Once upon a time (because that’s how all good stories start), the title of my work in progress was: LATEST BOOK. I considered submitting it that way. It was ironic. Poignant. It begged a deeper question of philosophical importance. Maybe.
Or maybe the truth was: While I am rarely a victim of traditional writer’s block, I am a frequent victim of title paralysis (or TP, for short). As a result, I once consorted with the most dubious of online resources for book title ideas. I regret if this post only adds to the pile.
Upon my first experience of being TP’d, I Googled “title generator.” Doing so, I got a handful of websites that offered helpful algorithms for generating book titles. It is really quite simple. They ask a stymied writer to insert two adjectives, two verbs ending in -ing, and two plural nouns. They don’t specifically tell you to use words that have anything to do with your novel, but I dug deep and got clever like that.
My WIP was a Young Adult romance with thriller elements, set in a cold Minnesota winter. I typed in: cold, dangerous, shifting, helping, friends, enemies. After that, I hit “title me,” and the site shot out ten possibilities. Ten! That was eleven more than I had!
I immediately took the title generator’s advice. At that point my manuscript was titled: DANGEROUS FRIENDS BY COLD ENEMIES. Catchy, right?
Apparently not.
Next up: the Wordle technique. Wordle.net is a website where you can paste large blocks of text from your novel, or even your entire manuscript, into its search window. You hit “Go!” and the website analyzes your most-often appearing words and gives you something that looks like this:
You’re then supposed to gain inspiration from those most frequently used words (those appearing the biggest) to come up with a killer title. Got it! Based on my Wordle, I should have titled the manuscript after the main characters: EMMIE AND MAX, which wasn’t horrible. There are plenty of successful books on the market that have done just that. (Maybe they all got TP and used the Wordle technique, too?)
I have to think every Wordle will have the characters’ names come up most often, so I went to the next layer of word frequency in my Wordle and re-titled my manuscript: LIKE GOING BACK. After looking at it for a few minutes, I decided to be more avant-garde and go with BACK LIKE GOING. It didn’t make any sense or say anything about the actual story, but it was intriguing so the title page of my manuscript sat like that until . . .
I was wasting time on Facebook one day (a rare occurrence), and I came upon this little gem of a meme:
Huzzah! BLUE POT ROAST! I could see it at the top of the best seller lists already.
As I waited to hear back from my agent, I remembered that Biblical allusions have always been a good source of book titles (e.g., Harper Lee’s title Go Set a Watchman is a line from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah) But then, I don’t remember Moses, Abraham, or any of the prophets trudging through a Minnesota snow storm like my YA characters.
Classic literature is another good source for allusions. I considered alluding to Romeo and Juliet, another YA about a poorly matched couple, and called my manuscript A HOOKUP IN VERONA. I changed the name of the high school to Verona High. Then I changed the setting from Minnesota to Verona, California. So I lost all the snow.
For a while there seemed to be a trend with adding the word “wife” or “daughter” to the title, e.g., The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Murderer’s Daughters, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. I like that. Daughter gives a nice warm feeling to an otherwise cold novel. I considered going that route and changed it to THE SNOW PLOW DRIVER’S DAUGHTER.
I brought back winter. I didn’t know anything about California, anyway.
“Diary” is another popular word to create a title: Bridget Jones’s Diary, The Princess Diaries, The Nanny Diaries, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian …. I deleted the snow plow driver and typed out: THE COLD AND MISUNDERSTOOD YOUTH DIARIES.
At that point I was getting a little testy. None of those titles were working. I’m a fan of puns, and I’d used puns for titles in my first YA series. I considered going with: MR. & MISS UNDERSTANDING.
Gah! Scrap it. Tear it up.
This continued into a phase of intense stomping around the house, followed by the most desperate act of asking my husband for suggestions. This was, of course, followed by me telling him to never speak to me of book titles again.
Finally, I re-read my manuscript. It had been some time. This act led me to the system I use now for avoiding TP, which is basically the same thing as the title generator algorithms but with a more sizable list of words and, of course, the human element:
Pull out the most prominent nouns from the story. Character names, for sure, but also place names, modes of transportation, emotions, geographical landmarks, and the like. Get a healthy list of no less than eight words, though ten-to-twelve is ideal. Do the same thing for verbs and adjectives. For my story, the list might look like: Emmie, Max, Minnesota, winter, high school, police station, hockey, game, drugs, parents, secrets, loved, cold, dishonest, dangerous, punishing, running, playing, hiding, etc. etc.
Then work on putting them together in various combinations of noun + noun (e.g., Hunger Games); adjective + noun (e.g., Gone Girl); noun + [and the] noun (e.g., Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone); verb + adjective (e.g., Running Scared). You get the idea. For my example, the title could be HIDING FROM WINTER, or LOVE RUNS COLD
Another favorite option is to come up with a bit of dialogue using the words from my list, for example, “It’s a cold and dangerous game you’re playing, and I’m not talking about hockey.” Then I plant that line in the manuscript and build the title around that: A COLD AND DANGEROUS GAME.
All in all, since using this technique, I’ve had much better success avoiding the dreaded TP. I hope you do, too. Let me know your title woes and triumphs in the comments below.
About Anne Greenwood Brown
Anne Greenwood Brown (@AnneGBrown) writes Young Adult ("YA") fiction. She is represented by Jacqueline Flynn of Joelle Delbourgo Associates. She is the author of the LIES BENEATH trilogy (Random House/Delacorte Press), GIRL LAST SEEN (co-author/ Albert Whitman & Co.), and COLD HARD TRUTH (Albert Whitman, April 2018). Anne was a proud contributor to Writer Unboxed's AUTHOR IN PROGRESS as well as a presenter at the 2016 UnConference. She also writes adult romance under the pen name "A. S. Green."
Brilliant and perfectly timed. Thank you!
Hope it helps!
I have a bad case of TP at the moment, so I relate.
My WIP (historical women’s fiction) was called The Oak Lovers, which made perfect sense given that the book is about a couple, and the man is a painter who often pairs his trees like lovers. I have since rewritten the novel in one point of view, though, making it her story, not their story. It is currently titled Landscape of a Bonded Heart. I like the double meaning of ‘bonded’ and the art reference. A solid working title, at least.
My “title generator” was a brainstorming session with several beta readers who know both me and my book well.
I solve TP by making almost everything I write into a series. Also, I am unpublished, so I don’t have the time constraints or deadlines to deal with, so I can let titles ruminate in my head for a while. With a series, all I have to figure out is the subtitle for each novel, but those usually arrive as I write. Some sort of joke in my head or a culmination of an idea.
Examples:
Book 1 – The Owerly Curse
Book 2 – The Owerly Curse: Dogs of War
Book 3 – The Owerly Curse: Tides of Time
Yes, I like the little jokes or puns. In my trilogy about murderous mermaids, two of the three titles are puns. My husband had pushed for “Fish and Chicks.” That, however, did NOT happen.
Loved this! I think all of us can relate to a discouraging case of TP.
Usually, my title jumps out at me when I reach the halfway or so mark of the first draft. This time, though, it’s being very elusive. Thanks for the reassurance that it’ll turn up eventually, even if it takes some searching!
Me too. I start with a clever title like “Fiction Project 2014” or “Book 1” and wait for the Real Title to suggest itself.
Very funny and very timely post for me, Anne. Thank you. I am ghostwriting a medical memoir for a retired spinal neurosurgeon who also suffered through much adversity in his youth. We’ve got the main title, a play on spine, but have suffered from TP now for over a year on the subtitle. I will try your techniques here and see if they help. It’s agonizing :-)
Let me know how it goes!
Title woes? Oh, yes, I’ve always had those! Two of my unpublished novels have titles that already exist among published works, although I didn’t know that when I named my “babies”. I got both titles from lines in poems (T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson), so the ideas were already out in the world and fair game for other authors. On the one hand, it’s a bummer that the titles are taken. On the other, I found one of my favorite authors, Louise Penny, after reading her series that contained the book that had “my” title. In that regard, I gained more than I lost. :)
I had 60 e-mails but had to read your’s first! I am horrible at novel titles! For my own published book, after dropping several friends suggestions, and finding the few titles I did come up with, were already published books, I got desperate and went to my husband. Yeah, I know, but I did use what he gave me, I was that desperate, and so my title ended up being, “The Other Side of Hurt”. It is a Western romance thriller with Australians, and dogs as secondary characters. So you can understand my difficulty! Thanks for the great article!
Love this essay, Anne. Title Paralysis set in here when people started looking at one of my books for middle graders, “Saviors of the Bugle,” and saw the last word as “bulge,” then asked me–often–if it was a self-help weight loss book or a story about the Battle of the Bulge. Awkward dilemma. For the e-book, I asked the artist to do what she could to clear up the confusion. She incorporated a picture of a bugle into the title (although it wasn’t THAT KIND of bugle) and I learned to count my blessings because it could have been much worse.
Ha! I read it as “bulge,” too! What is with that???? Also, you lost me with that last bit. Is there more than one kind of bugle?
Yes, the newspaper kind. (Herald, Bugle, Call, etc.)
Hahahaha…. you had me at “TP!”
I’m using the word “Diaries” in my series title because the stories are in one first-person POV.
It’s certainly one of those things that’s “been done before,” but I (personally) still find it an appealing title.
It is a VERY good thing that titles can’t be copyrighted, because though I have had a title I liked for a long time (Pride’s Children), and back in the day when I got that from a verse in the Book of Job about ‘the children of pride,’ and it stuck (seven or eight years ago), AND I used that over and over because I was serializing the novel on my blog, AND I checked back then that though there were a number of books already out with ‘Children of Pride’ in some part of their title, it wasn’t until last week, right before publication, that I decided to do a quick search on Amazon.
Don’t ask me why. Beginner nerves.
And I found what, in retrospect, made perfect sense: there is another novel, published last December, called Pride’s Children. And it is the story of two gay men who adopt kids (I think – from the description – I didn’t look deeper).
And it was already way too late – that cover, with those words as title, had been finished and set in stone months ago.
So I published it that way anyway, and I hope that none of my friends get too confused. I know these things happen – but do ordinary readers?
PS My working title from the beginning was Resurrection! – until I realized that was ALREADY way too common.
TP – I get it. I’m going to have a bad case NEXT time after all this.
Your technique – of having the line that leads to the title somewhere in the book – so an alert reader gets a shock of recognition – is one of the advantages of being a writer: you can always go back and plant the line.
Oh, and I’m stealing THAT title: ‘Title Paralysis’ is a perfect description.
I’ve had my book title in mind from the beginning. But I love the exercise you recommend. It’s got me thinking…
A very helpful post, btw, which I’ll hold onto.
When all else fails, you can always to back to the words day, minute, hour, night, and the preposition of. So you have one word to put in: “Night of the Winter.” and so forth. They’re not book award-winning titles, but at least you have something to put on the title page at least until the publisher suggests a title.
I cringed as I read this wonderful post because it brought back memories of my last disastrous experience. After months of searching for a title, I settled on ‘Not Real’ because that was the nagging refrain my geriatric protagonist heard from his wife when he was suffering hallucinations. After I sent the story in, I realized I had typed “Not True” in the title field, instead of Not Real. It changed the meaning entirely! I must have been suffering from the same dementia that plagued my protagonist.
This made me laugh out loud! Thanks.
I originally called my WIP Conspiracy Theory and later changed it to The Cause of These Disturbances, which I borrowed from a 19th century Luddite text. All the chapter titles are taken from these old documents, which works with the events and characters of my novel.
It can be so difficult to come up with a great title, but as soon as you find the right one, you instantly know it. But on another note, a title generator site could make a great resource for writing prompts :)
Ha, I don’t think Lilac Udon is going to fly off the shelves!
In all seriousness, this post is great food for thought. The problem I have in coming up with titles is that the dreamy writer side of me wants the title to represent the book’s themes neatly and poetically, but the hard-nosed businesswoman side of me knows the purpose of a title is to sell the book.
The title is the first thing a potential reader sees or hears, so like the cover art it needs to (a) grab attention and (b) convey the genre and tone of the book in a way that appeals to the target audience. The Fault in Our Stars is a romantic title that evokes dramatic thoughts of Doom and Destiny, even if you’re not familiar with its Shakespearean origins. Gone Girl sounds creepy, The Hunger Games screams high-stakes action, and The Princess Diaries is a sparkly pink title that no tween girl could resist.
Lies Beneath is a great title because it feels spooky and alludes to What Lies Beneath, which is all about murder and drowning and revenge. Rather than following formulas of verbs + adjectives or colors + foodstuffs, a TP-bound writer might start by thinking in terms of imagery and connotation, and playing with words that give the “gut feeling” she wants potential readers to have when they see it.
I’m glad I’m not the only one with TP. My first novel is shaping up nicely, except the title. It’s a fantasy novel about a man who is part of a druid-like group called the Keepers and the most important thing in the world to him is this ruby for a long and complicated reason involving his dying wife. ANYWAY, all I can come up with is The Keeper’s Stone, but that sounds like some sort of euphamism for his boy parts, and it is NOT that sort of book…
Thanks for the good ideas!
Fun post. No, stories to recount here. But enjoyed your post!