Titles Are Strange Things

CAIM wasn't always called CAIM.

For a long time, it was simply The Cloak.

The idea began with a question:

What would women do with an invisibility cloak?

And, more specifically, would they use it differently than men?

That question first became a poem.

Then the poem wouldn't leave me alone.

There was something underneath it I hadn't finished thinking about. Invisibility could mean power, certainly. But for a woman, it could also mean safety. Escape. Freedom. The ability to move through a world without being watched, followed, judged, desired, recognized, or afraid.

So the idea grew.

The poem became the beginning of something larger, and eventually The Cloak became a novel.

Except The Cloak had a problem.

It was a perfectly accurate title.

And a terribly unoriginal one.

Other books had already used it, and the further I got into my own story, the less it seemed to describe what the book was actually becoming anyway.

Because the cloak was still there.

But the story was no longer only about the cloak.

A Circle Around the Story

As the novel developed, I became interested in an old form of protective prayer involving a circle drawn around the body.

That sent me researching.

And somewhere down that particular rabbit hole, I found a word:

CAIM.

A caim is a protective circle, associated particularly with Celtic Christian prayer: a circle of protection imagined or physically traced around oneself or another person while praying for safekeeping.

I stopped.

There are moments in writing when you find a word and recognize it before you've completely explained to yourself why.

This was one of those.

CAIM.

Four letters.

A circle.

Protection.

The story had started with invisibility, but underneath invisibility had always been the question of safety.

What would it mean for a woman to move through the world unseen?

What would she escape?

What could she witness?

What could she do?

And what would happen if the thing that protected her also allowed her to see what had happened to other women?

Suddenly The Cloak felt like the name of an object.

CAIM felt like the name of the story.

Sometimes I know a title before I know much else.

Sometimes I spend months calling a manuscript something that amounts to Fine, We'll Call You This Until You Tell Me Your Real Name.

And sometimes the right title is already hiding inside the story.

You just haven't written far enough to find it yet.

That's what happened with CAIM.

I thought I was writing about a cloak.

Then I thought I was writing about invisibility.

But the deeper I went, the more the story became about protection, witnessing, circles, women, inherited stories, and the strange ways we carry what happened before us.

The title changed because the story changed.

Or maybe the story simply became enough of itself to tell me what it had been about all along.

I still love The Cloak.

It was the first name.

The working name.

The name of the door I walked through.

But it wasn't the name of the place on the other side.

That came later.

CAIM.

Sometimes naming a story isn't deciding what to call it.

It is waiting for it to introduce itself.