Titles

At the start of creation, man named the things surrounding him. He called a tree, tree. A frog, a frog. Like the first human, writers expend enormous mental exertion naming--trying to describe something in an extraordinarily accurate way with the least amount of words. We live a life full of labels, names, titles. I'm a mother, a sister, a wife. I love that I've become a writer, speaker and painter. But like the names of creatures and plants, these names, meager labels, do not define me. I am more than a mother or writer. Those labels are only things I do.

But the naming of a book is different. A title emerges in layers. At the start of my literary piece, I had already named my book. I called my book by this name though I hadn't even written one sentence towards the start of a first draft. God Thought I Was Atlas. I'm not even sure where the name, the inspiration for this title, came from. One day it was there.

Over the years, I've read chapter after chapter to my reading-listening-feedback friend, Lorene. And with every reading, the two of us referred to the book by its given name. Like one of my children, my book is called out when needed, referred to in dialogue, and thought about with much tenderness. Always with this name.

A few weeks ago, I realized this title limits my book. This is not a religious book. It's non-fiction literature, a memoir. My journey is not a religious journey, though it is a spiritual experience. My journey is more than this, more than this title, and so I had to un-name my work. I didn't realize how painful un-naming could be. Now my work was like a nameless child and drawing it to me, embracing it, felt awkward. I know many writers name their work when it is finished. Or the name arrives as powerful fresh language at the beginning or end of a new chapter. Maybe these writers did not know they had a void in their nameless work. They struggled through each line without the need for a label.

At first I thought I would need to comb through my manuscript. Surely the title was already there, hidden away, obscure, yet waiting to be found. But the weeks passed and...nothing. Then last week, I was working on the eighth revision on chapter 25 when the name lingered on a line right in front of me. There it stood out, stood alone--a new word, something unheard of, something more than fresh, and yet something that embraced this entire journey in only a few syllables. I stifled a small shout. Another layer in the writing journey had peeled away.  My work had a name.