Which comes first: the title or the book? by Donna Andrews

JENN: In March, I was lucky enough to attend Honolulu Havoc, Left Coast Crime's annual conference. My panel was named Crazy Crimes: Screw Ups to Die For. Well, didn't that prove to be true when our moderator went MIA! We renamed the panel Mystery of the Missing Moderator. Luckily, we had Donna Andrews at the helm and she gamely took over the double duty of moderator and panelist and with her usual wit, she led us into a lively discussion about writing humorous mysteries. She writes one of my very favorite series and I'm delighted to have her visit us today!

DONNA: With the launch this week of Gone Gull, the twenty-first book in my Meg Langslow series from Minotaur, I once again expect to hear a familiar question: do you think of a good title and then write a book to go along with it, or do you come up with a book idea and then figure out the title.

And the answer is: yes.

Or, less cryptically, it all depends on the book.

When I was about to submit my first book, I hadn't yet come up with the perfect title. The best I'd come up with was Three Weddings and an Undisclosed Number of Homicides. I called a friend who was good at this title thing, and asked her what she thought I should call it. Knowing that I had several projects in progress, she asked, “Is this for the murder mystery? The one with the peacocks?” Aha!  Murder with Peacocks!  And thus a title—and a series concept—was born.

All my books have birds in the titles. Often there are birds in the plot, but not always. The good thing is that unlike Sue Grafton, who will be up a creek if she wants to keep her series going after she hits Z is for whatever, I'm not likely to run out of bird names to use in titles. Although it is an ongoing challenge to come up with good titles—prefererably punning titles—that include a bird name, please not only me but also my editor and my publisher's marketing department, and last but very definitely not least, have some connection to a mystery plot that I think will work.

Sometimes the title comes first. For example, I knew for a year or two beforehand that the book in which my heroine was pregnant would be called Stork Raving Mad. No real storks were required, of course, which gave my plotting more freedom than usual.

Sometimes the plot comes first. I came up with a Christmas mystery plot in which someone was playing pranks in the various churches in the small fictitious town of Caerphilly, Virginia, where the series is set. Pranks that were non-lethal, caused no real permanent damage, but played havoc with the busy schedule of services, classes, pageants, and social events churches have at holiday time. When I came up with a good title—Duck the Halls—all I had to do was make sure that one of the pranks involved unleashing an impressive number of ducks in a church.

With Gone Gull I knew I wanted to set a mystery in the residential craft center owned by Meg's grandmother Cordelia. But I puzzled, at first, over how to bring Meg's grandfather into the picture. Cordelia and Grandfather were only briefly a couple; they get along very badly in ways that I find enormously entertaining (and hope my readers agree).  I knew the book would be much more fun if I could involve Grandfather. Aha!  The craft center is located in a picturesque small town on the edge of the Blue Ridge, surrounded by wide expanses of forest and mountain. The sort of place where Grandfather, a zoologist and ardent environmentalist, could be in pigheaded pursuit of some rare and endangered species. But what species?

At about this point, the title Gone Gull sprang into my brain.  Perfect! No, wait. The craft center is in the mountains—I can't move it because it already appeared in another book. Gulls live at the seashore, right? I did some quick research. No, gulls are not exclusively shore birds. They often live far inland, especially in places where they find good pickings, like garbage dumps and mall parking lots. The grey gull, a South American species, has its breeding grounds not merely inland, but in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, the dryest non-polar desert in the world. I can have my gulls, even in the mountains.

Okay. Gone Gull it was.

I try not to get too invested in a title until I'm sure Marketing approves. Later this year—okay, October 24, 2017, if you really want to know—I have a Christmas mystery coming out. I was originally going to call it Jingle Bills. Marketing wasn't crazy about that, and I had to admit it didn't have the pizazz of Gone Gull, so I was delighted when Marketing suggested calling the book How the Finch Stole Christmas instead. Of course, that did mean I had to go back and rework my plot to finchify it, since there were no actual finches in my first synopsis. But the changes I made ultimately improved the plot.

Someone once asked me if it wasn't a pain having to figure out a way to work in a particular bird in order to justify a catchy title. Sometimes, if I'm in a grouchy mood, it feels that way. Most of the time, though, I just consider it a part of the challenge. The balancing act. I try to write a book that balances mystery and humor. The elements of the plot that surround the requisite murder often pull the book in a darker direction. The brainstorming I have to do to make my title work the the book often beefs up the humorous side of the plot, and helps it achieve the right balance.  And even on those days when I think it's a pain—well, I'm sure poets who write traditional haiku sometimes find the seventeen-syllable limit a pain. It's a pain that makes their art what it is.

And now I will return to the current draft--which involves graverobbing and a thirty-year-old jewel robbery and is traveling under the title of Toucan Keep a Secret. And there will be a toucan, and a whole lot of secrets, and both will play a humorous but integral role in the plot. I keep telling myself that, because I'm at that part of the writing process where every creative decision I've made seems highly suspect if not disasterous, and only the fact that I've already done this twenty-six times before makes me think I can pull it off.

So maybe this is the right moment to remind myself that I felt the same way about Gone Gull about a year ago, and that seems to have come out okay.  I hope if you get a chance to read it, you'll agree.

Gone Gull is available in hardback, as an ebook, and as an unabridged audiobook read by the award-winning Bernadette Dunne. And in honor of the latter, just mention in a comment`—here or on Facebook—that you're an audio book fan, and I'll enter you in a random drawing to win the CD-set of Gone Gull.

All right, Reds, chime in, what's comes first for you -- the title or the book?