My second novel will come into the world in early 2024, published by the University of Wisconsin Press. And it now has a name—a new name: “Unswerving.”  

This is not the title I used while working on the book. I called my novel “Spinning.” It follows a young woman, severely injured in a car accident, as she tries to rebuild her life and find a new community as a wheelchair user. I liked how “Spinning” evoked both her life careening in an unexpected direction, and the motion of her wheelchair and her handcycle as she discovers the joy of adaptive sports.  

My editor initially liked the title, so I thought we were good to go. But then his team spotted a recently published award-winning graphic novel with the same name (how had I missed that?) and then said maybe he didn’t like “Spinning” after all; it suggested being stuck in one place, not moving forward as my character does. So, the hunt was on for a replacement.

Titles are hard. Sometimes the title of a story will come to me immediately but often I struggle. My short story “Stuck,” finally published last year, went through multiple complete re-writes and eight different titles before settling into its final version. My debut novel had two working titles while I was writing it, but both were rejected by the publisher of that book. We tossed alternatives back and forth a few times before agreeing on “When It’s Over.” It took me a while to adapt to the change and to remember to type the apostrophe. But I came to like it.

This time around the process was harder. With “Spinning” off the table, I was stumped. I sought input from two of my beta readers who had seen early drafts, and from my writing critique partners. They offered suggestions; some I liked, others I wasn’t sure about, but none met with my editor’s approval. “Turning Around” too flat. “Going Mobile” meh. “Out of the Wreckage” too on the nose. I combed through the manuscript hunting for phrases that might resonate. “She’s Got This” I thought perhaps—but discovered two recent publications with that name. What about “The Moment It Changes” my editor proposed. Nah, I said.  

A few weeks later, I received an email saying their team was approaching a consensus: “Unyielding.” They like the power of a one-word title, he said. And “Unyielding” was intriguing and could refer to a number of characters and situations in the novel. Unyielding? I didn’t like it at all. I ran it by a couple of friends. We agreed it felt negative, conveying rigidity and stubbornness. I turned to the Thesaurus. Other synonyms for unyielding were more positive: “Resolute” or “Steadfast”. What about those? I rushed off a hasty response.

My editor patiently gave me a little tutorial on titles. “A title is meant to appeal to the person who has never read the book, and has no vested interest in doing so,” he explained. “The author and the author’s friends are often in the least beneficial position to come up with a title.” He explained that no title will mean the same thing to all people, and that a title is not a summary or the representation of the plot. It’s meant to be intriguing, to make people pause and wonder what the story is about. My novel has characters who sometimes behave in rigid or intractable ways, and that makes them human. A title that only focuses on the good that wins out in the end, he told me, gives short shrift to the complex story you’ve crafted.

Okay, I thought, that makes sense. But I still didn’t like “Unyielding.” I went back to the Thesaurus. Not an online version, but the giant tome I refer to constantly, the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, with over a thousand pages of synonyms, antonyms, cross reference links, sample phrases, and “word toolkit” side bars. I came up with “Unswerving.”

And they said “Yes!”

So “Unswerving” it is. I’m still getting used to it. It doesn’t yet easily roll off my tongue. Like a mother, I imagine, adjusting to a child who wishes to change their given name. It takes a while. But my novel’s pronouns remain it/its, so there’s that.