Avi

word craft

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Titles

While Shake­speare once wrote, “A rose by any oth­er name will smell as sweet,” a good (or bad) title can make a dif­fer­ence for a book. The book’s title is the intro­duc­tion of a book to the read­er. It is enor­mous­ly important.

Curi­ous­ly, you can­not copy­right a title. That explains why some titles reap­pear for dif­fer­ent books.

Titles, some famous­ly, change. When Stevenson’s Trea­sure Island was first pub­lished (in a mag­a­zine, as a seri­al­ized work) it was called The Sea Cook. Only when pub­lished as a hard­back book was the title (as we know it today) changed, by an edi­tor, if I remem­ber cor­rect­ly. The orig­i­nal titled ref­er­enced Long John Silver.

Wolf RiderOver the years, with so many books writ­ten, I have had my share of titles, both good and bad. When I begin a book I give the work a title, not with a sense that it is the one that is final, but more like a label, a way of think­ing about it, and ref­er­enc­ing it. In book con­tracts a title is giv­en, but that does not mean it is used.

Wolf Rid­er was not a good title, inso­far, as it doesn’t read­i­ly con­nect with a read­er. Even those who have enjoyed the book (and many have done so) have asked me to explain the title. Not good.

The True Con­fes­sions of Char­lotte Doyle was first called The Sea­hawk. That title derived from the ship on which the sto­ry takes place. Curi­ous­ly, when I first thought of it, I had to check, find­ing it hard to believe it had not been pre­vi­ous­ly used.

Noth­ing but the Truth was titled Dis­cov­ery. That word ref­er­ences the legal term for the evi­dence in a case, which is the way the book is organized.

School of the DeadPop­py was called Pip. I had been read­ing the man­u­script to a class when a boy showed me a book called Pip, the Sto­ry of a Mouse. “Is this,” he asked, “the book from which you got the name?” In fact, the name “Pip” came to me from Dick­ens’ Great Expec­ta­tions. In any case, I changed the name of my char­ac­ter (and book) to “Pop­py.”

Crispin: The Cross of Lead, my New­bery book, was titled, No Name.

School of the Dead was orig­i­nal­ly called The Weird His­to­ry Club.

The forth­com­ing Gold Rush Girl was called Rot­ten Row.

Catch You Lat­er, Trai­tor had the title Sea­son of Sus­pi­cion, which cross-ref­er­enced polit­i­cal sus­pi­cion with a famous base­ball sea­son, both sub­jects of the book.

The Fight­ing Ground was called Twen­ty-four Hours.

3 thoughts on “Titles”

  1. Avi, do you change the titles after you work on and sub­mit them to your edi­tor, or does your edi­tor change the names? Love your work by the way!
    Lisa

    Reply
    • I have a work­ing title from the start. You need a name for com­put­er use. And recent­ly I made a pitch to an edi­tor and she asked for a title. I do change it if I feel moved to do so while writ­ing the first draft. And some­times there is a dis­cus­sion with edi­tor about title, and fur­ther changes might well result. In oth­er words it is very fluid.

      Reply
  2. Book titles have amused me since I was in col­lege. At break­fast one morn­ing, three or four friends of mine were dis­cussing the drab titles of phi­los­o­phy books: Repub­lic and Apol­o­gy by Pla­to, Con­fes­sions by Augus­tine, etc. Maybe it was a func­tion of the times and con­tent, we thought. Con­ver­sa­tion turned to mod­ern nov­els. We gen­er­al­ly con­curred that a title with a lit­tle “oomph” teased us into giv­ing some­thing a shot much faster and kept us invest­ed in read­ing-to-dis­cov­er-its-sig­nif­i­cance longer than a less­er title.
    Thank you for being so inten­tion­al with your titles and shar­ing the changes!

    Reply

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