GUEST POST: JOHN DUFRESNE COMES UP WITH NOVEL TITLES

THE DISTINGUISHING NAME

“Every child is finally named.”

—Jerome Stern

Today at Novel Master Class, we have a special guest post: John Dufresne comes up with novel titles and explains how you can come up with them too.

Author John Dufresne, Coming up with Titles for his Novels

Tennessee Williams said that the title came to him last. Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante said, “The title always comes first, to me and to the reader. I’ve written many stories and articles just by doggedly following the title.” John Steinbeck claimed he didn’t care what the book was called. He originally titled his novel Something That Happened. But he cared enough to change it, fortunately, when he read Robert Burns’ poem “To a Mouse” and saw these lines: “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men/ Gang aft agley . . .” Ernest Hemingway would make a list of potential titles—as many as a hundred—after he finished a work, and then he’d start to eliminate them, sometimes all of them, and begin a new list. He said, “Getting a title is a lot like drawing cards in a poker game. You keep drawing and they’re all worthless, but if you can last at it long enough you can always get a good hand finally.” Robert Penn Warren said, “Sometimes people give titles to me, and sometimes I see them on a billboard.” (“A Christian Education”?) And sometimes you get lucky. Edward Albee found his title written on a barroom wall in soap: “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (Or it was scrawled on the bar’s washroom wall. I’ve read both versions.)

            If you’re like me, more often your title will emerge during the writing. Before it does, however, it’s a good idea to have a working title or titles as you go. A working title keeps you focused and on track—until it doesn’t. To this point, E.L. Doctorow wrote, “You’ll find a better title, and it will have a certain excitement for you; it will evoke the book, it will push you along. Eventually, you’ll have to choose another title. When you find the one that doesn’t get used up, that’s the title you go with.”

            A title is also the first thing an agent and an editor will read. Will it make them want to go on? Will it confuse them? The title is always important. It’s not the introduction to your work; it’s a crucial part of your work. It breaks the silence. It says, “Listen to me!” One significant job of the title is to sell the book—to the agent, the editor, and eventually to the potential readers out there in the very congested literary marketplace. It should welcome the reader, entice, captivate, charm, delight, fascinate, or titillate. Or in the words of Walker Percy: “A good title should be like a good metaphor; it should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.” Like Love in the Ruins, perhaps.

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            When we browse a bookstore, we all judge a book by its cover and by the title on that cover. The difference between a great title and a weak title may be the difference between a display at the end of the bookshelf or in a pile on the remainder table. Consider the following classic novels and ask yourself if they would have sold as well (as they certainly deserved to) or been taken as seriously under their original titles: William Faulkner’s Dark House? I’m thinking Absolom, Absolom! was the wise choice. Kingdom by the Sea or Lolita? No contest. It’s difficult to even imagine that War and Peace was first called All’s Welll That Ends Well or that Jude the Obscure was originally Hearts Insurgents. And, of course, we all know about Trimalchio in West Egg.

            Early in the last century Emmanuel Haldeman-Julius, a Jewish atheist and socialist writer and publisher, began publishing affordable books for the masses. His Little Blue Books sold for a nickel, and the publications included Shakespeare; W.E.B Du Bois, Voltaire, Émile Zola, Jack London, Henry Thoreau, and other classics. When a title was not selling well, Haldeman-Julius sent the book to the “hospital,” where it got a new title. Guy de Maupassant’s story “The Tallow Ball” sold 15,000 copies one year and 54,700 copies the next year, after hospitalization, under the new title “A French Prostitute’s Struggle.” The man knew how to sell books and how to generate a best-seller. When Haldeman-Julius wrote and published The FBI—the Basis of the American Police State: the Alarming Methods of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI came calling. Suddenly bookstores weren’t selling his books. He was eventually convicted of tax evasion. Well, the Feds retaliated for that book and for others Haldeman-Julius published, like William J. Fielding’s Homo-Sexual Life, that subject being a particularly sensitive one for the Director.

            There is no trick to getting the title right. Like everything else, it’s work. Gratifying, if at times frustrating, work. Let’s think about what titles can do and how we might get one. The title can indicate a story’s or a novel’s subject—what it’s about, like Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop or Irwin Shaw’s “Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” Your title might announce the central theme: Loving by Henry Green or “Misery” by Anton Chekhov. You might utilize a symbol for your title as D. H. Lawrence did with The Rainbow or William Golding did with Lord of the Flies. 

The title is always important. It’s not the introduction to your work; it’s a crucial part of your work. It breaks the silence. It says, “Listen to me!

            The title is here to focus the reader’s attention at the start by saying, for example, this is a character-driven story. A character-driven story might, obviously, use the name of the central character, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, let’s say, the character’s occupation, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, or an intriguing depiction of the character: Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. A plot-driven story might focus on a significant event the way Defoe’s A Journal of a Plague Year does. Does yours? Life in the Time of Corona Virus maybe? The title might welcome the reader to the future time the way Orwell’s 1984 and Clark’s 2001: a Space Odysseys once did, or it might ask her to consider what life was like in the past as Gore Vidal did with 1876. Place can function as character in a story, and if it does, why not signal its importance by using it as the title: Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place or Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain?

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            You might find a title you love in Shakespeare, as so many writers have. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury comes to mind as does Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Maybe classical literature will serve. It worked for James Joyce with Ulysses and for Patrick O’Brien with The Wine Dark Sea. The Bible is another rich source of allusive titles like Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. You might consider your theme, get yourself a book or website of quotations and then read all of the quotes listed under the theme in the index. One phrase may strike you. And then look up the thematic word in the dictionary and see what the OED or Merriam-Webster has to say. I just tried this with loneliness as my theme. I found this quote from John Steinbeck: “All great and precious things are lonely.” My tile could be All Great and Precious Things. I like it. And from the dictionary: “dejection arising from want of companionship.” Dejection? You might find your title in a poem as we saw earlier with Steinbeck or in a song as J.D. Salinger did with The Catcher in the Rye. When I finish a draft of a story or novel and I’m ready to begin thinking about a better title than I’ve been working with, I think, “It’s time to read Emily Dickinson again.” That’s why a Christmas story I wrote is called “A Wild Night and a New Road.” That’s what dying is.

            Another way to go is to look at what you’ve written—the work-in-progress itself. Reread the draft with a pen or highlighter in your hand and note the lines or phrase or words that make you smile and nod. Jesus! I wrote that! Damn! I write better than I thought I could. Maybe this will be the line that you were surprised turned up at all. Maybe it’s a phrase you didn’t think your character was capable of uttering. Make a list of all these passages. Read them out loud. Show them to friends and readers. Or don’t. Just go with your gut. Think about the titles you love. What makes them great, and why do you love them?

            I mentioned lists. Here’s another strategy. Keep an ongoing list of possible titles on your computer. I do. I started the list the way Hemingway did. One upon a time I needed a title. Here’s the list I have on a file that I call “Title Search”: The Little Teacher Must Be Joking; The World of Extreme Happiness in Ouachita Parish; A Night With a Clear Moon; Nothing Can Be Worse; Without Talk, Without Silence; Our Hearts Burn With Desire; Interior With Portraits; Spotted Horses and Human Hands; Woman at the Height of Her Beauty; Human Birth on the Wide Earth Becomes a Thing Worth Having; Jocelyn, With Angels and Mourning Figures; Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos; The Thirst I Felt Within; All That Thrills My Soul; Do You Fear the Gathering Clouds of Sorrow?; What Language Shall I Borrow?; Sinners Plunged Beneath the Flood; What a Wave Must Be; My Sudden Angel; The Curve of Forgetting; A Mirror Without Glass; Zero at the Bone; Before I Got My Eyes Put Out; Heart’s Memory of Sun; Zion Stands by Hills Surrounded; How Do Thy Mercies Close Me Round; Sweet Place, Sweet Place Alone; Light of the Lonely Pilgrim’s Heart; Mistful Are Our Waiting Eyes; Sweet Fields Beyond the Swelling Flood; Who Is This That Cometh Up from the Wilderness; To a Young Hart Upon the Mountains of Spices; Be Thou Ravished Always With Her Love; The Paradise of Your Embrace; So Then What’s Love? Eamon Thought; Rapture, Grace, and Dying Love; A Little Madness in the Spring; He Loved: This Was the Way He Loved.

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Frank McCourt said that he decided on the title Angela’s Ashes before he wrote the book. The title is pleasantly alliterative. It announces its subject, its theme, and its tone. We think, Who is Angela? And we can’t wait to find out. If McCourt can do it, so can we. Let’s try writing.

Whenever you need a title, open that dictionary at random and choose the first noun you see. Like McCourt, the title will come first for this exercise. You read the random word’s denotative and connotative meanings, its symbolic possibilities, use it as your title, and go to work. I just tried this and came up with “floaters.” It’s almost so easy that someone must have used it already. Corpses, of course, in the East River. A person who can float, stay in the water, out of trouble, as it were. One who wanders, a drifter. An insurance policy that protects moveable property. And, of course, the specks that fly in front of your eyes and move off when you look at them. Already my mind is making connections. In literature, we often want a word to mean as many things as possible.

 Keep an ongoing list of possible titles on your computer

            Another title, random again but seeming to be inspired by floaters. “The Vision.”   1. The faculty of sight; 2. Something that is or has been seen; 3. The manner in which one sees or conceives a thing; 4. A mental image produced by the imagination; a person or thing of extraordinary beauty; 5. The mystical experience of seeing as if with the eyes, the supernatural or a supernatural being; 6. Unusual competence in discernment or perception; intelligent foresight.

            And third: “Headgear.” (I told you it was random.) Singular “headgear”: 1. Anything such as a hat or helmet for the head. 2. The part of a harness that fits about the horse’s head; 3. The rigging for hauling or lifting located at the head of a mine shaft; 4. Nautical. The rigging on the forward sails of a craft. Not listed, but it comes to mind: what you might find for sale at a headshop. Good luck. Write to the title knowing you can change it later.

            The title is very often the essence of the novel, which is why, despite our exercise, the title often comes last. Here are a few more titles. Do them one at a time. Write and then think: The Heart Specialist; Murder Your Darlings; You belong to Me, I Think. Or try one of the many title generators online. I just did and got The Trembling Sky, Enemy of the River, and Breath of Inconvenience. On second thought, forget the generators. Sorry I brought that up.

 John Dufresne is the author of twenty-five works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including Louisiana Power and Light and Love Warps the Mind a Little. He lives in Florida, where he teaches writing at Florida International University.

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Cully Perlman, Author of THE LOSSES, in Taos, NM

Cully Perlman is author of a novel, THE LOSSES. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com

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Today's GUEST POST: JOHN DUFRESNE COMES UP WITH NOVEL TITLES was graciously provided by the author himself.