Novel Writing: Trouble with Titles

Almost twenty years have passed since I last found myself in my current situation: struggling to find the right title for a novel. Even the very first story I wrote down—the utterly dreadful, only-for-the-drawer, learn-by-doing novel that almost everyone produces when they initially set out to write fiction—had a title almost from the beginning.

My Russian novels, too, acquired titles shortly after I started working on them—long before I knew where the stories would go—a process helped by the Chinese concept of the five directions, adopted by the Mongols and their Tatar descendants. The books in my current series all begin the same way, with Song of the followed by a noun or an adjective starting in S. Some novels have gone through several nouns or adjectives as my understanding of the main character has changed, but the format provides a structure that constricts the possibilities.

Only The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel gave me fits. I went through at least five different titles before I settled on this one, and even then, I went back and forth a few more times before deciding that was as close as I could get. But now, with the proto-novel I teased about last week, I find myself back in that space.

You may wonder, Why does the title matter? And maybe it doesn’t, for many writers. But to me, titles capture the essential theme of a book. Dostoevsky’s Demons started life as a novel called Atheism, then became The Life of a Great Sinner before assuming its punchier, more evocative moniker (sometimes translated as The Devils or The Possessed, which themselves convey different aspects of the Russian original, Besy).

Although I have no illusions of equaling Dostoevsky as a novelist—I aim only to provide a smidgen of historical knowledge through the medium of an entertaining story—I do find that having the right title from early in the project helps me work out both the characters and the plot. My subconscious often knows better than my conscious mind what a story is about. For example, The Swan Princess, although chosen because it reflected the northern orientation of the third book in Legends of the Five Directions, captured the heroine’s fundamental dilemma. The legend of swans who assume human form, only to flee back to the sky when society’s expectations of women constrict them more than they can bear, has been around for millennia. So too did Nasan need to break free of the imprisoning restrictions placed on her as a young wife.

Perhaps the difficulty in finding a title for the new project reflects the reality that I don’t yet have a clear sense of the story I wish to tell. I’m currently leaning toward Catch a Falling Star, the first line of a very cynical poem by John Donne. I’m not quite sure what my subconscious is telling me here—although I sense that the story will disprove his claim that women always play men false.

But something about this phrase feels right to me. We’ll see how it goes. Stay tuned!

Image: Night sky from Pixabay, no attribution required.