The other day I was hard at work procrastinating. Scrolling through videos of dogs and cats and shoes, I was soon interrupted by a link to a recent opinion piece on Afrocritik by Chimeze Chika: Sensational Book Titles: A New Trend in Nigerian Literature? I had to hand it to the algorithm. It knew me too well. This was a huge part of why I was procrastinating – avoiding writing because my project-in-progress has the decidedly uninspiring working title of, “New Novel.” If only I had something more sensational with which to lure myself to my desk.

Evidence 1.1

If you don’t already know, let me tell you: writing is hard. It is lonely. It is depressing and frustrating and soul-destroying. In short, it sucks. But nothing, no part of the writing process, not one second of it, sucks as much as coming up with a title.

“Come on,” you say, “you’re creative; surely you can come up with something good?” Sadly, no, I can’t. I am not creative in that kind of way. Want to know what I titled a short story I wrote way back in my distant youth? “The Shark.” Which, I confess, at the time I thought was pretty ingenious because there isn’t really a shark in the story: it is a metaphor. Clever, right? But the publisher of the anthology in which the story was included thought the title was dull and they wanted something more exciting. Guess what they came up with? “Mia and the Shark.” Not clever at all – Mia was the name of the main character and not a metaphor for anything – and certainly not exciting.

Anyway, I continued with my procrastinating and clicked on the link to Chika’s article. He makes a very good point early on: Titles should never overshadow the work; it is the content that matter, which is probably why Steinbeck in one of his bad moods declared, “I have never been a title man. I don’t give a damn what it is called.” Well, I have never been a title woman either. But of course, I do give a damn what my books are called. We all do, to a certain extent. The naming of a book is said to be akin to a parent naming their child. I have no children but would probably have been bad at that too, having always thought Shakespeare and Bronte would make good names.

Okay, so a title is important, but how to come up with one? Hemingway would compile a list of up to 100 options, then whittle them down, sometimes all of them, and would often go to the Oxford Book of English Verse for inspiration. Andre Brink did something similar. As a postgraduate student at the University of Cape Town, I attended a talk he gave in which he mentioned having kept a notebook for years where he wrote down possible future titles, based on phrases he found in literature, such as The Other Side of Silence (from George Eliot’s Middlemarch), An Instant in the Wind (from “The Broken Tower” by Hart Crane) or A Dry White Season (from the poem “For Don M. – Banned” by Mongane Wally Serote). This kind of strategy is a pretty common tradition, one which Dustin Illingworth describes as “raiding the great works of the past for the titles of the present” and refers to as a type of textual archaeology.[1] It has been done by the likes of Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart from Yeats’s “Second Coming” and No Longer At Ease from T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi”) and J.M. Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians from the similarly titled poem by Cavafy), and is thought to give credibility and legitimacy to a text by aligning it with the great works of previous masters.

Of course, that plan doesn’t necessarily always succeed, such as Gone with The Wind which Margaret Mitchell had originally called “Ba! Ba! Black Sheep” or T.S. Eliot’s influential The Waste Land, which he had wanted to name “He Do the Police in Different Voices” after a quote from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. I had my own disastrous attempt with a quote from Carl Sandburg’s poem “Lost,” when I named a manuscript “Harbour’s Breast. It was rejected by almost every publisher on the planet, bar one who wrote back, “Exceptional writing, but the title must go.” We eventually settled on the slightly ordinary, but (thank goodness) breastless, An Island.

Evidence 1.2

Still, I was in good company with publishers ignoring manuscripts possessed of weak titles. Thackeray had named his magnum opus “Novel Without a Hero” and couldn’t find a publisher for it until one night he was struck with the perfect title in his sleep and jumped out of bed, running around the room three times, shouting, “Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair!” I had a comparable experience, albeit slightly less exuberant, once while having a nap on the couch, only waking up enough to reach over to the coffee table and scrawl “Upturned Earth” on a sticky note with a kiss on it (and later messing around with other options before returning to the nap-inspired title, see evidence below). Besides the kiss, I think the big difference is that Upturned Earth has not become part of the canon in the way Vanity Fair has. Maybe the trick lies in reciting the title three times – something to consider in the future.

Evidence 1.3

But let me get back to another important point that Chika makes in his essay: The title is really no longer the sole responsibility of the author. Which is somewhat of a relief and takes the pressure off. As Chika observes, “suggestive inputs are usually made by editors and marketing departments,” because they need to get customers’ attention. This, unfortunately, is not easily done when competing with television, streaming services, and social media. Increasingly, this means that titles tend towards the sensational (the main focus of Chika’s essay) and even the ridiculous. Titles must stand out, that’s the point made by the number-crunchers in the publishing industry. I learnt this with my first novel, published in 2012. Once again, I had come up with a truly uninspiring title: “The History.” The publisher explained that it made marketing difficult with a title like that. What they wanted was for my book, and only my book, to come up when people typed the name into Google. “The History” was too likely to bring up anything and everything except for my book. So, it became Finding Soutbek, which, I believe, is still the only book to come up when googling “soutbek.” And, while I am at it, just to come to my own defence, this lesson may have been part of why I went with that odd “Harbour’s Breast” years later. Though I don’t think I am brave enough to google “books with breast.”

So, what one wants is a memorable title, one that grabs the prospective reader’s (i.e. purchaser’s) attention. But how to do that?  Leading titologist (yes, that is not only a real word but also a real job), Gerard Genette says that a title should make a promise to the reader, performing a descriptive and connotative role, whilst also being tempting.[2] It should intrigue but not baffle (The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women by John Knox, published in 1558 is a good example), nor be too obvious (such as Sun-Beams May be Extracted from Cucumbers But the Process is Tedious by David Daggett, 1799).

I procrastinated further, searching desperately for more clues to help me solve my titling problem. There’s the double kind of title, such as Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or What You Will, but that is pretty passé by now; then the one inspired by market trends, such as Alan Coren’s 1975 collection of essays, Golfing for Cats. He had noticed the most popular titles in Britain in those days were about cats, golf and Nazis. Which is also how his book ended up with a swastika on the cover. Mmm, possibly a bit controversial. Next up is the fashion for juxtaposing simple words in a rather startling way, such as Dora Taylor’s Rage of Life, or in the film world, Back to the Future. Possible, but I may need to dig out my dictionary of synonyms and antonyms for that. Sounds like hard work. There are always the old nineteenth-century favourites of place names or character names (Barchester Towers, Emma, Cranford, Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist). My main character’s name is Clive. Let’s be honest, nobody wants to buy a book with the title “Clive.”

Of course, there is the option of leaving it untitled, which I was told as a teenager was a cowardly, craven, terrible thing to do. Yet couldn’t one argue that, in fact, the decision is a bold one, one that makes a clear statement, that says, “No, I will not be forced to conform!”? Except that conformity is inevitably foisted upon one, since the work will forever be titled as [Untitled], which is what happened with E. E. Cummings’s book of 1930.

All of this is very exhausting and is not only getting me nowhere but also interrupting my procrastinating. So, for now I will stick with “New Novel,” and maybe by the time I manage to finish the manuscript an idea will have presented itself to me. Or I can do what is increasingly popular in the world – turn to the public, my few dozen followers on social media, sell the opportunity to create the title to the highest bidder (writers always need money), or have people send in suggestions and then put it to a vote, or pull a name from a hat? All of which sounds far easier than having to come up with the damn thing myself.

Afterall, “What’s in a name?”[3]

 


 

[1] Where Do Book Titles Come From?

[2] Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

[3] From Juliet’s famous soliloquy in Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare.