To Be Named Later

I recently got an edit that made me a laugh a little.

“You waste a lot of titles naming chapters.  You may want to consider using numbers instead.”

Well, I guess you could think about it that way.  I mean, I know when I stopped writing one novel a year, and started writing at least four, if not six, plus novellas.

And I use chapter titles for each one.  (Right?  I’m pretty sure—even the super short ones!  If not, someone correct me… oi!  The things I’ve forgotten!)

Anyway—yes.  Sometimes it is a challenge—even within a book—to come up with original titles.  I’m aware that sometimes I’ve repeated titles in other books, although I try not to, and I worry—with so much work out, will the title thing make stuff look repetitive, even when it’s, very often, not the same thing at all?

But I can’t stop—each chapter to me has a root, a theme, a core motif, that fits into the larger work.  It’s like the chapter name helps me identify that—and more than once, often per book, I’ve gone back and renamed a chapter because it was not the chapter title I needed.  The rewrites I go through for actual titles are equally insane, by the way, but the fact that I do it for chapter titles?

Well, I can understand the editor’s POV.  That’s a lot of work.

But it’s worth it.

My bank PIN is a word, not a number.  Yes, I know, it translates to numbers, but in my head it’s a word, and it’s a goal, something I’m wedded to in terms of mind and matter.  I never forget my bank PIN.  And nobody knows it, either.  Sales clerks look in me in consternation as I keep plinking on the keypad, and every time Target changes their processor, I can’t shop there for a month until they get it tweaked for longer PINs.  But it’s still worth it.  For one thing, not a lot of people are going to hack a “number” that long, but for another, every time I buy something (and that’s a lot, actually, to my shame) I remember that thing, that idea, the concept that I wanted to keep dear to my heart.

Titles help.  They help focus a work, help remind the author what it’s all about—not the plot, that can be hammered, ironed, and chainsawed until it’s complete—but the hart of it.  The color of the blood.  That’s what chapter do for me.

So no—I’m not going to change to numbers.  Even though I’m fairly prolific, I’m prolific because the people in my head keep talking, not because I’m trying to turn out carbon copy works.  I’m prolific because I want to write all the things, all the people, all the ideas, and I just keep working so I don’t part this mortal coil worried that I had one more work inside that never came out.

And those works all have titled chapters.  Just like Dickens’s, right?

And when I think about that suggestion, I’m reminded about RWA this last summer.  Yeah, I was a jellyfish in peanut butter—not my crowd, really, and I was sorely outclassed—but still, I got something out of it.  And one of my favorite things that I got out of it was author Kristin Higginson, who, when asked why she hadn’t saved a particular funny part of one book for another book, responded with something that I believed with all of my heart.

“I was told never to hold a piece of myself back for the next work.  Write like this is your last work, like it’s the last thing you’ll ever put in print.  That way, you won’t have any apologies to make.”

So, uhm, no—not apologizing for my titles.  Even my repeated ones.  After all, at the time, there was the possibility that would be the last book I’d ever write.

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Amy just released Shiny! At amazon.com and Dreamspinnerpress.com!