Titles in fiction are tricky, I think… especially for novels. You’ve spent months or years writing this big thing. It needs the perfect title. What follows is my experience with titling a few novels. It may or may not be instructive. My musings here might be most geared to literary novels, but then that might not be true either.

It can be interesting to search online to see what the working titles of novels were before they got their actual title.

Fahrenheit 451 was originally just called The Fireman. (I’m glad Bradbury kept thinking)

The Great Gatsby had the working title of Hurrah for the Red, White, and Blue.

Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone was called Lightning Bolt Forehead (ok, I made that one up)

I did read once that when Hemingway finished a novel, he’d commit to making a list of 100 possible titles. Sometimes, finding nothing that stuck, he’d make another list of 100.

My first novel was titled Into the Desperate Country. The novel explores some themes of living a simple life, so it was influenced by Thoreau’s Walden. As a result, I eventually used a snippet of Walden for the title:

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.”

I knew too if I ever wrote a sequel, it would be called The Desperate City. (I never did write a sequel)

That’s one way to go… pluck a part of a line from an existing poem or fictional piece (be warned, the well-known ones are often already taken.) I know Hemingway and Fitzgerald often plucked from the bible… see The Sun Also Rises and East of Eden.

For my second novel, about a painter, I wanted to find a term associated with painting that seemed metaphorically apropos for my character’s situation. (That’s another way to go… look at what your character does and see if there’s a term/lingo associated with it that carries some metaphorical/symbolic weight)

I found “fugitive colors”:

“A fugitive color is a pigment that, when exposed to certain environmental conditions such as sunlight, humidity, temperature or even pollution, is less permanent. Over time the color can change, lighten, darken or even almost disappear. Basically think of fugitive colors as temporary.”

Seemed great, but an amazon search turned up three books with the title Fugitive Colors. I love the phrase too… very poetic.

I ended up titling the novel much like I’ve seen painters title their paintings. I ended up calling the novel Landscape with Fragmented Figures. (Still like Fugitive Colors better!)

My next novel, I went with a more broad, sweeping title: American Poet. Yes, my main character is an aspiring poet in America, so it works on that level. But, I also was trying to get at what it means to be a poet in America. It’s a country that does not really love its poets. My novel is set in Saginaw, MI… birthplace to Theodore Roethke, a great American poet. Aside from a group that struggles to maintain his boyhood home as a museum, you’d hardly know that Roethke was from Saginaw. The town doesn’t really care. That’s what my novel is about… my main character returns to Saginaw after finishing his BFA in poetry, only to find that it can’t help him land a job in his blue collar town. He eventually finds purpose in trying to save the Theodore Roethke Home Museum after it experiences an attic fire.

Finally, my next novel, Detroit Muscle, is about a young man returning to Michigan after a stint in rehab. The title works because he and his grandpa do take a redemptive road trip across Michigan in a ’68 Firebird (a muscle car… or what is called Detroit Muscle). But, the muscle memory in the book is also about the grandpa and the kid remembering who they once were and trying to use that memory to develop into something else. They are flexing their own muscle.

I like titles like that. I call them concrete/symbolic titles. In this instance, concrete, because yes there’s a muscle car in the book. But symbolic too because the title has symbolic ramifications for the characters.

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