The art of a good title
A title could be one word, or it could be ten. Whatever it is, it needs to be the ideal representative for your book. Not only does it need, in some way, to reflect the content that is contained within that book, it also needs to sound, well, good.
The art of a good title can be a tricky one to get right. Sometimes, a story you’re writing just conjures up a particular feeling or image that makes it easy to name. Other times, you might well go through dozens of different titles before finally settling on one – and you still might not be entirely happy with it.
I think part of the difficulty of finding a good title is the difficulty in defining what your story actually is in the first place. If you know exactly what you’re hoping to achieve with your writing and have a clear direction from the start, it stands to reason that it would be much easier to come up with a name than if you started with a vague idea and just hoped something concrete would eventually coalesce.
Of course, you could always come up with a title first and go from there. This is something I’m sure many of us are familiar with from school and all those ‘fun’ assignments to write an essay on “What I did with my Summer Holiday” or write a poem called “Autumn Leaves”. It isn’t always the best method and can lead to you forcing something to fit a title, but sometimes a clever, interesting title can act as a great starting point for something properly good.
Choosing a great title is also important because naming a book is slightly like naming a child. OK, it’s not really like that, but it can feel like it at the time. The title is the name your book will be known by forevermore, and if it turns out to be the wrong choice, it will bug you for the rest of your life. And, unlike with naming a child, there is no emergency change-the-name-by-deed-poll option available with books. It has to be right the first time.
However fraught with pitfalls the naming process might be, though, there is something immensely satisfying about landing on the perfect title for your book. It’s like things really start to fall into place after that point, no matter how much more work you still have to do. Your book has a name now. It’s a thing. You can talk about it and refer to it as something other than ‘the book’. You know what it is.
How do you go about choosing the perfect title for your novels?
