The Angst of Finding a Great Book Title
A good writing friend says she can’t begin a story without a title. Even if that title changes, it forms a focus for what she’ll write. I’m the opposite. Titles are a struggle for me—I am part pantser (learning what I am writing about only as I write more of it) so the meaning of my work is not often apparent when I begin.
Like Joan Didion so famously said, I write to know what I think. But even more than that: I write to know what I feel about something. Why it matters.
I had the mistaken idea that short pieces, compared to books, were easier to title. I’m newly enamored with flash fiction, and I took several online classes with author Beth Gilstrap, as a relief from final revisions on my novel. Beth, well-published and generous to her students, volunteered to survey her writer friends on Twitter and get their two cents on title creation. It was reassuring to me that, despite years of experience, many still struggle.
Magic or mystery, how a title comes, some said.
Others, like my buddy above, know their titles at the start. They write the piece to make sense of its title.
Many only know their title on revision—it’s grabbed from the finished story, a line that illustrates the story’s meaning.
I liked this approach for short pieces, but I have war scars from my publishing history with book titles. Rarely did I submit a title that ended up on the published book. Once, the publisher’s marketing department got involved, and the title was (to me) ridiculous, not at all what I’d hoped for. But they did know their job: that book became their year’s bestseller.
My upcoming novel was stuck in title limbo for months. I’d revised and revised, my agent finally gave it the thumbs up, and we were ready to submit to publishers. Then I got the title email: she had concerns. OUTLAWS (the title I created and loved) came from the bad-ass glory of my three female narrators, all heroes in their own way by the story’s end. They sidestepped some social and legal rules, they won their battles for the most part, and I wanted to honor them with this Thelma and Louise badge of a title (even though they all live fairly happily after).
Nope. Editors would be confused, my agent said. They’d think Western. Gun slingers.
I wrote back that OUTLAWS was tongue-in-cheek, my hat tip to the female heroic nature. Society’s outcasts who dare or die, and win our hearts.
My agent wasn’t having it.
Before we could send out on submission—and it had been several years of work, so I was more than ready—the manuscript needed a new name. I was to research (again!) comp titles and come up with fifteen original possibilities to replace OUTLAWS.
I ranted for a few days (a week?), ate too much ice cream, then got to work. Truthfully, I knew I needed to upgrade my title skills. If only to pass any tips to others who also struggle.
A writing buddy suggested I try freewriting on the themes of my book. Surely, I knew them? But I didn’t. Even after ten years of writing and revising, getting an agent to represent it, getting great blurbs, a book’s meaning can still be a mystery to the writer herself.
Not knowing this embarrassed me. I slunk back to my laptop, asking myself: OK, hotshot, what actually happens in this story? What does that happening mean to the three women characters?
I never told my friend how much I wrote and rewrote, trying to get past my own limited understanding of this novel and put myself in a reader’s shoes just enough to answer to that dreaded theme question. I can teach others how to find themes, I easily locate them in books I love, but trying to see my own manuscript afresh, like a first-time reader, was tough.
I sweated through it. I came up with some cool (to me) realizations.
The story was about women who became heroes despite themselves (which I had kinda already known, Thelma and Louise style).
I wanted to show how women save others.
These characters learn the surprising truth that we often save ourselves because we save others first.
I wanted to explore the concept of “found family”—the tribe we discover outside of the one we’re born into, as we surpass our history and legacy. My three main characters: an artist in her twenties, an indie musician in her thirties, and a mother and Search & Rescue worker in her forties. Against their better judgments, the three lives become entwined. Within this new tribe, they are able to heal longings they’ve each had.
Search & Rescue, the older narrator’s occupation, fascinates me, and I caught the metaphor of it as I was working on this title search: that search for ourselves and how we rescue others in the process.
If for nothing else, this opened my eyes much wider to the story itself and what it could offer others. That was beyond valuable.
When I sent my agent the fifteen draft titles, she gave a thumbs-up to the last one I had dreamed up: A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue. And so it became.
I wanted to sit with this title for a few weeks, while my agent did her magic, and see how it felt. Did it say everything I wanted about the story? I spent time reading back through the chapters, imagining that title on the top of each page in the finished book. I asked her to add “A Novel” as a subtitle, so there wouldn’t be confusion: This could, conceivably, be a nonfiction guide for Search & Rescue workers.
A fun part of my internet research—my way to pass on learning to other writers—was to sort through sites that offered title steps. Here are a few. (If the links don’t work, google the site and search it for “book title,”)
Reedsy’s Book-Title Generator lets you pick your genre and browse thousands of potential titles.
Writer’s Digest offered seven steps to nail the perfect title.
I always love Jane Friedman’s sound advice and her suggestions for finding a great title.
Just for fun, Goodreads has an astonishing survey of the best book titles they’ve found.
The best tips from everyone I talked with or read:
Keep it short—five words or less is ideal—and don’t be afraid to start long and see how far you can trim down. Get rid of any extra words (especially ones that don't convey image--the, and, an, a, etc.). Longer titles are hard on library cataloging systems. Short titles fit more compactly on a book's spine, in larger type too.
Gatekeeper Press suggested using character, plot, setting, theme, or a stand-out quote from the text to dream up titles. They gave these great examples for fiction: Crazy Rich Asians (character), Beautiful Ruins (setting), The Night Circus (plot), All the Light That We Cannot See (theme), and Ready Player One (quote).
Although titles cannot be copyrighted, be sure to check your title idea with an online search. A friend told me an agent rejected her manuscript many years ago because another book by the same title had just been published. Don’t make it easy for someone to say no.
Make sure your book conveys the genre of your book and its tone. Karen Banes, in a post for The Writing Cooperative, talks about “how often fantasy books adopt a similar type of title structure: The Lord of The Rings, A Game of Thrones, The Wizard of Oz. Horror books often use a single word title such as Misery, Frankenstein, or It.” Do your homework and make sure yours clearly fits.
And it’s not just in the submission process that a great title matters. Your book is hopefully going to be around for a lot of years, once it gets published, and you, the proud author, want feel pleased with what you’ve chosen each time you see it or someone says how much they loved the story.
A word to nonfiction writers: If you're writing a nonfiction book, go for the reader benefit. What's a reader going to take away--what new skills or understanding? Use benefit-oriented phrases: How to . . . , 25 Ways to . . . , Secrets to . . . , or Master . . . . (For more about this, check out business-book blogger Ginny Carter and her articles on nonfiction.)
Clever with words and writing fiction or memoir? Try for a twist or double meaning: The End of Your Life Book Club. New Ways to Kill Your Mother. Flip your image or its normal meaning: Running with Scissors. Swamplandia. Present a problem in your title: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
Study good titles of published books and see why they sold. You'll laugh, you'll disagree, but you may also learn!
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Try one or more of these five ideas to help your creative self dream up the best possible title. I tried them all, with varying results, but learned something from each. Don’t discard potential titles that surface while you’re still brainstorming. Keep them around and live with them for a while, until you’re sure. Run ideas by your writing friends.
Comb your manuscript for key images or words. Read through your chapters and highlight or sticky-note words or images that repeat. Begin doodling or playing with them on a big sheet of paper and try different combinations.
Choose one of these images or words and write a poem around it. Does part of one line of your poem stand out? Could it become a book title with some additional tweaking?
Like I did above, examine your book's meaning, its theme—not what it's about, but what it means to you, the characters, the reader. Any images or words come from that? Play with them.
Look closely at your characters' inner and outer dilemmas—and if memoir or prescriptive (how-to) nonfiction, imagine narrator or reader. Could their conflict be part of the title? How about their name or occupation?
Is there an unexpected twist in the plot that could give you a title? (I’m thinking of Lisa Lutz’s wonderful thriller, The Passenger, and how the meaning of that title was super clear at the end, in a very surprising way.) How could a big turning point in the plot become part of the book title?