A plea by novelist Lisa Medved on Twitter, asking for tips for choosing titles, has got me thinking about what makes a good title, and how you go about finding one. So far I've had very positive responses to the titles of my books (though one kind reader emailed because they were worried that I'd made a big mistake in titling a book with what it isn't). So forgive me if some of the examples are of my own work, because they do offer clues to what's going on.
1) Your title is part of your pitch (join me online at Blue Pencil next Thursday, the 30th, for more on pitches), and if you have a cracker, that's great. But at the submissions stage, having a not-cracker is absolutely not a deal-breaker. My debut novel started life as Shadows in the Glass and everyone said, "Oh, that's a good title", and it was sent out and sold as that. So it was a shock when my editor said to my agent, "I can't tell you how much I hate that title", but we changed it to The Mathematics of Love. And yes, it did feel like renaming a dog you've had for years, but my editor was proved absolutely right. First, everyone including the big buyers was now saying, "Wow, fantastic title!". Next, virtually every review and media mention picked up on the title and commented, made puns, or used it as the opening of the piece: hence my indecent confidence that it is, indeed, a good title.
2) A book title is not a label. Being the most exact description of the contents matters less than getting the potential reader thinking, "Oooh, what's that all about?". Having said that, Four Weddings and a Funeral hasn't suffered from its title; I think of this as the Snakes on a Plane tradition of titles defiantly eschewing mystery or poetry. This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin is an tongue-in-cheek example of the same species.*
3) The crucial "Oooh, what's that all about?" can be stirred up by various means:
- Potency. Wedding and funeral are both potent words, of course, and in Jeanette Winterson's Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, oranges is vivid and specific, colour and shape conjured instantly in your mind: it's Showing, if you like. But as competition judge Susannah Rickards pointed out when she guest-blogged for the Itch, oranges works so very well because not the only fruit "activates" the noun. In a title like Lisa Jewell's psychological thriller The Family Upstairs, the words are more everyday, but still potent because they're close to home.
- Friction between the words. One of my daughter's most beloved books is Jenny Valentine's Broken Soup: what's that all about? Other examples might include Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Jo-Anne Richards's The Innocence of Roast Chicken. And people found friction between mathematics and love, even though that wasn't the point and anyway, in my family the two are not antithetical at all.
- Working in an existing tradition, as certain genres have covers to draw in readers who already know and like them. Jennie Valentines' The Double Life of Cassiel Roadnight echoes many others of all kinds of genre (just search for "the secret life of", or "double life of", and the like, on The Online Retailer Who Must Not Be Named). And the rhythm is good too. Dick Francis, like many thriller-writers, often use single words - Straight, Proof, Bonecrack - which mirrors the spare, energy-packed prose, while Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall belongs to a tradition which includes Mansfield Park and Bleak House, but with a different potency, even friction, in wolf.
4) Saying a title aloud shouldn't be difficult. If someone's not sure how to pronounce a word they may be too embarrassed to ask for it, or talk about it, or even have it lying about. Similarly, my original title for my second novel was An Uncertain Alchemy, but to say that aloud even this half-trained actor has to summon up her crispest diction. We toyed with calling it Alchemy, but another book with that title was out there. True, in the UK there's no copyright in titles, but it was aimed at a very similar market and only a few years old, so I thought hard about all the alchemical couples in the story, and came up with A Secret Alchemy.
5) Finding a title may take brainstorming. Your writing mates can help, and here are some other ideas:
- Brainstorm on paper, and don't censor as you go: put down everything. However meh or silly or someone-else-has-done-that a title seems, you never know what thought it will lead to next.
- Try free-association techniques of the sort that poets use: spider diagrams which jump the tracks of logic and obvious meanings, wake up your metaphor-and-image mind, and engage your rhyme-and-rhythm sense.
- Look through the novel for potent phrases. "I would say that the mathematics of love defy arithmetic" comes from a crucial hinge moment, the midpoint of the story, and because they recognise the title in the line, the reader gets a little fizz of extra alertness exactly where I want them to.
- Make a list of key words, metaphors and ideas from your novel, then get hold of a good dictionary of quotations and look them up (or try The Poetry Foundation, say; Google will only give you a million versions of a narrow selection). Max Porter's Grief is the Thing With Feathers riffs on Emily Dickinson's poem "Hope is the thing with feathers" (although if you're not riffing, leaving the original word in can be over-explainy). P D James's Devices and Desires is from the General Confession in the Book of Common Prayer.
- Existing phrases and sayings, riffed on, can also work: there's friction in the metaphorical connotations of Bonnie Garmus' Lessons in Chemistry but the denotation is deliberately tin-labelling, while the sting in the tail of John LeCarré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, is a classic example. Just be very, very careful not to use anything which is still in copyright: Claire Allen's Rainy Days and Tuesdays wasn't Mondays for a reason.
6) Start noticing titles of films and songs as well as books. If it whets your appetite, why, exactly? What are the denotations but also the connotations of the words? How are they working together? If it doesn't whet your appetite, why might a writer and publisher nonetheless have thought it would? But do also bear in mind what my agent said as we were trying to thrash out a title for what wasn't yet A Secret Alchemy: sometimes everyone spends ages trying to come up with a better title, and in the end they come back to the original, just with more faith that it's the best there is.
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*Indeed, Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction hasn't suffered by doing, I hope, exactly what it says on the tin. Though of course How To books are a bit different; here, the Amazon algorithm is king.
Image by KathrynMaloney from Pixabay
