Cat with a Title

Writers have told me more than once that I’m “good” with titles. I guess that means I can come up with titles that are both catchy and meaningful. Last post we discussed taking cues from our marketing friends, in order to become better writers. Finding the best title for your work is another way the media can inform our writing.

Writing Tip for Today: Let’s examine the ways finding a good title can help your reader and help your writing.

Look to Movies, Poetry and Songs

If you can capture the concept, mood or theme of your work with a one-liner from a popular movie, poem or song, your audience can instantly grasp what your work is going to be about. This helps readers choose what they want to read. A book’s cover is important for first impressions too, but your title should evoke the theme, concept or mood of the work. Your “promise” to readers in the title should deliver what readers expect. Look for titles in poems, which are usually distilled versions of a concept, or turn a commercial’s pitch on its head. Songs might prove a bit trickier due to copyright laws, (many song lyrics will require a fee if you use them in the BODY of your work) but if you use a song lyric as your title, you can get away with it. That’s because you can’t copyright a title—song or novel. For nonfiction writers such as memoirists, be aware that a poetic title almost certainly requires a plain, to-the-point subtitle.

Try it On

If your title eludes you, try free associating with a few key ideas in the work. For instance, I completed a novel about an odd boy whose brother suffocated in a chest while playing hide and seek. I tried out dozens of titles, ranging from the original working title, HIDING FROM FLOYD, to the one I go with now, CLOSURE. The working title originated from the hurricane called Floyd that hit the Southern United States in 1999 (yes, I’m still working on it!). Keep a list of possible titles and add to it whenever you have an idea or hear or read something that reflects your work. It may take time, but this method has usually paid off for me when I’ve been stuck.

Metaphors Make the Writer

A bonus of this exercise of listing possible titles is that by searching for the perfect title, you’re also telling yourself what your story is really about. Many writers—especially first-time novelists—struggle to sum up their novel in a single sentence, agonize over synopses and summaries and can’t readily describe the central ideas in the work. By experimenting with titling lists and searching art forms such as movies, poetry and song lyrics, your ability to create a solid pitch for your novel will almost certainly improve. You’ll hit upon the story’s core conflict and be confident of the ideas you’re trying to get across. And when you find that perfect title, your readers will be drawn like moths to a flame.

What are a couple of your favorite book titles?