I Hate Making Titles

If I had to pick my weakest point in writing, I would have to say it is coming up with titles. It is a very difficult task to do well and I am a total perfectionist about it, so I always struggle the most with it. The title is always the very last thing I create for a story.

Titles should be interesting. It is the first thing that people see, and when you are going through a list of books or essays, sometimes it is the only thing that a person sees. A title needs to pique a person's interest enough to check out the writing itself.

For a lot of nonfiction, this isn't too difficult. People looking in nonfiction are usually looking for a subject they care about, so the best thing to do is be forward. If you are writing a biography, you just say that it is a biography and make sure the person's name is in it. If you are writing an essay, you should title it after your main point.

When you get into more creative writing, you need to have more creative titles. And this is where the real difficulty comes in. A title for a creative work needs to be relevant and engaging, but not overtelling.

For example, look at Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. The Philosopher's Stone is an object with some history, so some people may be intrigued by a story that involves it. Within the story, the Philosopher's Stone is a significant object. It is talked about a lot, and ends up being very important in the main story of the book. The stone acts as a focus. The fact that it is in the title also makes us more curious.

Another example is Michael Pollan's nonfiction book, The Botany of Desire. Desire is a strong and well-known experience, but we know it in terms of humans. Botany, the study of plants, what does that have to do with desire? Well, when we read, we find out that the premise is that, although humans think that they are in complete control over plants, the reality is that we are mutually dependent upon each other and that we both satisfy desires that we each have. So the title intrigues people into reading, and then as they read, the title is a theme that runs throughout the book.

I think that the genre of fantasy has it pretty easy when it comes to titles. You can always name it after a military campaign, a quest name, or whatever artifact is the primary focus of the story. In fantasy, the writer is creating their own world and filling it with all kinds of new, interesting, and significant things, so there is an abundance of things to draw titles from.

I don't do a whole lot of fantasy, so I don't have that luxury. My stories usually involve people in our world or a world like ours. The only way I have ever been able to come up with titles was to make puns. Sometimes it's cute. If I'm writing a children's story about a fly training for a race, people would smile if I titled it Time Flies. But if I'm writing something that isn't cute, a pun isn't very appropriate. If I wrote a murder mystery in a dark, gruesome world about a person who used curses to kill his victims, it would be really inappropriate to call it The Hex Files.

I don't have any magic answers for how to come up with titles. The best I can do is what I've already said: intriguing titles that also are important objects, scenes, or people in the story itself. The best advice I have found is to not overthink it. Don't try to worry about being too clever. In the course of writing, something should come to your head as an appropriate title. If it doesn't, then sit back, look at your story , and figure out what would fit these criteria.