You probably know what The Bard said, through Juliet, about names:
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet.
(And yes, it’s word, in every edition of Romeo and Juliet except Q1. If you don’t believe me, you can look it up.)
I can agree with that, for roses and for people. Maybe pets, too. (Although try telling that to my dog, Teddy Bridgewater.) But for books… nah. Every author, myself included, wants just the right title for their labor of love. Something that relates to the story in some way (directly or tangentially), something memorable, and, most importantly, something catchy enough to make prospective readers think, “Oooh, that looks interesting! I’ve got to buy it right now!”
When I decided to use a story I’d thought up many months ago as the basis for my first novel (for details, see my initial blog post Why did I decide to write a novel, and why this novel?), I started thinking about the title. I decided up front that I wanted something from Shakespeare. Just why, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s due to the ghost of a high-school English teacher, Mr. Claeson, who made his classes memorize verse after verse of Shakespeare, haunting me. (Actually, I loved Mr. Claeson and owe him a huge debt of gratitude for drilling into me the rules of English grammar… which I even remember once in a while.) More likely it’s because I wanted people to look at the title and think, “Wow, he knows Shakespeare—how classy, and cool!” Okay, so no one’s actually going to think that. I just wanted Shakespeare; we’ll leave it at that.
I started researching potential titles. I had a specific title in mind that I thought would fit perfectly. (I’m not going to share that idea here, because I realized later it might give away a major plot twist.) So I Googled it. I found about 1,771,561 (yes, I’m a Trekker) books with that title. Darn. I really wanted something unique. So I searched Shakespeare’s works for other potential titles. I came up with half a dozen that I thought would fit pretty well. Then I Googled those. Arrrgh! All of them had already been used—most of them several times—for books. But then I searched further, and I found one possibility that had zero hits for book titles: “…the lightning in the collied night…” No doubt the reason it hadn’t been used is the archaic Old English word “collied,” which means “darkened, blackened, murky.” Darkened night… that fits! I thought. And so does lightning, albeit less directly. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. I thought of how it fit the story. And I realized that not only that line, but some of the surrounding lines, fit the story. Here’s the context, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
Or, if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it,
Making it momentary as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;
Brief as the lightning in the collied night
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say, Behold!
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.
I even thought of a way to work it into the thoughts of one of the characters. And, it is unique. Is it memorable? Maybe. Will it excite people enough to run out (or click into Amazon) and buy my book? The book’s out on that; I guess we’ll see!
I asked everyone who’s reviewed a draft of my book about the title. Most reviewers thought it was fine. A few loved it. But two people, one of whom is a professional editor, hated it. “It’s too long,” they said. “It doesn’t fit the story,” they also said. (Except it does—see above.) “It’s weird.” Okay, they didn’t say that, but I’m pretty sure they were thinking it.
That got me thinking about popular, award-winning sci-fi novels and stories that had titles at least as long, if not longer. Or titles that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the story… until you read the book. Or both. And I also remembered what the books I’d read about how to write fiction said about how, at the end of the day, it’s MY novel.
So… that’s the title: The Lightning in the Collied Night. Love it, or hate it. Or just shrug and say, “What’s in a name?” After you read my book, I hope you’ll see why I chose that title.
I think Mr. Claeson would have liked it.
