Naming the baby

Amidst all the hard (but rewarding) work of the third draft of the final volume of the Chaos Walking trilogy, today is a fun day for me. It’s when I get to tell the world its title. 

This is partly because I decided to keep it a secret for a while. Not just to let the anticipation build for a bit (but why not?), but also because it felt like I was protecting my book a little; keeping it out of the fray until it was ready to launch.

It’s ready now, and though I’m still working on that third draft, a real book is emerging, one that deserves a name. And that name is...

Well, let’s consider titles for a moment first, shall we? Now that I’ve offered four of them to the world, I get asked a lot where I get my titles from, and the answer is often just the same gut instinct that plots emerge from. Half the time, who knows? You’re just bumbling along and suddenly it trips you up, fully-formed but obviously right.

The Knife of Never Letting Go wasn’t originally called that, for example. I didn’t quite know what the title was going to be, so for the first draft I called it The Hole in the Noise, which was accurate enough and would do if nothing else presented itself (which is what happened to my first book, The Crash of Hennington, and to this day, I wish I’d thought of something better).

I happily toddled along, hoping the right words would present themselves, and one day, when titling a chapter, they did. The Knife of Never Letting Go just showed up at the top of the page.  And I thought, Eureka. Todd can’t let go of the knife once he uses it, even when he wants to. But there was more to it than that. It was syntactically odd but somehow sweeping, somehow yearning and emotional, somehow everything I wanted to signify in my hopes for the book. There it was, mystically on the page, and I wasn’t about to lose it.

Likewise with the second book in the trilogy, The Ask and the Answer.  Not The Question and the Answer, but again, something slightly odder, something that – when you read the book – makes perfect sense but is still mysterious enough to hint to the reader that there might be treasure inside.

And isn’t that what you want? My short story collection is called Topics About Which I Know Nothing, a decent joke, archly stated, hinting at loads but actually saying nothing at all. It was a happy title for a weird little collection. It also, however, swore me off comedy titles forever and ever. Jokes lose that certain something when you say them for the 10,000th time.

And so that brings me to my latest title, the name of my latest child to be sent off into the world. This is always a tricky business because people will have opinions about baby names that have nothing to do with the name itself. If you’ve never met a Fred you’ve liked, it’s unlikely you’re going to be enthusiastic when your sister names her son that. 

Which is why a title has to be personal, particularly for a novel. It has to be right for me, regardless of what others may say.  I’m open to suggestions, of course, but if the eureka isn’t there, no thank you. I’m protective, fiercely so, of my titles.

(With the big exception of their translations. The Knife of Never Letting Go is a very English-language style of phrasing and has proven extremely difficult to translate. And so in French, it’s called 'The Voice of the Knife', in Spanish 'The Knife in The Hand', and in Italian – wait for it – 'The Hole In the Noise', my original title. But in Italian that comes out as 'Il Buco nel Rumore', which sounds fabulous.)

And so the title of book three. This was an easy one. 'War makes monsters of men,' Todd’s father tells him. I knew from the start book three would be a book about war. And so it’s called Monsters of Men. With again, a slightly odd construction ('of' instead of 'and') and that slight reaching feeling that I like. I’m happy with it, happy to send that title out into the world today with all my best wishes.

Besides, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was already taken.