What’s in a name?

‘What’s in a name?’ asked Shakespeare – ahead of the game as usual – and it’s certainly a question I’ve been asking myself a lot recently, with regard to titles. Ah yes, titles… that most difficult of things to get right. Perhaps only naming a rock band is more fraught with complexities, and potential pitfalls… Because if you think that the hard part is coming up with your story, and developing your characters, and getting down your first chapter, and your second, and all the ones after that until you get to the finishing-line of 80,000 words, then think again. The hardest decision by far is what to call the damn thing.

Should it be a one-word title – Middlemarch, or Ulysses? And with or without the definite article, as in The Trial, or The Ambassadors? Or should it be two words – Bleak House; Hard Times? Perhaps two words linked by an ampersand – Pride & Prejudice; Decline & Fall? Should one call the book after its central character, as in numerous nineteenth century novels, such as David Copperfield, or Silas Marner? Or try to encapsulate the novel’s subject in one bold statement: The Way We Live Now? Should one be even bolder, and flag up a universal theme, such as War & Peace, or Crime & Punishment? And what about quotations – Far From the Madding Crowd; A Handful of Dust – to name but two? Abstract nouns can make good titles: Persuasion; Futility. Then there’s cryptic understatement: A Fairly Honourable Defeat; The Good Soldier. Or titles alluding to other art-forms: Between the Acts; Point Counter Point.

That there are fashions in these things goes without saying.

Of course there are times when one starts with the title. It comes out of nowhere, and one gratefully accepts it, as a gift from Calliope, or Clio, or Melpomene – or whichever Muse one is currently invoking. But even this has its drawbacks. Having seized on a title, which then becomes the fulcrum of the novel, around which everything else revolves, it is then almost impossible to change it. This was the case for me with my most recent novel, The Dark Tower (for a discussion of the pitfalls of that title see my blog, Other Dark Towers http://www.christinakoning.com/archives/other-dark-towers) and with my second novel Undiscovered Country, which I’m currently republishing.

When the novel was first published, in 1997, I had no idea that there were any other books with that title – beyond a single work, the fourth volume in a then-ongoing saga: Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country. Even though it was a bit of a blow to find that William Shakespeare and I were not the only authors to have employed this particular phrase, I reassured myself that at least my novel and Star Trek 4 were unlikely to compete for readers or sales. Things look very different in 2010. Now, a cursory search on Amazon reveals at least eight books – four of them novels – entitled Undiscovered Country. That all but one of the novels has been published since mine first came out, is no consolation. What is it with these people? Can’t they find their own titles?

Some authors (yes, I mean you, Mr Eggars) try and get around the problem by going for an extravagantly one-off title. This does at least have the advantage of ensuring that your book will be the only one to come up on Amazon searches for that particular combination of words. A wildly unusual title tends to stay unique, for the reason that no one else will have the temerity to use it. It does mean that readers are less likely to come upon your book by accident, however.

Having gone for titles in the past with a high recognition factor – that is, those that were quotations from other writers – I’m now disinclined to do the same again. The novel I’ll publish next won’t include any literary allusions in the title, nor will the one I’m currently working on. I can’t help regretting this a little; after all, one of the pleasures of writing is to feel that one is part of a continuum of writers, to whom homage – if only in the form of a title, or an epigraph – should be paid. As a reader, I’ve always enjoyed picking up these literary ‘clues’ in other writers’ work. A shame then, if the need to ensure one’s book stands out from all the rest, with a title that won’t confuse the casual browser, should mean an end to such inter-textual games.