The Most Important Thing a Novelist Needs

Years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine and I confessed I was having trouble titling my second novel. Eventually it would be called The Answers, but before that it was called XXXXXX, a title I didn’t even really like but had thought myself into believing was the only correct title for the book. It very much wasn’t.

Anyway, in reply to my confession about the difficulty of finding the correct title, my friend (who has since written all manner of things, musicals, board games, novels, etc) said to me—

I was mildly devastated by this remark, which I tried to brush off, yeah yeah, maybe that’s how you work, but me on the other hand…

It’s true that I also entertained several dumb titles for my first novel until I realized that the best title was a line from a poem I’d read about 100 times before and during the writing of that novel: Nobody Is Ever Missing. (It’s from Dream Song 29 by John Berryman.) I didn’t pick that title until the very end, and yet the novel very much existed before that title was clear to me.

However, since then, I’ve tended to just pick a very simple title for a novel at the start, telling myself I can always replace it later, but so far I never have. Pew had that title after I’d written about 10 pages, and Biography of X had that title when it was still just an idea. The Möbius Book, which is not a novel, was a very different beast, for many reasons, detailed here if you’re interested—

If you’ve been reading this Substack project of mine during the last year you may have noticed that I’ve been writing a lot about everything I do when writing a novel. That’s because, after years of research, distraction, dwelling, and note-taking, I finally felt ready to tackle a novel idea I’ve been working on since 2022.

Every novel I’ve written has developed in a slightly different way, but those various processes also have a good deal in common; I was trying to notice and describe what I was doing with this novel draft, and keep a running tally of the most basic methods and habits I used while writing—

There are several more entries here, but here’s the most recent, the inevitable question of whether you should destroy your own work:

In early May of this year, however, something happened. What felt like it had been the title (more or less) of that novel now only seemed to be the title of one section of the book, as the narrative began to run off in a new direction. Without a title for the work as a whole, I felt the book was no longer writable, at least not for now.

But perhaps it was something else that derailed me, a secret I’d been keeping so well that I didn’t even know I was keeping it, and it was that secret that really made the project cease to respond to my attention.