The Titles Left on the Cutting Room Floor

I knew when I finished my novel that I hadn’t figured out the right title for it. But I wasn’t too worried because I also knew that even if I had found what I considered the perfect title, my editor would probably want to change it. Book titles are very important because they have to stand out in the marketplace; they are advertising as well as storytelling. You need a word or string of words that will draw people in and stick in their head. The stickiness is important because word-of-mouth is the number one way people discover new books, and if someone can’t remember the title, they won’t tell other people. Simple phrases often work best, and editors will sometimes ask what your working title was (the file name on your computer), because those are usually very basic and easy to remember. 

My working title was Jennifer Hex, and that’s the title I used to sell the book because I thought it sounded good and might catch an editor’s eye. Jennifer Hex is also an important character who drives the plot forward, though I wouldn’t say that the book is about her. Instead, it’s about the psychological journey of the narrator, Leigh, who must find a way forward in life after the loss of her mother and the break-up of her marriage. It's also a book about the climate crisis, the fast pace of technological change, end-of-life treatment, A.I.-enabled robots, and the military’s forays into holistic health. Also, mushrooms.

So, somehow the title had to gesture toward all that, or at least help set the mood. “Jennifer Hex” wasn’t sending the right signals. It sounded a bit too witchy and maybe a touch satirical. The other problem with Jennifer Hex is that it is apparently confusing to readers, in general, when a first and last name are used as a title because it competes with the author’s name. That’s something that had never occurred to me, but it’s the kind of thing that editors are aware of, because it is their job to think about what readers see when they glance at a cover.

I tried to come up with a better title as I was revising. One I was fond of was “Hecate’s Key,” which is the name I invented for an imaginary mushroom that plays an important role in the story. (“Hecate’s Key” is the common name; I did not come up with a Latin name for it, an oversight that seems more glaring now that I am learning to identify mushrooms in the wild.) The problem with Hecate’s Key as a title is that no one knows how to pronounce Hecate, and as I learned with my first novel, which also had to be retitled, you need to have a phrase that people feel confident saying out loud. Another title I liked was “Project Demeter,” which was the name I made up for the top-secret military project that Leigh becomes involved with. But that sounded too sci-fi, and it put too much of an emphasis on the symbolic/mythological aspects of the story. Also, Demeter is another Greek name that Americans are not sure how to pronounce.  

In the end, I didn’t think either of these titles was better than Jennifer Hex and I was also, quite frankly, very weary of reading my book. I couldn’t see it with fresh eyes anymore, and if there was a great title hidden in the middle of a paragraph, I knew I wasn’t going to be the person to find it.

That person was Laura, my very insightful editor, who combed the manuscript for phrases that might work as titles. Last summer, she sent me this list of possibilities:

Everything is Connected
Under the Pulse of the World
Someone Else’s Life
Existential Escape
Stoic Creatures
Altered State
We Were Pretending
The Pretenders
Escape Plan
Exit Strategy
How Did We Get Here
How Did I Get Here
Come with Me
Release Me
Release
A Peaceful Release
A Life I Never Wanted

As you can see, the title we eventually chose was hidden in there…but this list was initially rejected by the marketing department as “too esoteric.” My editor was directed to find something with a more subjective feeling, ideally something that used personal pronouns, so she came up with this list:

It Comes to This
Our Altered Lives
An Altered Life
What We Imagined
We Were Pretending
We Were Always Pretending
We Were Pretenders

The favorite in the marketing department was WE WERE PRETENDERS, but I was hesitant to use it, because it made me think of the band The Pretenders and also the song, “The Great Pretender,” two musical associations that don’t have much personal meaning for me. ‘Pretender’ is also not a word I tend to use, and it doesn’t show up in the manuscript—though I was surprised to find that “pretend” and “pretending” does appear quite a bit. (You really can’t see your own book after a while.) As Laura pointed out, the novel is very much about pretending, about fantasies and alternate realities and altered states of consciousness. So, I could see the value of the word “pretend.” I suggested that we use the title “We Were Pretending” which had showed up on both lists. And, happily, it was accepted.

Of course, I second-guessed myself. (What kind of writer would I be if I didn’t ?) While I was going through the final edits, I wondered if the book should have been titled “Spiritual Readiness” or “A Handbook for Spiritual Readiness” after the holistic health manual that my main character, Leigh, is helping to write. Laura told me that she had considered this early on, but it sounded too realistic. The marketing department worried that people might pick up the book and think that it was, literally, a self-help book about spirituality. (My book is definitely not that, though my father recently read a galley and said he thought it seemed “accidentally Buddhist.”)

When I first started using my new title, it felt a bit awkward. The book had been “Jennifer Hex” for so many years that it was almost as if I was referring to someone else’s novel. But over time, We Were Pretending has really grown on me. I think it speaks to the theme of denial, which is something our culture is wrestling with as we try to face the reality of the climate crisis. And I think it also speaks to the way, especially when we are young or in times of transition or crisis, we have to take on roles and attitudes that don’t quite fit us…until one day they do.

I hope all this title talk is making you curious to read the book itself. If you’d like an advance copy, I have ten paper galleys that I will mail out to the first ten people who reply to this email with their address. You don’t have to say anything other than “hi,” though if you want to tell me what your favorite title is, out of this list, that would be fun. . .

Thanks for reading and I’ll be back in your inbox next month with some thoughts about epigraphs.

-Hannah