How to decide on a book title

Where Art meets Marketplace (is this the grumpy/sunshine romance of publishing?)

In The Movie Of Her Life has been out for two months now (they grow up so fast!), so have another behind-the-scenes peek - this time on coming up with the title.

Published by Doire Press | Cover design: Triona Walsh

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For several years, the working title for this short story collection was ‘Women Like Us Get On With Things’, although ‘collection’ might be a grand word for something that was a MS Word document with stories copy-and-pasted in as they slowly found homes in literary journals or anthologies. The opening story in the finished book is ‘My Mother Gets On With Things’, so it was a nod to that, and also (as so many things are) it was the best I could come up with at the time.

Titles are important. But I’d learned, from publishing stories and poems as well as several YA novels, and from sometimes working on the editor’s side of the desk myself, that titles are often changed between submission and final publication.¹ I’d discovered not to get too attached - title changes can be about all kinds of things, from ‘there’s another book/story with a similar title’ reasons (i.e. out of your hands) to ‘this signposts the story a bit too much’ (that one’s a learning opportunity, as they say). I tried to find one that worked, that was attention-grabbing, without feeling as though it was the one perfect title and I’d die if anyone suggested anything else.

I didn’t ever want a title to be a deal-breaker - for a piece of work to find the perfect home, only for us to disagree on something that is, yes, part of the overall artistic work, but is also about the marketing of that work. When there are other people involved in helping your work find an audience, whether small or large, niche or general, it behooves you to listen to them, and value their areas of expertise. They almost certainly know more than you about the overall field, even if you feel you know your particular work best. The title is both text and paratext, of the work and around it - and the ‘around it’ stuff has come to feel, for me, like the place where editorial- or marketing- or PR-brains are likely to have a clearer view than you do, as the author. You take part in a conversation rather than issuing a diktat (or one being issued to you).

Armed with all these lovely spirit-of-cooperation thoughts, I was asked to revisit the title of this collection and promptly had a brief melodramatic moment of despair (why don’t you like the title? Why don’t you like me? Why do you hate me? etc) before, well, getting on with things, like the sensible women of that provisional title.

Looking back now, that title does not fit one bit - because the whole point, to me, was that of course ‘getting on with things’ in that repressed-Irish-Catholic is not particularly healthy.² It’s the ‘pull your socks up’ mentality. It’s the ‘it’s grand, it’s grand, everything’s grand’ approach that leads to suppressed suffering, which inevitably manifests in various dysfunctional ways - substance abuse, mental illness, troubled relationships. Not to mention the more socially-acceptable faces of psychological distress - excessive exercise/health monitoring, workaholism, extreme self-righteousness disguised as activism, etc.

The title works for the short story, but not for the collection as a whole. The irony is lost, or potentially lost. So I did the following key things to try to come up with a range of new titles (preparing to send a selection on to the publisher):

1. Revisited the collection with a highlighter (okay, a digital one - working from a pdf copy) to identify lines or other story titles I liked, or that seemed to encapsulate one of the themes of the stories.

2. Looked through the two greatest sources for titles-for-things that exist, both out of copyright - Shakespeare and the Bible. This is a good go-to in general, but didn’t quite fit for this - the appealing phrases felt either too formal or else overdone. (No, self, you cannot call this collection about sad girls and women ‘To Thine Own Self’, are you kidding? Yes, actually, I think a few hundred other people might have spotted that bit about seeing ‘As Through A Glass Darkly’.)

3. Went through various Spotify playlists to see if anything jumped out at me. Titles, unlike the works themselves, can’t be copyrighted (this is how you sometimes see books that share titles with popular songs), but few songs really seemed to work. There were a couple of stories very much informed by particular songs (one was written with Leonard Cohen’s ‘Closing Time’ on repeat), so any instances of that went into the mix, even though Joseph Heller and other writers have used ‘Closing Time’ as book titles previously. (You could drive yourself mad with this way of thinking - books do often have similar or identical titles, and the world keeps spinning, but you want to avoid potential confusion. In this instance I did not think anyone was going to mix anything up. I am rarely confused with Great American Male Writers. Or Great Canadian Poets.)

4. Ran the titles by a few writer friends, one of whom pointed out things like Google-ability and memorability, which were practical things I had forgotten existed in my haze of ‘what will best serve The Art here?’. As with seeking feedback on any creative work, it is helpful here to pick people who will be tactful or at least not do too much sneering or eye-rolling at you. It is also helpful if the people involved have read books, ever, and can tell you if something sounds like a short-story-collection title or a self-help guide.

In the end the title chosen was ‘In The Movie Of Her Life’ - it shares its name with another story in the book, which originally had a different title entirely and was renamed after a line about how the main character thinks about her daily existence - going to her day job to support her creative, bit-of-a-waster boyfriend - as though it’s on screen. It’s easier for her to think about it, this way - as a story told through a camera, where the choices make narrative sense, or will eventually.

That distance, I realised, was echoed in other stories, where characters are viewing things through screens (there is another one titled ‘Screen’, where the protagonist monitors her friends at their Debs via social media posts) - communicating with and/or obsessing over people online, rather than the so-called ‘real world’ (does such a distinction make sense anymore, when we're all glued to our devices?). It was echoed, too, in stories where characters compare the what-might-be or what-could-have-been or what-should-have-been of their lives to what they are now - ‘This Is Not The Story’ depicts a college student’s abortion pre-Repeal, while ‘Blue’ sees a young woman invent an improbable backstory for a stranger whose phone she finds.

I felt fiercely clever for about two minutes, before remembering that understanding, roughly, what you’ve written about is part of the gig when putting a book together. Even if you don’t quite know when you’re actually writing, it hopefully becomes evident as you go through the editing stages, as you start to see the work with clearer eyes. I’d been relying on a sort of self-deprecating shorthand up until then - oh, it’s about sad girls/women being sad! - and then it came into focus. It’s about those gaps between what we want and we have, what we deserve and what we get, what the world could be and what it actually is. It’s about living in a world where stories of various kinds are told and sold to us daily, and dealing with that, and just, well, getting on with -

Okay, there was a reason for that provisional title. I still think this one is the right one, though.

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In The Movie Of Her Life is published by Doire Press and is out now. Nice things people (and newspapers) have said about it have been gathered up here, and I’m on the latest episode of the Burning Books podcast here. If you’re around Bantry next month, I’ll be at the West Cork Literary Festival, and I’m looking forward to seeing people for flash fiction discussions at Dalkey Book Festival next week!

1. There’s an excellent post about this from a commercial fiction perspective over at The Honest Editor, but it happens in lit-fic/poetry/essay land too. Don’t even get me started on newspaper headlines.)

2. I had this post all ready to go and then this piece, which is also about Irish notions of ‘getting on with things’, popped up on my social media timeline at the weekend. Endlessly repeating myself, I am.