One of the more pleasant moments in the creative process is crowning the original work with a title. Giving a name to your opus is like telling the maternity ward nurse that you’ve decided to call the innocent babe cuddled in your arms Horatio.

Having erred in the past, it’s my opinion that the christening ceremony for one’s masterpiece should take place only after it has been fully fleshed out. Bless it with a title only after you’ve given careful consideration to what it is you’ve created. Then whether it’s Horatio or a recipe for hash, the thing speaks for itself.

In my early years, while experimenting with the art of writing, many fumbles brought forth the punishing nun of reproach whenever I began a literary piece with the title before I had written down anything of substance. Although experience is crow-eyed, strict and unforgiving, I finally came to know that it’s a bad idea to title an idea when it exists only as an idea.

For example, say I have the notion to make soup. Stirring around in my mind is the idea to devise a soup that uses kimchi (Korean-style spicy pickled cabbage) as its base. Is it wise to leap to the decision that what will eventually end up in the soup bowl deserves a name like Pot O’ Crouching Tiger? What if my soup-making fails to deliver, and rather than setting mouths on fire my tiger staggers to the table toothless.

Besides titling too soon, often people who are bent creative will delay the real work of the creative process with what I like to call the “inspiration hunt.” Instead of simply heading to the kitchen with pad and pen and ingredients and getting straight to the labor of making soup, some will fiddle around on the internet looking up the Korean word for hellfire. We do this because we are concentrating on the title and not on what goes in the pot. It’s a backwards process.

Idling away time on the inspiration hunt can be distracting; it can set you off on the wrong path. For instance, when the Korean recipe for boshintang popped up on Google, more time was wasted while I allowed myself a lengthy interlude of knee-slapping high hilarity. However, since boshintang translates as “dog meat stew,” the title couldn’t possibly work for kimchi soup.

Nevertheless, I suddenly had an overwhelming desire to switch from a recipe for spicy cabbage to boiled dog. Obviously this was an impractical figment of fancy given the American palate, not to mention American laws against foraging for Fido. My Googling distraction serves as another lesson against putting too much weight on the idea – especially when it’s an idea that’s trotting off to nowhere fast.

So there I was back at kimchi soup square one.

Finally getting around to the business of the kitchen, the question became whether to use commercially jarred kimchi or to start from scratch. But starting the kimchi from scratch meant following a traditional procedure that can take up to a half-year to complete.

Researching kimchi I learned that fermentation of the cabbage must go through as much as six months of a scary bubbling process – a bubbling process that takes place down in a hole you must dig outdoors. Once the cabbage is stuffed into a jar and put into the hole, the jar is buried and the infernal contents are left to roil and spume for the duration.

Okay, so today there are special kimchi refrigerators for the modern cook. But for the sake of this discussion, let’s agree that if you don’t go through the traditional fermenting process in the ground, then you haven’t made kimchi truly from scratch. (Or maybe it means even growing the cabbage from seed. Or more. Carl Sagan once observed, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”)

Not many of us are going to tolerate a jar of hot cabbage gurgling and boiling away like a witch’s cauldron in a ditch that is located out in the yard near the kids’ swing set. The idea is chilling, no matter how intriguing we find Korean food.

Making kimchi soup from scratch had to be re-thought.

I know this for a fact: My personal enthusiasm for the nut of an idea always starts out plucky. I invariably begin as gung-ho as a Marine running up the beach at Grenada.

Occasionally, however, it does happen that my fervency will fizzle. And so, after hours of chewing on the idea, hours of research, hours of stops and starts, hours of contemplating the practical and impractical aspects of the recipe, in the end I lost interest in liquefying pickled cabbage.

Now I come to the point of this story. What if, in my haste to appear cute, I had begun the creative endeavor with the title? What if at the head of this article you saw written Pot O’ Crouching Tiger Soup? Interest pricked, you naturally assume the story will deliver the goods (and the soup) and not go off on a tangent.   

There you sit under a tree munching on a tuna fish sandwich during your lunch break. There you are with taste buds primed, with expectation heightened by the promise made in the title, and then instead of running your eyes over a tantalizing, fleshed-out recipe you find nothing.

Titles – like the one at the top of this story – should always come last.