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| photo credit: Sylvie Rosokoff |
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Erin Swan's website.
Titles are not easy for me. This was especially true when it came to this novel. Coming up with a short story title feels simpler, because it needs to cover less. For a novel, however, the title must encompass characters, plotlines, themes: everything I’ve crammed into the book. It took me a while to land on Walk the Vanished Earth, especially because the story covers so many characters and settings and timelines.
When I had just a short story that was only beginning to dream of being a novel, I called it Aftermath, because at that point it was fixated on my character Bea’s trauma and its apocalyptic aftermath. As I churned out more pages, spinning into other time periods and eventually launching my characters to Mars, I chose the title This Infant Nation, which is a phrase my bison hunter Samson says towards the end. I thought this captured what I was trying to say about America, what it has been and what it might yet become. This title, however, didn’t roll off the tongue quite right.
Once I began working with my agents (I have two who collaborate brilliantly as co-agents), we decided the book needed a new name. After writing my character Michelangelo on the Caribbean Sea in the year 2030, I noticed a line he said that included “vanished earth.” This seems like a start. There is a lot of walking and a great deal about the journey in the book, and so eventually I combined these ideas into Walk the Vanished Earth. The grandiosity of this title used to embarrass me when I said it aloud, but I have come to embrace it and can now proclaim it with pride. I think it captures one of the book’s big ideas, that even if...[read on]
Q&A with Erin Swan.
--Marshal Zeringue
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