what’s in a name?
As with many things Shakespeare hit the nail on the head with this question. If you accept that agents/ publishers in general will no more than glance at your letter unless something grabs them, the title of your novel will play an important role in any chance you have to get published.
Mine is currently Abstractions of Feeling- it comes from a character’s comment towards the end of the book. Well actually I thought of the title first as a working title then it struck me that one of the character’s should say it, since it sums things up really. I am never completly confident with it. It sounds a bit, well pussy really, as if the jacket would be painted in pastells… or trying to fit into the copycat shadow in the wind genre… but I cant think of anything more suitable and it just seems to fit. Whether it is because I am attached to it, I cant really say, but at least for the moment Im sticking with it. But I am not too attached, it could be something I change during this publishing process
How important is a name. I suppose it depends what you are trying to get it to do. What are great titles? Well you have something like Ulysses. It is difficult now to look back on what associations that would have had in context, but before all the biogs and Joyce’s labyrinth of letters and keys, it would have been the only clue on the parrallels with the Odyssesy. If it had been called Bloom think how much of the genuis of the book had been lost.
Then you have something hip which pricks your interest, such as catch 22, zen and the art of motorcycle maintance and catcher in the rye. Would they have become such cultural phenonmens is they had been lumbered with a dull or weak title? Or just using a few words to create a phrase that is so beautiful you are almost seduced into buying it, phrases such as gravity’s rainbow or portrait of an artist as a young man. But for all those, there are crime and punishment’s and Emma’s-which do exactly what it says on the tin.
My new book is very different from Abstractions- while kicking round a few ideas the title Zeppelin came as I walking through London, passing a familar building on Farringdon Street which had been bombed during 1916 Zeppelin raids. And then what was needed to unify some of my ideas, a mass of new ones and most importantly what I wanted to say hit me at once. Scieved off for the rest of the day and just worked until I had a plan- about 6000 words. I never had a plan before apart from a general direction in my head.
I expect I will still be writing this when Im trying to sell that one as well….
(exit, followed by bear)
