What's In a Name?

Writing is a funny thing…even funnier than my kid sometimes. Granted, Westly makes me laugh quite often—like the other night as we read The Very Hungry Caterpillar before bed. He loves sticking his fingers into the holes punched in the pages where the caterpillar ate. I pinched his fingers from the underside of the page as he poked his through and he giggled so hard it made me laugh. 

Writing for me isn’t always a funny ha-ha thing. It’s more like a funny “Really?!” thing. Right now I’m working on giving my fourth book a title. Sometimes titles just come to me, either before I’ve written the book, during the writing of it, or after with some reflection. And sometimes the title totally eludes me. Here’s the funny thing going on with naming my Book 4:

Before I even started writing it, I knew the premise of the plot and immediately had a title in mind. All while I wrote it, the title stuck. Then when I finished the book and re-read it last week, I started having doubts about the title. This weekend I’ve been brainstorming with Michael on titles. After making lists of titles, scratching out some, perusing my big thesaurus, and talking out my thoughts and reasoning….

…I think I finally landed on a title (TBA). And the funny thing about it is by changing the title I have to go back and change the name of a key component of the story! But this new title sounds so much better, is way more intriguing, and is a better summary of the story. So I’ve got to change a few things in the story to correspond with the title. Kind of a pain, but it will be totally worth it.

Book 3 was funny like that. I had no titles in mind as I was finishing it. After some brainstorming, Michael and I came up with The Holmes Brigade as the title for Book 3. Now here’s the funny thing: before the title, the storyline of the Holmes Brigade did not exist! I created a whole side-story about the secret club based on this interesting title we came up with. And the best part about that, the Holmes Brigade storyline became not only an important part of Book 3, it also became the story crux of Book 4!

Like I said, writing is funny!