Shakespeare posed this question in Romeo and Juliet, and provided a response: “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
What a lie.
Not even Juliet believed this preposterous assertion. In fact, she spent the lines just before and after this famous inquiry bemoaning that, in fact, there’s quite a bit in a name. If only Romeo wasn’t a Montague then the lovers’ troubles would be over. But in fact he was a Montegue, and she a Capulet, and neither could cast off their names lightly.
And, while we’re at it, a rose by any other name would not smell as sweet. I acknowledge to Juliet that a person wholly unacquainted with roses might find their scent pleasing (it’s easy to be magnanimous to a fictional character, and an author who’s been dead for hundreds of years), but only if the flower remained unnamed to them beforehand.
Again, a rose by any other name would not smell as sweet. To bolster my point, let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s pretend I’m a botanist who cultivated several new varieties of roses. These cultivars smell better and last longer than other roses, but, being the zany botanist I am, I’ve allowed my two sons, 12 and 13 years old respectively, to oversee their branding. Which of these appeals to you most?
Show your wife you care by sending her a gorgeous bouquet of Fart Flowers! Nothing says I Love You like the scent of a warm summer wind breaking over the garden into your home. Available at the finest florists.
Spruce up your yard with Puke Perennials! These two-season shrubs bring excitement and drama to your garden in heaves of yellow and green. Available at your local home center.
So, names matter. Especially if you want to tempt someone to smell the flowers.
Hence my anxiety about selecting titles for my novels.
I’ve had a few people ask if titling a book is like naming a child. In some ways it is, but in other ways it’s much worse. A child can grow past their unfortunate name and make it their own, whereas a book has no means of overcoming an author’s mistakes.
The first title of However Long the Day was Working Title. An acquaintance saw the cover page of the manuscript and commented how interesting the title was (their expression led me to believe that by interesting they meant completely stupid) and wondered aloud whether it was too literary. I assured this person it was literal, not literary, and represented a placeholder. I then walked into the other room and crossed that person’s name off my beta reader list.
I held onto Working Title for as long as I could, mainly because I wanted to avoid the mental torture of selecting something better and the attendant risk of settling on something far worse. Eventually, though, people outside my own home needed to read the novel, and a placeholder was insufficient.
Over the course of a half a day at the office, I jotted down eighteen options, mulled them over, and without asking for any other input, slapped Crosswise in Carnegie Hill on my cover page and sent it to the printers. I should have known, after I got home and told my daughter the news, that it wouldn’t last. She gave me the same look my acquaintance had.
It didn’t take long for the shine to wear off on Crosswise in Carnegie Hill. It sounded like an article in Highlights, the magazine your kids read while they’re waiting in the dentist office. But I stuck with it through the beta reading process, and well into the second draft phase. I again waited until the very last moment.
Luckily, I decided to employ a more scientific approach during the second attempt to name the story.
I began by listing major categories that could influence the title of the book: Theme, Plot/Setting, and Character. I came up with lists of words in each of these categories, and for each of those words dug up at least five synonyms.
I then played mix-n-match with all of these words like a kid building something with Legos. To my original list of eighteen I added another one hundred fifteen alternatives, each crying out they could be a contender. I didn’t include obviously bad combinations, but neither was I too fussy about removing all the garbage (there were plenty that were the book marketing equivalent of Fart Flowers).
I reviewed this list with my focus groups (wife and kids), and they gave their opinions on everything. Some of the options were crossed out multiple times, they were so bad. Some of the candidates were really cool, but wrong for the book. In the end, the process yielded a list of ten finalists I could stew on.
My next job was to determine if these ten finalists were taken, meaning another book, movie, and/or other media already existed with that title or something similar. What followed was a wacky and surprising journey through Amazon and other booklisting services. I should have known that any title that included the word night would likely be taken by a romance and/or erotica author or seven.
At the end of this process of verifying and investigating, I was left with an even smaller list: zero.
That’s right, I was left with zero usable titles.
Bummer.
All was not lost. My favorite of the ten finalists, However Long the Night, was derived from an Irish maxim that I had twisted to match the setting of the book. The original saying is However long the day, the evening will come. Most of the book takes place at night, so I changed the candidate to However Long the Night. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), that title was used by a book published five years ago. Incidentally, However Long the Night comes from a similar adage, only of African origin.
In the end, I untwisted the saying, and happily chose However Long the Day.
I’m pleased to have found something at all. The first novel I wrote, which I set aside to write However Long the Day, suffered a worse fate. I sent it to some beta readers with a mediocre title, and the smell of it added nothing to their reading experience.
I hope, for my sake, to someday have the experience other authors report, of having a title presented to them from On High, or knowing the title before the first word is written. Until then, I’ll fret over finding titles that entice potential readers to stop and smell the roses.
