I am writing the Book With No Name. It will have one, I hope, at some point between now and the moment it hits the shelves, but for now it is the Book With No Name. I finished it last year, and the last twelve months have been mostly spent writing it all over again. I am so familiar with my book, I could read it aloud to you without pausing to look down at the page. But still it has no name.
They say writing a book is like giving birth, and whilst I laugh at the notion that rewrites are anywhere close to the earth-shattering pain and joy of having a child, there are similarities between the process of creating a novel, and a pregnancy. A very long pregnancy, in my case. A pregnancy of elephantine proportions. Parents differ in their approach to their bumps: some like to name their babies prior to arrival; others draw up a list of names and wait to see which suits; a final group choose to wait still further, until a name emerges which suits the character of their now-two-day-old child. I am in the first camp. The boys’ names were chosen early on in pregnancy, and assigned once the babies stopped switching positions, and we did the same with the girls a year later. Some how, by giving them names, I felt I knew what to expect. Even those parents who don’t choose a name will often allocate a moniker: bean, pumpkin, bear… Names and labels are comforting to us. They let us know what we’re dealing with, and enable discussions with others, where the subject is in no doubt. Names are necessary.
The Book With No Name is saved on my computer as ‘Book one’. Book one – first draft; book one – second draft, and so on, and so forth. Saved in a neighbouring folder is book two, just across the road from book three. They are both in embryonic stages, but they have one significant difference: they have names. Book two is Do No Harm. Book three is The Choice. It is just book one which has no name. No name to announce to friends who have heard about my book deal; no name to make it feel more real to me; no name to slip into my italicised bio at the end of my columns and articles. The Book With No Name.
I’ve tried to choose one, but nothing feels right. My editor reassures me that something will leap out at me as I finish the book (for the fourth time), and I sit at my desk and stare at the words on the screen, willing a pithy phrase or just-so word to make itself known.
But it doesn’t. And so I continue writing the Book With No Name.
Clare Mackintosh is a feature writer columnist and novelist. Her first book, which still has no name, will be published in 2014 by Sphere.