The Title is the Hardest Thing
The Waters: 56 Days and counting down to publication January 9
A book title should sound good, it should intrigue folks to pick up the book, and (most importantly) it should reflect what the book is about. Simple, right? Meanwhile, how absurd that you are trying to condense a whole world you have created into a couple of words.
I have always had a terrible time coming up with titles. I could tell you stories! (I actually wrote them all into this blog, but it got too long—let me know if you want to read about the other five titles!)… Which brings us to The Waters. My original book deal was for a book called The Barn Witch, a title we tentatively chose as an alternative to my preferred title at the time, Math Slut, which the publisher really did not like. Well, the book changed from that original book to become something very different, and in fact this book takes place six years before the book I initially planned to finish.
In my notes, I can find other titles, The Math Novel, Natural Numbers, On Rose Island, The Island of Remarkable Women. There’s a bridge in the novel and I thought I might name the bridge and then name the book after the bridge. Sorrow Bridge, Hollow bone bridge, Cabbage Bridge, Bridge to Nowhere, Bridge to Somewhere, Sinking Bridge, Harrowing Bridge, Lost Girls Bridge, Women’s Way, Snake Island Bridge, The Konigsberg Bridge. My thematic list went on and on, all bad titles.
And many others. Then I set my mind on Donkey, and for a time Editorial thought we could go with it, but then we got news that the sales reps put the kibosh on Donkey. They felt it would be hard to market a book with that title and make sense of it for bookstores and readers—it sounded like a kids’ book. The Marsh Witches, our editor suggested, strongly, as an alternative.
Putting books together are all about people working together, folks who write and folks who know how to create and sell books. Clearly when either of two choices are unacceptable to the other parties, we must forge a new title. But more weeks passed, and we couldn’t come up with the right title, and the catalog had to be published, and my book needed to be listed in that catalog!
“But Donkey is short, cute, memorable, and it really pays homage to the girl who matters most in the story,” I pleaded once more. (Though the three central women are equally important, in fact.) But I also remembered that I have a tendency to undermine myself, to deny the seriousness of my work. Though Horse worked for Geraldine Brooks, a title like Donkey could undermine me. Despite my strong opinions, I understood we needed something better.
So my fabulous agent Bill called me and said we would stay on the phone until we had a title. I think he was walking in and out of his NYC office, down the sidewalk, possibly running his errands, and I was at the river shack, draping myself over one piece of furniture after another, finding each uncomfortable, gazing across the dirty water of the Kalamazoo River. We bandied about many bad, funny, and not-good titles. Our conversation went on and on and on. I am sure I was tiresome, but he remained energetic somehow. He said at one point that it had to suggest a group of women, like Furies or Fates or Muses, something like that. And I thought of the landscape and suggested, tentatively, The Waters.
“The Waters sounds like an award-winning book to me,” Bill said after a while. And we looked it up, and to our surprise could not find any other books with that title.
We all sighed a big sigh of relief, us and our editor and the sales reps. And so I revised some more, with the new title in mind. And it turned out The Waters was the book I had been writing all along.
