The Title Is the First Sentence

Before a reader meets the first sentence of a book, they meet another one. It sits on the spine and the cover, in the catalogue entry and the bookseller's recommendation, and it has already done a good deal of work by the time anyone turns a page. We mean the title. It is the one sentence of a book that nearly everyone reads, and it is the one that writers most often leave until last, written in a hurry, as if it were packaging rather than prose.

We think this is a mistake, and we make a point of treating the title at this press as the first sentence of the manuscript rather than the last. A good title is not a label. It is a small act of interpretation, performed by the author, that tells the reader how to hold what follows.

Consider how much a title can borrow, and what the borrowing does. Faulkner took The Sound and the Fury from Macbeth, and the phrase arrives carrying the whole bleak speech it came from, a life that signifies nothing, so that the novel is read against that verdict before a word of the Compson family has been spoken. Hemingway took The Sun Also Rises from Ecclesiastes, and the line argues with the lost and drifting characters it names: the earth abides, the sun goes down and rises again, and the generations come and go. Neither title summarizes its book. Each gives the reader a second voice to hold alongside the first.

The reverse case is just as instructive. Fitzgerald is known to have wanted something quite different for the book we now call The Great Gatsby, and the title that survived does a particular thing: it sets a faintly ironic public grandeur over a private and very ordinary longing. A title is often where a writer first decides what the book is really about, and revising it can be a way of discovering that decision.

For the writers we work with, we suggest a plain exercise. Set the manuscript aside, and write down five things you want a stranger to feel in the half-second before they open it. Then write ten possible titles without looking at the book. Some will be descriptive and some will be borrowed. A few will be too clever. Read them aloud, and notice which ones still sound true after a night's sleep, because a title has to be said, recommended, typed into a search bar and printed on a spine, and it has to survive all of that without embarrassing anyone.

Then read each candidate against the first page. A good title and a good opening sentence should not repeat one another, and they should not argue. They should sound like two people in the same house, one speaking from the doorway and the other from the kitchen. If the title already promises what the opening withholds, one of them is working too hard.

There is a practical side too, which a small press cannot ignore. A title must also function at thumbnail size, in a catalogue line, in a sentence spoken across a table. We do not think this is a compromise of literary values. A title that reads clearly at the size of a postage stamp has usually been pared to its necessary words, and paring is what we ask of every sentence in the book.

When a manuscript comes to us untitled, or titled in a way the author no longer believes in, we take it as a good sign. It usually means the book has not yet finished telling the writer what it is. The title arrives, when it arrives, as one of the last acts of understanding, and it should be given the same patience as a final paragraph.

So before you send the book out, read the title once more as if you were a stranger. Ask what it promises, what it borrows and whether the first page keeps the promise. If it does, you have written one more good sentence than you thought you had.

— The Editors