When I begin a story, I want to have something to put at the
top of the page so that when I save it, I have some sort of identifier. I know
by now that whatever I use may well not last until the work is finished. I
consider these titles place holders, convenient tags so that I can locate the ms
later on my laptop or in a file. There’s nothing special about any of this.
I did this with my first mystery novel, expecting to later develop
the “perfect” title that would capture the attention of readers. Such dreams. Apparently
I forgot about this after my ms was accepted by the publisher. Only when I got
my proof copies (ARCs) with my place holder title on the cover did I realize I
meant to come up with a better one, a real one. I didn’t expect my first
mystery novel to be called Murder in
Mellingham, but it was. I don’t know what I planned to replace it with, but
I learned a lesson from that experience. The book isn’t finished until the
title is.
Some people are gifted when it comes to titles. Ernest
Hemingway thought F. Scott Fitzgerald had the gift and most writers agree.
Raymond Chandler had the gift sometimes, and when it worked, it glowed on the
page. Others may disagree with me but I love the titles The Big Sleep and The Long
Goodbye. More recently, Louise Penny has come up with some especially
attractive ones, such as How the Light
Gets In and A Trick of the Light.
I envy a lot of cozy mystery authors because they’ve created
a package with a setting and lead character that gives them a head start on
inventing a title. Agatha Christie was no slouch in this category, but her
nursery rhyme books featuring Hercule Poirot stand out, the first being One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. The Body in the . . . series by Katherine Hall Page is well known. I
especially like Edith Maxwell’s titles for her nineteenth-century Quaker
midwife, Delivering the Truth and Called to Justice.
When I began the Anita Ray series I thought about how I
wanted to construct the titles long before I finished writing the first draft.
The name of a Hindu deity would give a sense of the story to follow, and an
image of the god would show up somewhere in the plot. The title of the first
book, Under the Eye of Kali, came
easily as did those for the subsequent three books. (Of course, I failed to
appreciate how little Americans know about India.)
The hardest titles for me are those for short stories. Some
time ago I finished a short story I was happy with but the title sat like a
dead tree on the front lawn. I put the story aside until the perfect title came
to me, which it did a few weeks later.
Not every writer wants to spend so much time mulling over
titles. I don’t either. But in my view every part of a story or novel has to be
the best I can make it, and if I see a flaw in one part—the title, a chapter
ending, a minor character—and leave it, then the work is unfinished. I take the
time to work on anything that feels less than it could be. And that includes
titles.
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