I’ve gotten tired of referring to my thesis as “my thesis.”  A thesis is something that, once it’s finished, gets filed away in the school library and looked at only by other graduate students who are trying to find something new to say.  If it’s particularly lucky, a thesis might see a small publication run from a university press.  I want more for this project than that.  Technically, what I am writing will serve as my thesis for my MFA program, but I’m not writing a thesis.  I’m writing a novel.

Novels get published and find shelf space in bookstores.  Novels can have agents, and Amazon sales rankings under ten thousand (they can even, it is rumored, reach single digits).  Novels are read by people who want to read them, not just people who have to read them.  Novels get read aloud in public places to audiences listening for pleasure, and sometimes they get talked about around water coolers both physical and virtual.

Novels have titles.

No, there isn’t someone pounding urgently on your door, as though they need to get to the bathroom in the next ten seconds.  That sound is my head against the desk.

It isn’t that I hate coming up with titles.  Normally I enjoy the process.  Some of mine are pretty good, some too boring, but like all writing, coming up with titles is a skill one develops.  I’ve even enjoyed playing with titles this time.  To a point.

You see, to date I have considered forty-eight different titles for this project.  Forty-eight.  I have a list.

Not one of them is right.

I don’t know why this is proving so tricky for me.  I suspect that it’s because I am trying, in only a few words, to accurately convey the essence of the story in a way that draws a reader’s attention.  Which, really, is what any good title should do.  Except when it doesn’t.

Consider, for example, The Hobbit.  Once you’ve read the story, it makes perfect sense.  But before you’ve read the story, it’s just a definite article and a made-up word.  Does it convey the essence of the story?  No.

But it has a distinctive word that can draw a reader in.  The reader might wonder, “What’s a hobbit?”  And Tolkien plays it well, answering the question in the first page or two while drawing the reader in further with his prose.  But that’s Tolkien.

There are many approaches to titles.  Bruce Holland Rogers covers the subject well here and here.

I do, perhaps, see a glimmer of land from the crow’s nest.  I’ll set my course that way and see if it’s another bloody mirage.  Wish me luck.

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Submissions Update: since my last post, I have submitted pieces to New Myths, Cemetery Moon, The Pedestal, and The Prose-Poem Project.

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