Name that novel?
I've spent some time considering different titles for all of the novels I've finished and sometimes have not been satisfied with the final results. Seems deciding on a title is a common thing among writers. What follows is an article I stole from another blog, Bookslut. It arrived there after being stolen from another site. Anyway, I thought it was interesting.
Enough About Me #2: In Which the Author Struggles to Find the Right Title
February 07, 2005
By Adam Langer
Early this morning, at 1:20 a.m., to be exact, I pushed the send button and zipped off a revised manuscript to my editor. And the manuscript now actually has a title that I like. I’m calling it The Washington Story. When I’d written the first draft, I’d called it The Washington Years, but that always felt too generic. The second draft was The Washington Cycle, which I liked fairly well, but didn’t look quite right either. It didn’t help that a good friend of mine, who happens to be a publicist, said that it reminded her of “The Washing Cycle.” And then there was a friend’s agent who said that “Cycle” was a deadly word and was largely responsible for the fact that nobody had gone to see the Pulitzer-Prize winning play, The Kentucky Cycle. When my own agent’s office sent me an e-mail titled “Re: The W.C.,” it was back to the drawing board.
Deep in the throes of title block, I’d been trying to convince myself that titles really didn’t matter much—that Annie Hall would have been just as successful had Woody Allen stuck with Anhedonia, that I’d still have read A Streetcar Named Desire in English class even if Tennessee Williams had used any of his original titles, such as Blanche’s Chair in the Moon. I’d like to think that Joseph Heller would probably have been just as successful if he had kept calling his debut Catch-18.
But the fact is that Thomas Wolfe’s original title O, Lost doesn’t have quite the same ring as Look Homeward, Angel, nor does Margaret Mitchell’s Fontenoy Hall, which became Gone With the Wind. If F. Scott Fitzgerald had gone with Trimalchio in West Egg, one of his working titles for The Great Gatsby, God knows what we’d have studied in high school.
The conventional wisdom is that titles matter a great deal.
I’ve been e-mailing with John Horn, film writer for Newsweek, who reports that the producers of Searching For Bobby Fischer blamed its underperformance partly on its “unwieldy title.” Horn adds that Pretty Woman was once called $3,000, which was not so hot, and that While You Were Sleeping’s original title was the wisely discarded Coma Guy. You could write a whole book about this topic and, as it turns out, someone already has—check out Harcourt publisher André Bernard’s Now All We Need Is a Title (Norton, 1996) for more of these sorts of fun and games. Bernard writes that George Eliot initially considered the title St. Ogg’s on the Floss for The Mill on the Floss, and that Don DeLillo’s original title for White Noise was Panasonic.
“Titles do matter, but it’s not something that one can measure,” says Nicole Aragi, agent to Jonathan Safran Foer, Nathan Englander and Edwidge Danticat, among others. “I picked up A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian because I liked the title so much, and first bought A Wild Sheep Chase in a bookstore years ago for the same reason, becoming a Haruki Murakami addict from there on. I can probably think of a good handful of books I was drawn to because of the title rather than familiarity with the author's work—Plainsong; Blood Meridian; A Brief History of Time. As for books I've worked on, I'd say that titles like Everything Is Illuminated and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges played a part in the success of those books, though exactly how, and how much, who knows?”
Meanwhile, Aragi says that one of her forthcoming books, The Great Inland Sea, was originally titled Agapanthus Tango in the U.K. But “too many people blinked and said, ‘Huh, what’s an agapanthus?,’ ” she says.
“It’s one thing for a title to intrigue, another for it to bemuse,” says Aragi.
Dan Chaon’s You Remind Me of Me was first The Premonitions, which, he says, “I came up with before The Corrections came out. But my editor felt it was too close. I had the title You Remind Me of Me in one of my old title folders, and I realized how well it fit.” MJ Andersen, author of Portable Prairie: Confessions of an Unsettled Midwesterner, started out calling her book Home Beyond Home, but says that St. Martin’s asked her to change it. “Maybe it sounded too abstract,” she says. “They wanted something like Dances with the Daughters of Job.”
And as for Jincy Willett’s Winner of the National Book Award, that catchy title started out as a joke.
“The title was always Fame and Honor,” she says. “But as I got closer to finishing, my publisher told me that the title had to go. It was a drab title. Abstract nouns, apparently, make lousy titles. (War and Peace, for example.) Anyway, I wasn't surprised, but I was kind of cheesed off, because I really liked my title. So I came up with a clever ploy: I would “suggest” increasingly goofy or inappropriate alternatives until, in the end, they gave up and let me keep it. My first outrageous suggestion was based on a story I once heard, about this guy who made a student film entitled something like Winner of Twelve Academy Awards. St. Martin's e-mailed back that this would be problematic, as there might be legal issues, but I asked them to work on it. About a month later they called and said that their lawyers were “fine with the title,” and everybody loved it, and it was already creating “buzz.” Once I realized what they were talking about, I was of course aghast. As it turned out, St. Martin's was right and I was wrong. Only one reviewer really dumped on the title, and I'm sure that the book got much of the attention that it did by virtue of the title alone.”
On the other hand, a title, of course, is only part of the package. As music critic Steve Dollar says, “The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street was originally going to be called Tropical Disease. Either way, it would still be the greatest rock ’n’ roll album ever made.”
As far as I’m concerned, one of my all-time favorite titles is former Eagles’ guitarist Joe Walsh’s album You Bought It, You Name It. Cute, but I didn’t buy the record. And I’m not sure if anybody else did either.
Enough About Me #2: In Which the Author Struggles to Find the Right Title
February 07, 2005
By Adam Langer
Early this morning, at 1:20 a.m., to be exact, I pushed the send button and zipped off a revised manuscript to my editor. And the manuscript now actually has a title that I like. I’m calling it The Washington Story. When I’d written the first draft, I’d called it The Washington Years, but that always felt too generic. The second draft was The Washington Cycle, which I liked fairly well, but didn’t look quite right either. It didn’t help that a good friend of mine, who happens to be a publicist, said that it reminded her of “The Washing Cycle.” And then there was a friend’s agent who said that “Cycle” was a deadly word and was largely responsible for the fact that nobody had gone to see the Pulitzer-Prize winning play, The Kentucky Cycle. When my own agent’s office sent me an e-mail titled “Re: The W.C.,” it was back to the drawing board.
Deep in the throes of title block, I’d been trying to convince myself that titles really didn’t matter much—that Annie Hall would have been just as successful had Woody Allen stuck with Anhedonia, that I’d still have read A Streetcar Named Desire in English class even if Tennessee Williams had used any of his original titles, such as Blanche’s Chair in the Moon. I’d like to think that Joseph Heller would probably have been just as successful if he had kept calling his debut Catch-18.
But the fact is that Thomas Wolfe’s original title O, Lost doesn’t have quite the same ring as Look Homeward, Angel, nor does Margaret Mitchell’s Fontenoy Hall, which became Gone With the Wind. If F. Scott Fitzgerald had gone with Trimalchio in West Egg, one of his working titles for The Great Gatsby, God knows what we’d have studied in high school.
The conventional wisdom is that titles matter a great deal.
I’ve been e-mailing with John Horn, film writer for Newsweek, who reports that the producers of Searching For Bobby Fischer blamed its underperformance partly on its “unwieldy title.” Horn adds that Pretty Woman was once called $3,000, which was not so hot, and that While You Were Sleeping’s original title was the wisely discarded Coma Guy. You could write a whole book about this topic and, as it turns out, someone already has—check out Harcourt publisher André Bernard’s Now All We Need Is a Title (Norton, 1996) for more of these sorts of fun and games. Bernard writes that George Eliot initially considered the title St. Ogg’s on the Floss for The Mill on the Floss, and that Don DeLillo’s original title for White Noise was Panasonic.
“Titles do matter, but it’s not something that one can measure,” says Nicole Aragi, agent to Jonathan Safran Foer, Nathan Englander and Edwidge Danticat, among others. “I picked up A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian because I liked the title so much, and first bought A Wild Sheep Chase in a bookstore years ago for the same reason, becoming a Haruki Murakami addict from there on. I can probably think of a good handful of books I was drawn to because of the title rather than familiarity with the author's work—Plainsong; Blood Meridian; A Brief History of Time. As for books I've worked on, I'd say that titles like Everything Is Illuminated and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges played a part in the success of those books, though exactly how, and how much, who knows?”
Meanwhile, Aragi says that one of her forthcoming books, The Great Inland Sea, was originally titled Agapanthus Tango in the U.K. But “too many people blinked and said, ‘Huh, what’s an agapanthus?,’ ” she says.
“It’s one thing for a title to intrigue, another for it to bemuse,” says Aragi.
Dan Chaon’s You Remind Me of Me was first The Premonitions, which, he says, “I came up with before The Corrections came out. But my editor felt it was too close. I had the title You Remind Me of Me in one of my old title folders, and I realized how well it fit.” MJ Andersen, author of Portable Prairie: Confessions of an Unsettled Midwesterner, started out calling her book Home Beyond Home, but says that St. Martin’s asked her to change it. “Maybe it sounded too abstract,” she says. “They wanted something like Dances with the Daughters of Job.”
And as for Jincy Willett’s Winner of the National Book Award, that catchy title started out as a joke.
“The title was always Fame and Honor,” she says. “But as I got closer to finishing, my publisher told me that the title had to go. It was a drab title. Abstract nouns, apparently, make lousy titles. (War and Peace, for example.) Anyway, I wasn't surprised, but I was kind of cheesed off, because I really liked my title. So I came up with a clever ploy: I would “suggest” increasingly goofy or inappropriate alternatives until, in the end, they gave up and let me keep it. My first outrageous suggestion was based on a story I once heard, about this guy who made a student film entitled something like Winner of Twelve Academy Awards. St. Martin's e-mailed back that this would be problematic, as there might be legal issues, but I asked them to work on it. About a month later they called and said that their lawyers were “fine with the title,” and everybody loved it, and it was already creating “buzz.” Once I realized what they were talking about, I was of course aghast. As it turned out, St. Martin's was right and I was wrong. Only one reviewer really dumped on the title, and I'm sure that the book got much of the attention that it did by virtue of the title alone.”
On the other hand, a title, of course, is only part of the package. As music critic Steve Dollar says, “The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street was originally going to be called Tropical Disease. Either way, it would still be the greatest rock ’n’ roll album ever made.”
As far as I’m concerned, one of my all-time favorite titles is former Eagles’ guitarist Joe Walsh’s album You Bought It, You Name It. Cute, but I didn’t buy the record. And I’m not sure if anybody else did either.
posted by Bob Liter at 8:56 AM
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