Titles are tricky. I’ve learned over the years that getting attached to one early on is a very, very bad idea. Either my editor hates it, my editor’s boss hates it, the majority of the people I bounce it off hate it, or it’s been used– either famously, infamously, or recently. At this point, I tend to call my work-in-progress by the main character’s first name. So, at the moment, I have piles o’ files called “Ella” (Ella ch. 1, Ella ch. 2, and so on), “Jules”, and “Clara”. Not titles. I give myself very good advice. So, of course, ignoring that advice, all three books were titled within days of inception.
Sigh.
So, here I am, trying to rename one of them. I’m not gonna to go into that excruciating process here. Instead, I’m thinking about some of the titles I’ve liked best. I haven’t read some of the books, but I’ve thought: “Wow. Wish I’d come up with that.”
In my class, I teach about picking titles. (Maybe I shouldn’t.) In a nutshell, most good titles seem to be one of the following:
-Evocative single words (Shiver, Possession, Persuasion, Dubliners)
-Hooks/question prompts (The Perks of being a Wallflower, To Kill a Mockingbird, Because of Winn-Dixie)
-Interesting names (Jane Eyre, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Artemis Fowl, Al Capone Does My Shirts)
-Clever combos (Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There)
-Setting (Bridge to Terabithia, Empire Falls, Where the Wild Things Are)
-Subject (Memoirs of a Geisha, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)
-Cute/Shamelessly Topical (Someday My Prince Will Come, Vegas Bites, Ella Enchanted, Living Dead in Dallas)
-Poetic/Abstract (Love in the Time of Cholera, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, And Then There Were None, The Elegance of the Hedgehog)
So many of my favorite book titles are in that last category. So few young adult titles are. Some Sarah Dessen, certainly, but she could probably call her books “Book” and they’d be just as successful and wonderful. Me, I just need to come up with something that won’t make me cringe when I say it aloud.
Stay tuned.