thomas Hardy; suitably reassured, I decided I could follow in the footsteps of such literary heavyweights.

So, asks the reader (slipped another one in there for you!), tell me about the Van Morrison quote at the top of this article? Well, Van the Man is another poetic muse of mine, and this song is one of my all time favourites; my fellow Northern Irish singer-songwriter wrote And It Stoned Me about a semi-mystical event from his childhood in Northern Ireland, when a normal day in the life of a child was transformed, by a place and the people in it, into a time where time stood still, and the participants seemed in another dimension, if only for a short while.

So the title of And The Buntings Flew is also inspired by the song,  and its meaning, which are both sublime. I hope a little of that everyday real life transformative mysticism , just a little, rubs off onto And The Buntings Flew.