Preemptive Retaliation

A friend asked me the other day how I choose the titles for my stories. He has been writing something himself and was struggling to come up with an adequate title. He was having difficulty with it, which I was incredibly taken back with as a few weeks ago he told me the title of his yet unwritten Scottish-Western project is Bring Me the Head of a Young Poet – the best title for any piece of work ever. I’m angry at how good it is.

Francine is a robot was born out of necessity. When I submitted my page for consideration at First Page they asked me for the title. Until then I had been working under the tentative title I am a robot which was born from the first words I wrote of the book. It was going to be a running joke in the book where every chapter would begin with “I am a robot and I am…” or “I am a robot and currently…”, but that pretence fell off pretty quickly in the first draft. I still like it to an extent – the gag, not the title. The gag served as a constant reminder that the narrator was not a human, they were a robot and as such their interpretation of the world was to be subjected to question. But either way I didn’t keep it up and the title felt off. On my computer the word docs are held in a folder that’s named Artifice which I came up with when I thought I was sounding clever, and the notebook where I planned most of the novel is titled with There was an AI who made art whilst pretending to be human. And so this novel is about ART and HUMANITY and also IMPOSTER SYNDROME which is a bit on the nose I think.

Before this novel I spent a good while working on The Making Of. This title also wasn’t the first run at it. For almost all of its creation, the book was called Sausage Factory. Since the whole novel is detailing the act of creating something in all its glory – and I should stress here, it’s not just the creation itself but the nitty gritty process of bringing that creation to life. You like sausages? Well eat ’em up lad, we’ve made a bunch for you and, while you’re here, let’s see how they’re made shall we? I wanted to make people sick of sausages as they ate them. I wanted them to appreciate the effort that goes into making them. I wanted to justify the hours and hours I’ve spent at this keyboard fighting my way through a difficult scene, clawing through a tough character, painstakingly arranging words so they make some form of sense to someone else. Basically I wanted to moan about how tough it is being a creative and I wanted people to pity me. So I called it Sausage Factory and, I shit you not, every single one of my beta readers came back rejecting it. They all assumed it would have something to do with masculinity or homosexuality and when the book picked up on exactly none of those they felt it was a bait and switch. Which is a shame, because I loved that title so much. It even had a subtitle! In the meta-narrative this was a book based on a film, and this was highlighted in the subtitle of the book – Sausage Factory; the novel based on the award winning film by Miles Hutchinson (adapted by Joe Timms) which only at this moment I realise is more wanky than I thought.

But still, I renamed it. I don’t know how it came about, but I very quickly settled on The Making Of and I was mad at myself that I didn’t think about it earlier. It’s perfect. The perfect name for this little mess of a novel. The book tells the behind the scenes of a film being created, a literal Making Of segment that you find in DVDs, but it’s also the making of something, or the attempt to make it, but also the making of someone who is growing into a person that their art cannot sustain. It’s perfect. Though, I do mourn the loss of Sausage Factory. To help myself I slipped the line into the book itself.

And that was how Things Keep Happening was named. I don’t know what came first, the title or the line in the book. I think they came about at the same time. I was writing away and had a side character (who I always liked a lot) decide to dump some home truths on one of the POV characters, and she told them that things keep happening, so they just need to keep living their life. And again it fitted the novel like a well worn jacket that had spent a summer in the cupboard. The arms fitted snugly, the collar was soft against its neck and it just looked effortlessly cool. I would (and still do, sometimes) joke that it reflects the unevenness of the novel, where scenes lie upon scenes, and the story marches forward without much traditional structure – I would joke that the title matched the prose in way. That’s being unkind to myself, but it’s true. Things do keep happening in that book, much to the characters behest. And so it’s perfect too.

I don’t know how I come up with the names of things. I guess I throw around ideas until they fit – oh but when they fit it is a tailored fit. It is a smart fit. An envious fit. I don’t know if Francine is a robot is a tight fit yet. It might have to grow into it a little.