Some nice titles there, Lev. The one you mentioned from Raymond Carver, which is also the title of one of his short story collections, is one of my favorites. On the other hand, I’ve read some beautiful personal essays with very simple titles. Alex R. Jones had one in The Threepenny Review last year called “Dancing.”
For humorous stories, I like to try play(s) on words. "Heavily Ever After," about a man on his honeymoon who escapes into overeating when his new wife begins flirting with another resort guest; "The Call of the Wool," in which a couple's use of pet names gets out of hand; and "Dead Men Get No Tail," in which a private eye gets involved in a family squabble about a deceased man's "essence" stored in a sperm bank.
I'm betting I'm not alone in that I have various and sundry possible titles written down here and there. Sometimes I even do write a story for one. One I've been trying to complete for years now is "When Pushkin Came to Shovkin" but nothing to show for it yet.
I suck at titles and often bend to the suggestions of my editors. I don't think they're all that important to me, but I recognize people struggle over them. I think at least a third of everything I've ever been lucky enough to find a home for was sent under three or four title possibilities and in a good portion of those the editor or publisher decided. Really, a lot of the titles I've come up with are pretty stupid.
I've now published over 40 essays in the last 20 months or so and probably half have gone out under multiple titles--that is different titles to different lit mags. Right now I have a true ghost story out at five mags with four different titles. It feels like playing the Lottery. :-)
I've sometimes had luck with Hemingway's approach: brainstorming. Supposedly, he would write long lists of possible titles (50 ideas or more). I found that after the first few or ten I'm forced to think in a different way. Once, for a flash fiction, I was able to discover a better title and went from "Fire in the Barn" (ug, yes) to "Everyone Has Their Own Shangri-la." Better?
Like you I often find titles to my work (poetry) once I feel the writing has expressed my intent. Then, as I search for a title, I usually keep only a few guidelines in mind.
First of all I never title any piece based on the first line (and usually the first stanza) as it’s similar to giving away the plot line of a story. There’s nothing for the reader to anticipate, leaving the remainder a denouement.
I also don’t prefer the central theme, image or character as the title simply because it’s too readily apparent (and sometimes boring).
What I do look for is a phrase or word tucked within which can exemplify the theme or attitude. Once in a while I will even use a phrase based on a pun or derivative of the theme to put my point across as I once did in a poem concerning an insufferable narcissist. I titled it Altar Ego both to bow to its subject’s hunger for continual praise and idolization and to accentuate the rather Jekyll and Hyde facets of his personality.
Becky, what a great post--such useful information on title creation, which has always been one of my struggles. I love how you take us through the process for your essay.
I am loving this article. It is very timely for me. Just last week I decided that I was going to name each of my Substack articles after the title of a song. Your article gives me a few more things to consider.
Thanks. I decided to title a story "Remind Me to Smile" from a Gary Numan song long before I wrote a story that fit it. And that story grew into my 10-book mystery series: https://www.levraphael.com/mystery.html
Great to hear that you are a Numan fan. This also reminds me that I want to chose some titles that are not so mainstream and might even go over some reader's heads. A little bonus for the people who know the song and have an attachment to the band or musician. What I want to avoid is the song titles that everyone in the world know and are repeated ad nauseum in all conversations. Such as "Don't Stand so Close to ME" when talking about social distancing. You know, the Captain Obvious song titles. Thanks again.
Regarding Numan, to think he morphed from an all white beginning to an all black phase. To think that Trent and other industrial bands bow at his feet. Gary has been an innovator since day one.
The Great Gatsby. The Portrait of a Lady. The Age of Innocence. Middlemarch. Sense and Sensibility. Tom Jones. The Incredible Lightness of Being. 5 words seems to be the general cut-off for books that have become classics.
I love your tone, Lev -- so smooth and assured. I recently searched for a title for a poetry collection. I tried finding a line from the poems but didn't land on one that truly resonated. So, I looked through SPD's (Small Press Distribution) catalog to see current titles -- not to copy any of them but to get a sense of what's out there. The search helped me eliminate many of the titles I had been considering -- also an important step in settling on the right title.
Mostly my titles come to me naturally and feel right. To me the primary importance is they match the vibe of the piece and invite the audience to imagine what the story or experience is going to be like.
I actually am quite fond of using typographical hijinks like strikethroughs too. I have a short film called "Sometimes a Figure Grabs Me by the Wrist W̶h̶i̶l̶e̶ ̶I̶ ̶S̶l̶e̶e̶p̶" for instance. It felt too icky without 'while I sleep' but it's also about sleep paralysis which feels wakeful, so the contrast is in the strikethrough.
Another short was operating under the working title "After the Strϕke" for a while because it was about a lightning strike / a brain stroke but I removed almost all of the stroke-related material from the edit so the risk of it being read str-phi-ke became less worth taking.
Sometimes the title needs to be long enough to fit in the information not in the poem, so I recently tried it with "diss odor: meeting the Cristo-fascist part of his extended family". We'll see how that works out.
Depends on the story and the journal. Some editors/readers will be intrigued, some annoyed. Who can predict? I hit a sweet spot, I guess with "If I Were Straight, I Wouldn't Know How to Swim." Placed it very quickly.
I think crisp titles work best . Im looking at my bookshelf at my top twenty books. Ive read each one four to five times in my 78 years on earth..It's hard to list a preference order but here goes. If you've never heard of some there are solid reasons Im willing to discuss any questions in here, in a zoom, or some SPOT.
The longer the title the more you inconvenience the reader; it's narccisstic and clumsy], or you are showing off either how erudite or clever you are. Consider the classics. Antigone, Madame Bovary, Moby Dick, Mrs.Dalloway, Song of Lawino, Eva Luna, Orlando, Moll Flanders,, Mr. Mani. Frankenstein, ,Sula, Don Quixote, Jane Pittman.
I published a collection of stories about race and class entitled I Looked Over Jordan and Other Stories (Boston: South End Press,1980) The eight stories focused on friendships among black and white hospital workers in understaffed hospitals and other issues. The title story concerned an elderly black worker who had worked for thirty years in the Bay Area shipyards, including during World War II putting asbestos-laden fireproofing into various liberty warships. Years later, he and thousands like him were comiing down with various cancerous mesotheliomas from working in a lethally unsafe environment with no warning or caution given by their employer- the Federal government. At the time the govrnment officils and doctors t ried to hid the growing scandl but it burst to the point there are scads of ads on tv about it. So I felt I Looked Over Jordan represente well many of the patients we had who were dying but in the seventies at least the word had emergd and the Asbestos Unions won a major multimillion dollar workmens compensation suit.
The book did well, sold all three thousand paperback copies and 500 hd copies in about five years, which I thought was good consideriing the publishers, mostly nonfiction nonfictionreading leftists did almost nothing to promote it, and given that the American book reviewers either disdained this young new press, or didnt have savvy orcommtment to think of s better distribution for the book despite my many suggestions.
But then an old friend from San Francisco State, the now legendary topshelf book buyer/conniseur afficiando of world literature and voracious reader like me, told me I would have much better if I had used the title of the first story in the book as the main title for the whole book. The story was CRAZY HATTIE ENTERS THE ICE AGE. Whereas I Looked Over Jordan was a straight up use of the first line of the famed gospel song Swing Low Sweet Chariot, it was a song about preparing for death. Hattie's title was more open and mysterious and implied some ongoing crisis. Young and green to publishing at 34. I admit to making a mistake and not thinking it more clearly through although I like the song and feel the book was a total flop because of the title. BUT the story Paul suggested was optioned and purchased by Ruby Dee fpr the halfhour show on PBS. and I made more money (albeit not a fortune)selling that one story than all the royalties I made on the entire book!
Some nice titles there, Lev. The one you mentioned from Raymond Carver, which is also the title of one of his short story collections, is one of my favorites. On the other hand, I’ve read some beautiful personal essays with very simple titles. Alex R. Jones had one in The Threepenny Review last year called “Dancing.”
Short can be very effective. one of my favorite of 40+ essays I've recently published is "Musketeer": https://braidedway.org/musketeer/
For humorous stories, I like to try play(s) on words. "Heavily Ever After," about a man on his honeymoon who escapes into overeating when his new wife begins flirting with another resort guest; "The Call of the Wool," in which a couple's use of pet names gets out of hand; and "Dead Men Get No Tail," in which a private eye gets involved in a family squabble about a deceased man's "essence" stored in a sperm bank.
I'm betting I'm not alone in that I have various and sundry possible titles written down here and there. Sometimes I even do write a story for one. One I've been trying to complete for years now is "When Pushkin Came to Shovkin" but nothing to show for it yet.
Humorous and punning titles are a big thing in the mystery community. Your Russian one would make a great title for a crime novel!
I suck at titles and often bend to the suggestions of my editors. I don't think they're all that important to me, but I recognize people struggle over them. I think at least a third of everything I've ever been lucky enough to find a home for was sent under three or four title possibilities and in a good portion of those the editor or publisher decided. Really, a lot of the titles I've come up with are pretty stupid.
I've now published over 40 essays in the last 20 months or so and probably half have gone out under multiple titles--that is different titles to different lit mags. Right now I have a true ghost story out at five mags with four different titles. It feels like playing the Lottery. :-)
I also really struggle with titles. Thanks so much for sharing how you've managed this in the past.
You're welcome! I just sent something out that has had half a dozen titles....
I've sometimes had luck with Hemingway's approach: brainstorming. Supposedly, he would write long lists of possible titles (50 ideas or more). I found that after the first few or ten I'm forced to think in a different way. Once, for a flash fiction, I was able to discover a better title and went from "Fire in the Barn" (ug, yes) to "Everyone Has Their Own Shangri-la." Better?
The 2nd one has a nice ironic edge.
Like you I often find titles to my work (poetry) once I feel the writing has expressed my intent. Then, as I search for a title, I usually keep only a few guidelines in mind.
First of all I never title any piece based on the first line (and usually the first stanza) as it’s similar to giving away the plot line of a story. There’s nothing for the reader to anticipate, leaving the remainder a denouement.
I also don’t prefer the central theme, image or character as the title simply because it’s too readily apparent (and sometimes boring).
What I do look for is a phrase or word tucked within which can exemplify the theme or attitude. Once in a while I will even use a phrase based on a pun or derivative of the theme to put my point across as I once did in a poem concerning an insufferable narcissist. I titled it Altar Ego both to bow to its subject’s hunger for continual praise and idolization and to accentuate the rather Jekyll and Hyde facets of his personality.
Altar Ego is a great title.
Thank you very much.
Becky, what a great post--such useful information on title creation, which has always been one of my struggles. I love how you take us through the process for your essay.
Becky was the editor, but I was the author. :-)
Ah, thanks! Sorry for the confusion.
No worries! Becky came up with the title. :-)
I am loving this article. It is very timely for me. Just last week I decided that I was going to name each of my Substack articles after the title of a song. Your article gives me a few more things to consider.
Thanks. I decided to title a story "Remind Me to Smile" from a Gary Numan song long before I wrote a story that fit it. And that story grew into my 10-book mystery series: https://www.levraphael.com/mystery.html
Great to hear that you are a Numan fan. This also reminds me that I want to chose some titles that are not so mainstream and might even go over some reader's heads. A little bonus for the people who know the song and have an attachment to the band or musician. What I want to avoid is the song titles that everyone in the world know and are repeated ad nauseum in all conversations. Such as "Don't Stand so Close to ME" when talking about social distancing. You know, the Captain Obvious song titles. Thanks again.
That's a great idea--you work with the resonance of the song whether general readers know it or not.
I lost track of Numan for a long time but album Savage blew me away.
Regarding Numan, to think he morphed from an all white beginning to an all black phase. To think that Trent and other industrial bands bow at his feet. Gary has been an innovator since day one.
Definitely. And he still sounds fresh and unique. I love his soundscape.
Amazing videos also. His daughter stars with him in “My Name is Ruin”.
The Great Gatsby. The Portrait of a Lady. The Age of Innocence. Middlemarch. Sense and Sensibility. Tom Jones. The Incredible Lightness of Being. 5 words seems to be the general cut-off for books that have become classics.
What a great story and how cool about PBS!!
P.S.--Becky came up with the title for this piece! :-)
I love your tone, Lev -- so smooth and assured. I recently searched for a title for a poetry collection. I tried finding a line from the poems but didn't land on one that truly resonated. So, I looked through SPD's (Small Press Distribution) catalog to see current titles -- not to copy any of them but to get a sense of what's out there. The search helped me eliminate many of the titles I had been considering -- also an important step in settling on the right title.
That's good advice. I advise my clients to check titles for those reasons, and also to see if they want to riff off of an "established" title.
Glad you liked the tone. I had a wonderful editor. :-)
Thank you, Lev, for this column. Great tips for figuring out a title. Plus, I’ve always wondered about the purpose of strike-throughs!
Glad you enjoyed it. My mother, taking Comparative Literature courses, introduced me to unique concepts and fascinating writers like Roland Barthes.
Mostly my titles come to me naturally and feel right. To me the primary importance is they match the vibe of the piece and invite the audience to imagine what the story or experience is going to be like.
I actually am quite fond of using typographical hijinks like strikethroughs too. I have a short film called "Sometimes a Figure Grabs Me by the Wrist W̶h̶i̶l̶e̶ ̶I̶ ̶S̶l̶e̶e̶p̶" for instance. It felt too icky without 'while I sleep' but it's also about sleep paralysis which feels wakeful, so the contrast is in the strikethrough.
Another short was operating under the working title "After the Strϕke" for a while because it was about a lightning strike / a brain stroke but I removed almost all of the stroke-related material from the edit so the risk of it being read str-phi-ke became less worth taking.
What about long titles?
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being
Is there such a thing as too long?
Sometimes the title needs to be long enough to fit in the information not in the poem, so I recently tried it with "diss odor: meeting the Cristo-fascist part of his extended family". We'll see how that works out.
Provocative and strong!
Depends on the story and the journal. Some editors/readers will be intrigued, some annoyed. Who can predict? I hit a sweet spot, I guess with "If I Were Straight, I Wouldn't Know How to Swim." Placed it very quickly.
I think crisp titles work best . Im looking at my bookshelf at my top twenty books. Ive read each one four to five times in my 78 years on earth..It's hard to list a preference order but here goes. If you've never heard of some there are solid reasons Im willing to discuss any questions in here, in a zoom, or some SPOT.
The longer the title the more you inconvenience the reader; it's narccisstic and clumsy], or you are showing off either how erudite or clever you are. Consider the classics. Antigone, Madame Bovary, Moby Dick, Mrs.Dalloway, Song of Lawino, Eva Luna, Orlando, Moll Flanders,, Mr. Mani. Frankenstein, ,Sula, Don Quixote, Jane Pittman.
I published a collection of stories about race and class entitled I Looked Over Jordan and Other Stories (Boston: South End Press,1980) The eight stories focused on friendships among black and white hospital workers in understaffed hospitals and other issues. The title story concerned an elderly black worker who had worked for thirty years in the Bay Area shipyards, including during World War II putting asbestos-laden fireproofing into various liberty warships. Years later, he and thousands like him were comiing down with various cancerous mesotheliomas from working in a lethally unsafe environment with no warning or caution given by their employer- the Federal government. At the time the govrnment officils and doctors t ried to hid the growing scandl but it burst to the point there are scads of ads on tv about it. So I felt I Looked Over Jordan represente well many of the patients we had who were dying but in the seventies at least the word had emergd and the Asbestos Unions won a major multimillion dollar workmens compensation suit.
The book did well, sold all three thousand paperback copies and 500 hd copies in about five years, which I thought was good consideriing the publishers, mostly nonfiction nonfictionreading leftists did almost nothing to promote it, and given that the American book reviewers either disdained this young new press, or didnt have savvy orcommtment to think of s better distribution for the book despite my many suggestions.
But then an old friend from San Francisco State, the now legendary topshelf book buyer/conniseur afficiando of world literature and voracious reader like me, told me I would have much better if I had used the title of the first story in the book as the main title for the whole book. The story was CRAZY HATTIE ENTERS THE ICE AGE. Whereas I Looked Over Jordan was a straight up use of the first line of the famed gospel song Swing Low Sweet Chariot, it was a song about preparing for death. Hattie's title was more open and mysterious and implied some ongoing crisis. Young and green to publishing at 34. I admit to making a mistake and not thinking it more clearly through although I like the song and feel the book was a total flop because of the title. BUT the story Paul suggested was optioned and purchased by Ruby Dee fpr the halfhour show on PBS. and I made more money (albeit not a fortune)selling that one story than all the royalties I made on the entire book!
As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (Jonas Mekas film from 2001)
There's also the post-rock habit of titling songs like run-on sentences, like these from Red Sparowes' first album:
1. "Alone and Unaware, the Landscape was Transformed in Front of Our Eyes"
2. "Buildings Began to Stretch Wide Across the Sky, And the Air Filled with a Reddish Glow"
3. "The Soundless Dawn Came Alive as Cities Began to Mark the Horizon"
4. "Mechanical Sounds Cascaded Through the City Walls and Everyone Reveled in Their Ignorance"
5. "A Brief Moment of Clarity Broke Through the Deafening Hum, but It Was Too Late"
6. "Our Happiest Days Slowly Began to Turn into Dust"
7. "The Sixth Extinction Crept Up Slowly, Like Sunlight Through the Shutters, as We Looked Back in Regret"