To name it is to give it power
If in reality names tend to mould the people and things to which they're attached, then such is also the case in fiction, only exponentially more so. Call a secret agent James Bond and you are halfway to creating a character that people will become involved with; call him Cuthbert Sidebottom and I suspect you will have an uphill - not to say vertical - struggle. Similarly, you will not be doing yourself any favours if you decide that the perfect monicker for a seventy-eight year old librarian with piles is Dirk Thrust.
And so it is with novels. The perfect title goes a long way to drawing the reader in, ensnaring them, making them think that here is something worth spending time and money on. But what is the perfect title? Should it be long or short, a quotation perhaps, or just a single word? This decision is yet another agony for the author, a million times worse than christening a baby, and just as prone to unfortunate error.
I tend towards quotation, a habit that I suspects marks me down as pretentious. Indeed, I am so pretentious that I have even stooped to making up a quotation - that is, giving a book a title that ought to have been taken from somewhere, but wasn't.
Still, get it right and it gives you a buzz. I was particularly fond of 'A World Full of Weeping', and hope to repeat the feeling with the new one. 'With a Passion Put To Use'. It's got a nice ring, I think. It hints at some of the plotlines and it alliterates.
What more could one want?
Keith McCarthy on Monday, November 6th 2006 @ 03:40 PM GMT [link]