Common Nonsense

Almost everyone has in mind writing a book someday. The assumption by so many people that a book is easy to write—if they could only find the time—is irritating to writers who actually write books. Although there is no evidence one is any harder to do than the other, people who wouldn't think of operating on a friend for a brain tumor have no hesitation about trying to write a book. Most of them don't actually want to write anything, they just want to be authors.

I like being a writer but I also like writing. The only time I feel in control of my life is when I am sitting at my typewriter—computer now—typing.

This book was three quarters written when the publisher, Peter Osnos, started pressing me for a title. Coming up with the name for a book has never been one of my strengths. It doesn't seem important because the name of a book doesn't have anything to do with whether a book sells well or not. The title only seems like a good one after it becomes a best-seller. When John Steinbeck submitted his book during the great depression of the thirties, it seems unlikely that the publisher thought The Grapes of Wrath was a title that would become one of the best known of all time.

I tried to think of a name for this book. There is no orderly process to go through thinking of a name for a book. If you're naming a child, there are long lists of names you can look through. It's more difficult naming a book than naming a baby because of the multitude of options. Just to give you some idea, every child's name there ever was is the potential name for a book.

As my brain flipped through possibilities, it seemed as if all the good book names had been taken. I started making notes of titles I'd like to have for this book and in every case, someone had thought of it first: War and Peace, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Catch 22, Cry the Beloved Country, Heart of Darkness, The Joy of Cooking, Gone With the Wind, Never So Young Again, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Brave New World, The Naked and the Dead, Darkness at Noon, Tender Is the Night, The Postman Always Rings Twice, From Here to Eternity. Now those are great names for books. What could we come up with to match one of those in the unlikely event this becomes a classic?

We ended up with Common Nonsense. I cannot remember whose idea it was. Five of us were sitting around a table and it may have been mine. At first glance it's pretty good. It's short and mildly clever being a play on a cliché. As the others around the table agreed that Common Nonsense would be the name of the book, the problem with me giving the name Common Nonsense to a book I wrote, came to me. Why am I saying the material in it is both common and nonsense? I guess the answer is that the book comprises 154 essays about a wide variety of subjects and is a reflection of a flawed brain with a capacity for being interested in more things than it can comprehend. We need fewer mysteries in our lives though and holding up any subject, no matter how trivial or how profound, to the strong light of day, takes the mystery out of it. But we could have called it 154 Essays by Andy Rooney. That would have been a good, straightforward name for the book. Making my name part of the title would have been a trick way of getting it mentioned more prominently than if the book was called 154 Essays and then, down below in smaller type, "By Andy Rooney." Because of the exposure my name gets on the television broadcast 60 Minutes, its prominence in the title is considered to be a sales tool.

We'll see.