Tag Archives: Shakespeare

A rose by any other name…

Last month, I attended a meeting of a group of women writers I joined last fall. Our moderator (who also happens to be C., my editor) often brings interesting bits of industry news and great pieces of advice to our monthly meetings, and last month was no different. She had stumbled upon a web site devoted to book titles and suggested we visit it, for inspiration or a laugh, or, in my case, for cautionary examples.

 

As I was hell-bent on finishing the editing of my manuscript this month, I didn’t visit the site immediately, spending time instead with my new BFF Search and Replace (see last post). Well, the process went quickly, more quickly than I expected, and C. and I got to the point where we were ready to start talking about titles.

 

I’ve been working on this same manuscript for close to five years now, and it’s always had the same working title, but just because I kept it this long, doesn’t mean I was satisfied with it. So I asked C. for some input, which she graciously provided; I also toyed around with some new titles of my own. Ultimately, between the two of us, we came up with more than two dozen possible titles for my book. Egad! How am I supposed to make a rational decision with a list that long? I can’t even decide which pair of shoes to put on in the morning, some days!

 

So C. invited me to open my list up to our group for feedback. That was a tough thing for me to do—I’m still new to this supportive group feedback concept. I’m more familiar with the paradigm of submitting to professors, agents, and publishers and receiving in reply either the stony silence of utter rejection or a scathing retort indicating I should not quit my day job.

 

Imagine my surprise, then, when the group came up with not only a number of excellent title suggestions, but even went a step further to provide insightful, concise, and helpful feedback on the book pitch I’d shared with them as well. Each new message was a wonder.

 

Now, for those of you who have been following me from the beginning, you may recall my agreeing in earlier posts with writer Philip Roth, that writing should not be done by committee, but in this case, I feel I have really been missing something, and I am here to ‘fess up to it: Feedback is good. Feedback is not only good, it’s critical.

 

To be absolutely clear, I’m not referring here to the type of feedback you get from your best friend or your mother or the local librarian you bribed with a cup of coffee before sliding her your manuscript. I’m talking about skilled feedback from readers with critical eyes yet supportive touch; readers who can tell it like it is without breaking your heart in the process. Readers like my other new BFFs in my writers’ group.

 

So—the title. Have I decided yet? Nope. In the end, with all the feedback I received, I wound up with a handful of frontrunners and an additional 7 title suggestions. I have studied the list, narrowed it down to my top 3, and when I meet with my group this week, I plan on asking them for a straight vote. I’m hoping it will be less contentious than the GOP primary, but you never can tell—writers have strong opinions about everything.

 

I’m still shocked, however, that of all the things I’ve spent so much of the last few years writing, rewriting, and editing, it is the title that is causing me the most trouble.

 

In an effort to educate myself a bit more about good titles, I did go to the site our group leader recommended, and I’m glad I did, because there were some real doozies in there. Cooking with Pooh is my favorite from the list, an illustration of another important concept in writing, that of reading your work aloud to hear how it sounds.

 

All this focus on choosing the perfect title for my book brings to mind Shakespeare’s immortal lines, “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” He’s right, it would, but I guarantee, if the rose were called “Pooh,” a lot of people out there would never give it a sniff to verify if that’s really true.

 Yep. No doubt about it, titles are important, and I hope to have one locked in soon.

Sometimes the Joy’s in “The Done…”

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William Shakespeare is always a great resource for a good quote, and one of my favorites is “Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.” I like that one so much that I even have a plaque inscribed with it hanging in my laundry room (I put it there in a futile attempt to convince myself how much joy I get out of The Doing of laundry–so far unsuccessful, but I still like the quote).

Generally speaking, I agree with the spirit of the quote–there’s a certain anticlimactic feel, sometimes, in the completion of a task, particularly one in which you’ve invested a great deal of time and energy. For example, I remember when I finished my first full-length work, a novella: I had worked on it for over a year, and when it was finally completed, of course, there was joy, but there was also a brief period of “What now?” that followed–The Doing” had filled my life with joy for such a long time, that it took me a little while to figure out what to do next. Of course, once I moved on to the next project, I was back to being joyful all over again. I know, I’m so fickle–isn’t it awful?

But then there are the other times, times when you’re in the middle of a long-term project (which I am now), when occasionally The Doing isn’t living up to that joyful rep–times when it feels like you’ve been DOING this same project forever (which, of course, you have); it will never be done (which, of course, it won’t); and the prospect of doing any more work on it, even one single paragraph, is enough to make you want to sock ol’ Bill Shakespeare right on his pointy little chin.

Not so much joy there, now, is there?

Those are the days, and today was one of them, when I find it helpful to step away from the keyboard for a couple of hours and focus on things that are finite in duration; things that have visible, tangible results–in other words, things that can be DONE.

So today, I focused on a laundry list (no pun intended) of mundane tasks: a trip to the DMV to renew my driver’s license (that’s a bonus task, because it always provides fresh fodder for new characters); replacing burned-out light bulbs in all the chandeliers (hovering at the top of a 10-foot ladder has a unique way of clearing one’s mind of all distractions); scouring the kitchen sink (ugh–’nuff said). Throw in two loads of laundry (I pointedly avoided looking at the plaque while I was in the laundry room), and I found that my head was cleared, my soul was refreshed, and inspiration had returned.

So yes, while I do (on the whole) agree with Shakespeare that you can find a lot of joy in The Doing of your work, I also find that sometimes, you just can’t beat that feeling that comes from The Done.

But just because I felt the need to engage in some domestic chores today, don’t think I’m planning on doing that laundry thing every day; we all know that that one will never be The Done.