What do you call it?

What's in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet;

Romeo and Juliet, Act II Scene II 

Predictably, this principle is not widely embraced by the publishing industry. After all the title of a book sets the tone, hints at its genre and is the first opportunity to draw the reader in.

Word count: 390            Reading time 1-2 minutes

Some members of my Young Writers’ Club were surprised to learn that the author doesn’t always get to name his/her own work but the trend isn’t new. When F. Scott Fitzgerald submitted his novel Trimalchio in West Egg, to Charles Scribner’s Sons, the publishers hated the title. Only at the insistence of editor, Maxwell Perkins, did he change it to The Great Gatsby.

I’m thinking about this a lot lately because my first novel is in the structural editing stage. Once this is completed, I suspect I’ll be asked to offer alternative titles for it. I’m working on that list now and I’ve found several helpful sites:

• I might do what some famous writers have done and take my title from existing literature (examples from that page include: East of Eden, Of Human Bondage, Tender is the Night)
• If my novel were fantasy, I’d go here: Random Fantasy Title Generator. In fact I pushed the generator button several times just for the fun of it.
• I’ll consider Scott Berkun’s hints and keep my titles short, provocative, memorable, and easy and fast to say.

The main thing most sites seem to agree on is the need to create a number of alternatives to work through. Frankly I like Lockdown for my work-in-progress (wip). It’s short and evokes the dystopian theme of the novel. Maybe I can do better though so I’ve started a list and when the novel is ready for the final spit and polish, I’ll have a number of alternatives to offer Great Plains Publications. In the meantime, to quote Raymond Chandler in a letter to Alfred A. Knopf, “I’m trying to think of a good title for you to change.”

Whatever my novel is eventually called, I hope it will be a sweet read.

How do you arrive at the titles for your work? Have you picked a perfect one, only to have it changed? Are you making a list for your wip, or are you waiting until it’s finished for more inspiration?

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Photo of Fragrant Rose Cloud from Wikimedia Commons

Are you a thief?

Walt Disney’s Cinderella was based on a fairy tale collected by the brothers Grimm. Marissa Meyer’s wonderful adaptation of the same story, Cinder, made the New York Times bestseller list in 2012.

Word count: 305           Reading time: 1-2 minutes

I bet Cinderella, as published by the brothers Grimm in 1812, was only one of many versions being told by the oral storytellers of the day.

‘Filter any single incident through another set of eyes, it becomes a different story’ Ellen Hopkins, Flirting with the Monster.

Helen Fielding watched the 1995 BBC drama, Pride and Prejudice, and re-worked the plot into her classic novel Bridget Jones’s Diary. She even based the BJD romantic lead on Colin Firth who played Mr. Darcy to Jennifer Ehle’s Elizabeth Bennet. In doing so Fielding created a mini-industry that just keeps paying and paying.

Picasso said it best: art is theft. But there is good theft and bad theft, and writer Holly Lisle gives some hints here: How to (legally and ethically) steal ideas on the difference between the two. Austin Kleon offers more guidance in his book Steal Like an Artist:

Good theft: honours, studies, credits, transforms, and remixes. It takes from many sources, not just one.

Bad theft: degrades, skims, plagiarizes, imitates, and rips off. It takes only from one source.

David Bowie said, “The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from,” and most of the time, that’s how I pick my reading list. I lift ideas from other writers and if my remix is detected, I hope I've done justice to the original work. 

Have you stolen any good ideas or techniques lately? Have you read an author that made you break out in goosebumps and if so, did you do something to honour that experience? How do you stop your admiration of someone’s work from slipping into plagiarism?