How To Title Your Story

Writing Titles is Hard

Like … “I wish I could outsource this to someone smarter than me” hard.

I am by no means a master of titling things, but the very fact that I consider myself so terrible at it is why I have striven (strived? Strought? Now nothing looks right.) to find some keys to properly naming a story.

This comes about after attempting to name a series of flash fiction and short stories.

The Trick

Good names typically come from one of three different aspects of your story.

Your Twist
Your Hook
Your Theme

Example

Let’s say you’ve got a flash fic about a witch who loves to bake. Her name is Lucy Alvarez. And she … umm … enters a baking contest but her rival replaces all her normal apples with poison apples. She doesn’t notice till the end, when it’s too late to change it, and it turns out the judge is a unicorn so the poison is neutralized before it can be eaten. Lucy wins the contest, and our villain ends up punished with peeling poison apples so that Lucy can make more pies.

Or something. That’s lame, I know, but I’m on a time budget here and didn’t want to use one of my real-world examples because reasons.

Great Titles

Great titles are intriguing and catchy and indicative of the story.

“Lucy Alvarez” is a boring title. It doesn’t make me want to read it because there’s no spark there.

“Lucy’s Adventures In Baking” is at least a little more descriptive? But still boring. Unless your readers already know who Lucy is, you’re driving readers away instead of drawing them in.

Twist

A TWIST title would NOT be “Unicorns are immune to poison”.

That would GIVE AWAY the twist and ruin the story. Instead, what you want is something that’s like … it’s like a shared in-joke for all of the people who know what the twist is. It’s a gift for the reader AFTER they’ve already read the story.

“Pure Poison” might be too subtle, but it hints at the twist rather nicely. Unicorns neutralize poison with their purity — a fact you’d want to make very clear in the story in order for the title to work. It also hints at the anger of the villain and (of course) the poison in the apple.

“Poison Apples” kind of works? But it feels very boring and could apply to rather a lot of stories, couldn’t it?

Hook

The HOOK is the reason your story makes a reader’s perk up (so to speak). It’s always right up at the front of the story, and is often the spark that made you want to write the story in the first place.

“A Very Witchly Baking Contest” would be an example of this. We indicate the witch AND the baking, thus drawing a parallel that isn’t very common and intriguing two different kinds of readers.

Theme

With the punishment at the end of the story, I assume the theme is something along the lines of “what goes around comes around”, so titles like “Karma’s Poison” or “Karma’s Apples” might work.

(Though I feel like Karma’s Poison should be used for something a lot more epic than this little ditty).

Summary

When you find yourself grasping for a title, try analyzing these three aspects of your story and looking for something that feels right to you. It may not always help, but I’ve found it to be a great comfort once I realized that sharing stories with other people often meant they were stuck with the title I gave them, even if that title was pretty awful.

My Favorites

My favorite titles are typically the Hook titles, which is reflected in the fact that I just LOVE story hooks. Holly Lisle favors Twist titles, which work out very well for her. Some of the Saucy Ink folks write with moral values firmly in hand and their Theme titles reflect this careful choice.

THE TAXIDERMIST was a hook title. The hook for the story was the main character being a taxidermist for magical creatures (I took advantage of the fact that the short story collection was called “The Unicorns” in order to imply the magical bit.

LOVE’S CHAMPION, on the other hand, was actually a Twist title. (Hint: Aphrodite is the goddess of love).

Your Turn

What types of titles are your favorites? Can you think of better titles than the examples I gave for Lucy’s story?

Related posts:

Story Dissection and Evaluation
Saucy Chronicles 1: The Unicorns Now Available!
Holly Lisle’s Short Story Anthology