John C. Wright recently posted a link to an older post on book titles by Mike Flynn Entitlement Part I and Part II in which Flynn interviewed a number of notables including Nancy Kress, Harry Turtledove and John C. Wright about what makes a good book title.
Flynn starts his analysis with a quote from Twenty Problems of the Fiction Writer by John Gallishaw:
Now the ultimate Beginning of any story, that part which comes at once to the reader's attention, is the title. From the point of view of interest, a good title is, then, your first consideration in arousing the reader's interest. The title should be arresting, suggestive, challenging. Kipling's "Without Benefit of Clergy" has all these requirements. So has Barrie's "What Every Woman Knows." So has Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw." So has O. Henry's "The Badge of Policeman O'Roon." So has John Marquand's "A Thousand in the Bank." ..... You may say definitely that the first device for capturing interest is in the selection of a title which will cause the reader to pause, which will whet his curiosity.Flynn then elaborates on what he thinks arresting, suggesting and challenging mean with the help of the group of authors he interviewed. My edited version of his post follows.
Arresting. Especially arresting titles include When the Sacred Gin Mill Closes (Lawrence Block); “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” (Samuel Delaney), “Out of All Them Bright Stars” (Nancy Kress). Of course, arresting titles need not be elaborate. The Maltese Falcon is short, descriptive, and carries a hint of the exotic. Niven and Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer and Greg Bear’s The Forge of God are effective for the same reason. John C. Wright would like a title to be “brief, striking or memorable to the reader, and to tell the reader immediately what genre the book is. If the title includes an odd or invented word, or a combination of words not normally found together, this is better still.”For my part, I tend to shy away from books with invented words in the title, but that is just a personal foible.
A good way to arrest the attention is to evoke imagery. “I want graphics,” writes Jack McDevitt. “I want a visual, connected with an emotional impact, or at least an insight into where the narrative is going.” He suggests joining a physical object with an abstraction. For example, his own Eternity Road (which is one of my own favorites) joins the physical Road with the abstraction of Eternity and “takes on the changes brought about by the passage of time.”
Because genre readers like to read genre, John Wright suggests the title include words like star or world or otherwise suggest SF and offers The Star Fox (Poul Anderson), Rocannon’s World (Ursula K. LeGuin), Forbidden Planet (“W.J. Stuart” (Philip MacDonald)) and World of Null-A (A.E. VanVogt) as examples.
Suggestive. Michael Swanwick writes that the title “should suggest that something really interesting is happening in the story.”
The simplest way to do this is with a title that captures the essence of the story. Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky is not only arresting (a tunnel in the sky?) but suggests what the story will be about. William Trevor’s mainstream story “The General’s Day” chronicles the banal events of one day in the life of a retired British general (with a devastating ending).
However, “suggestive” does not mean flat description. Suggestive means to hint, to adumbrate something about the story.
- Not too revealing. Ed Lerner cautions that the title should avoid giving away anything critical in the story. Geoff Landis concurs: “Something evocative and also fitting for the story, but doesn't give away key points of the story.” The art of story-telling is to present events to the reader in an order that produces the best artistic effect.
- Metaphoric or symbolic. Edmund Hamilton's The Haunted Stars concerns the discovery of an abandoned alien base on the Moon, and the imagery of vanished peoples and long-ago deeds pervades the book. John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider concerns a protagonist who “surfs the wave” of Future Shock. Juliette Wade tells us that her titles grow out of thematic ideas or important recurring concepts in the story, like the title of her novel, For Love, For Power. Nancy Kress also admires titles that work on both a plot and a thematic level, like LeGuin's "Nine Lives." Sara Umm Zaid entitled her 2001 Andalusia Prize story “Making Maklooba.” Maklooba is a Palestinian dish in which the bowl is turned upside down on the tray and removed. If the maklooba is good, the food retains the shape of the bowl. The dish is used as a metaphor for a woman whose life has been turned upside down and emptied by the death of her son and its subsequent political exploitation. John Dunning used the title Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime for a tale of murder set in the days of live radio and World War II. Kipling’s “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows” is likewise suggestive while also being descriptive – it is the name of an opium den where the main story takes place.
- Atmosphere. The title might also be suggestive by conjuring an atmosphere. For science fiction, that might be a title that conveys a sense of “cosmic deeps of time.” For fantasy, one that conveys a “haunting sense of melancholy.” In fact, Roger MacBride Allen wrote The Depths of Time, which surely conveys that sense of cosmic deeps of time! The sequel The Ocean of Years succeeds by pairing ocean with years. Edmond Hamilton’s City at World’s End does a little of both, hinting at depths of time and a sense of melancholy.
Challenging. You can also catch the reader’s attention with a title that challenges him. An odd word might be used – Null-A, Dirac Sea, Feigenbaum Number, and so on. Ed Lerner suggests that the relevance of the title might become evident only after the reader has finished the story and reflects on it.In the second part of his post, Flynn examines the process by which writers come up with titles. Some, like Flynn himself, John Wright, Jack McDevitt, and Geoff Landis begin with a title. Other writers, however, come up with a title after the story is complete or near enough, often after a struggle, as with Michael Swanwick, Nancy Kress, Geoffrey Landis, Ed Lerner, and Harry Turtledove. On the other hand, Juliette Wade and Bill Gleason do not struggle.
Juliette Wade likes titles that can have more than one meaning, such as her own “Cold Words,” which is both literal and metaphorical. John Dunning’s detective title The Bookman’s Wake seems to mean one thing during the course of the story, but takes on another meaning at the end. Patrick O’Brian’s naval novel The Surgeon’s Mate also carries two meanings. Sara Umm Zaid’s “Village of Stones” refers not only to the material construction of the dwellings, but to the enthusiasm with which the villagers stone a young girl who has dishonored her family. We might call these double-take titles.
But be careful. A title may be so challenging that the prospective reader scratches his head in bewilderment and goes on to another book or story. Long, obscure titles could tip over into a perceived pretentiousness. Apparent metaphors could fail to deliver. James Blish’s The Warriors of Day had a nice title, but it turned out to be prosaic: actual warriors from a planet called Day. Double meanings could be unintentional. “The Iron Shirts,” my alternate history story for tor.com, was originally titled “Iron Shirts” until it was pointed out that “iron” might be read as a verb!
It’s Got a Good Beat. A fourth factor that relates to the form rather than the matter of the title is its rhythm or meter. Critic and author Greg Feeley once said of my own title The Wreck of “The River of Stars” that what was arresting about it was how the regular beat of the phrase contrasted with the chaos and irregularity implicit in the words wreck, river, and stars. G.K.Chesterton was fond of alliteration in many of his Father Brown mysteries: “The Doom of the Darnaways,” “The Flying Fish,” and so forth. Try saying aloud such titles as “The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde” (Norman Spinrad), “The Sorrow of Odin the Goth” (Poul Anderson), The Stone That Never Came Down (John Brunner), To Your Scattered Bodies Go (Philip José Farmer). Each has a rhythm that makes it attractive. But a short, punchy title can have its own charms: Warlord of Mars (Burroughs), Jumper (Steven Gould), Star Gate (Andre Norton).
As for where authors get their titles, Flynn suggests four source.
Flynn also has six avenues for generating titles:
- Setting: A book can take its title from the milieu in which it takes place. This can be literal or metaphorical. Examples include: Ringworld (Niven). “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows” (Kipling). Eternity Road (Jack McDevitt). Venus (Ben Bova). Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson). “Gibraltar Falls” (Poul Anderson). Or my own Eifelheim. Because SF often involves strange milieus, and readers are attracted to futuristic or alternate settings, this is a popular class of title.
- Idea: The title can be a word or phrase that captures the essential theme of the story. This is probably the most popular category of titles. The idea may be described directly, as in the mainstream book Room at the Top (John Braine) or by means of a double-meaning, as in The Bookman’s Wake (John Dunning) or a paradox, as in Casualties of Peace (Edna O’Brien). Examples in SF include: Thrice Upon a Time (James Hogan), Mission of Gravity (Hal Clement) or Dark as Day (Charles Sheffield).
- Character: The name or description of a key character, either directly naming the individual (or group of individuals) or by using a metaphor. Examples include: The Odyssey (Homer), David Copperfield (Dickens), and Lolita (Nabokov). Titles taken from protagonist names are less common in SF, but we have Kinsman (Bova), Starman Jones (Heinlein), and of course Conan the Barbarian (Robert E. Howard). Metaphorically, we have character-driven titles in The Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkein), The Revolving Boy (Gertrude Friedberg), and “The Man Who Came Early” (Poul Anderson).
- Event: A name or phrase that captures some peak situation or occurrence within the story. Typical examples include “The Madness of Private Ortheris” (Kipling), The Fall of the Towers (Samuel R. Delany), and “The Green Hills of Earth” (Heinlein). The last refers to a poem composed by the character Rhysling during the story crisis. Mars Crossing (Landis) and “Nano Comes to Clifford Falls” (Nancy Kress) are summaries of their respective plots.
I got a lot out of reading Flynn's posts and commend the rest of them to you.
- Simple description. A nanotech story of mine was called “Werehouse” because that was where people went to be illegally transformed into animals. Such titles often take the form:
Noun (The Syndic, C.M. Kornblunth)
Adjective Noun, (The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett)
Noun Noun (Dinosaur Beach, Keith Laumer)
Noun of Noun, ("Flowers of Aulit Prison," Kress)
and so forth. For place-titles, try tossing prepositions like At, In, On, To, etc. while you ponder your story and you might come up with To the Tombaugh Station (Wilson Tucker), “On Greenhow Hill” (Kipling), In the Country of the Blind (yours truly).- A line from the story. Search the text of your story for a line that seems to encapsulate the story. That was the origin of my in-progress novella, “Places Where the Roads Don’t Go.” It was also how Nancy Kress found titles for "Out of All Them Bright Stars" and "The Price of Oranges," and R.A. Lafferty obtained “Camels and Dromedaries, Clem.”
- Famous (or not so famous) quotations. Make a list of key words from each of the four categories mentioned above and go to Bartlett’s to see if there’s a quotation that illuminates the story. Shakespeare and the Bible have been overused, though there is a good reason why people fish there for pithy quotes. But why not look for the road less traveled and try Matthew Arnold, Algernon Swinburne or Lewis Thomas? This was how I found “Where the Winds Are All Asleep,” “Great, Sweet Mother,” and “The Common Goal of Nature.” I also mined quotes for “Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth” and “The Clapping Hands of God.” Harry Turtledove took “In the Presence of Mine Enemies” from Psalms 23:5 – and “The Road Not Taken” from Frost. Bill Gleason, as already mentioned, used Dylan Thomas. Lawrence Block’s Small Town comes from a passage by John Gunther – and refers to New York City, which makes for an arresting contrast.
- Pairings. BruteThink is a creative thinking tactic. It consists of finding two words that are individually contrasting but which in combination capture the story. From the list of key terms suggested by the four categories, look for pairs that clash. Charles Sheffield’s Dark as Day, for example; or Nancy Kress’ “Flowers of Aulit Prison.” Flowers + Prison? What’s that all about? Another contrast, which Jack McDevitt has mentioned, is to join a physical thing with an abstraction, as in his Infinity Beach, Nancy Kress’ Probability Moon, or Kipling’s “Dayspring Mishandled.”
- Crossing categories. A good title might suggest itself by pairing key words from different categories. For example, an event and a place, as in Kipling’s “The Taking of Lungtungpen” or Dashiell Hammett’s “The Gutting of Couffignal”; or a character and a place, as in de Camp’s Conan of Cimmeria. Try each pairing and see what comes up: “The Character of Setting,” “Of Idea and Character,” and so on.
- Random matches. Mozart used to roll a trio of dice to suggest chord progressions. He would take the randomly-generated chords and see if they inspired his creative juices. If not, he would keep rolling until something came up. The writer can do the same thing, taking words from the list of key words purely at random and rubbing them against one another to see if any of them strike sparks.
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