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Some titles are smiley faces, others are ironic or grim, but — take it from someone who knows — a lot of torturous thought goes into getting the expression just right. At this very moment, thousands of authors are wracking their brains trying to come up with a better label than the place-holding Work-in-progress, convinced that if they find the perfect title it will by its charm, pithiness and power carry the book to bestsellerdom, and — who knows? — eventual immortality.
All those words in a book, and the handful in the title are the only ones the writer is asking the reader to memorize, so they can order it at a bookstore or recommend it to friends. How strange it is then that I’ve seldom read any analyses of what makes a good title or how to go about creating one. Maybe it’s because there are no rules here, but only patterns, and it might be helpful to title-challenged authors to trace some of these out.
By far the easiest way to name a novel is the simplest: title it after your main character. David Copperfield. Anna Karenina. Madame Bovary. Fanny Hill. Dracula. Moby Dick. Eponymous titles won’t sell a book on their own, but, if the book becomes a classic, the name really sticks with you. And some manage to be alluring and suggestive on their own. Peregrine Pickle could only be about a rogue; Billy Budd could only be about a naif.
A more interesting way to do this is to take a name and add on the briefest of descriptions or tags, so the title’s not just Harry Potter, but Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone; not just Theron Ware, but The Damnation of Theron Ware; not just Gatsby, but The Great Gatsby. Or why not eliminate the proper name and just do a description or tag? The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The Diary of a Nobody. The Woman in White. The Man With the Golden Arm.
Alliteration is always helpful — again, you want the reader to remember the title, and there’s nothing like a little rhythm to help this along. The Haunting of Hill House. Pickwick Papers. Guido the Gimlet of Ghent. Sinister Street. The Wind in the Willows. Or — often imitated; never equaled, wearing a wonderfully ironic and knowing wink — Pride and Prejudice.
A time-honored method is to borrow a title from popular songs, classic poetry, or familiar proverbs. The Catcher in the Rye (poetry). All the King’s Men (nursery rhyme). For Whom the Bell Tolls (poetry). A Good Man Is Hard to Find (proverb). The Grapes of Wrath (hymn).
Ambitious writers like to insert the word “blood” in their title, though I wish they wouldn’t. In Cold Blood. Blood Oranges. Blood Meridian. Wise Blood. Okay, I get it, we’re holding in our hands a very serious book, but I prefer titles that come at things slant, so, instead of saying The Bloody Badge of Courage, we have The Red Badge of Courage, which to my ear is perfect.
“Love” shows up in a lots of titles. Love in a Time of Cholera. Love in the Ruins. Love in a Cold Climate. The Spy Who Loved Me. If you’re really stuck for a title, I’d urge you to go to “love” a lot sooner than you go to “blood,” though, with a title like Love Lies Bleeding, you can have it both ways.
Often the best titles follow no rules or patterns at all, but come to the author in a flash of inspiration so perfect that, combined with the power of their prose, it enters our vocabulary as a byword or saying
that many people use without ever realizing it began life as a book title. Brave New World. Catch-22. A Bridge Too Far. 1984. You Can’t Go Home Again. And familiar human types come from book titles, too. Babbitt. Pollyanna. Lolita. Uncle Tom.
Titles for nonfiction follow the same patterns, but tend to be a bit more descriptive. The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The Education of Henry Adams. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
What’s different with nonfiction is that a longish subtitle is often required, so authors have to wrack their brains for not just one title, but two. Thus, on a book I’ve just been reading, the title, A Great Idea at the Time, nice enough on its own, is followed by The Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books.
Among creative works, plays probably end up with the best titles. Maybe because they will appear up on a marquee or billboard and thus have great prominence, or maybe because playwrights are good at coming up with pithy phrases, plays seem to have better names than novels. A Streetcar Named Desire. Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Death of a Salesman. Curse of the Starving Class. Arsenic and Old Lace. Classics! And perhaps the best play title ever — the best anything title ever, so universally applicable it could be adopted for half the books ever written — Much Ado About Nothing.
My own titling talents are modest; one either comes to me in a flash or I really have to struggle. When I wrote a collection of short stories mostly set in the New York suburbs, The Man Who Loved Levittown was a natural; when I wrote a memoir about boys and fathers in love with their favorite sport, Soccer Dad was inevitable.
With novels, it’s always been trickier. I wrote one set in Flanders in the last days of World War I. November — a gloomy month, not a hopeful one. But I wasn’t just trying to say something about autumn 1918, I was trying to say something about the entire 20th century, the bloodiest century mankind has on its record. It wasn’t just a month of that autumnal mood the world had, but 100 dreary years of it — and so that’s where my title came from, A Century of November. And since many titles have an echo, authors paying tribute to another title that’s always haunted them, I probably had in the back of my mind that masterpiece of the titling art, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
These are rough preliminary notes to a longish study of title writing that someone really should write. In the meantime, I’ll offer this as my conclusion: While I can’t prescribe what makes a great title, I know one when I see one. And so, sticking just to novels and story collections, here’s a personal list of 20 favorite titles. I’d be very interested in seeing your own list if you have time to put one together.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Been Down So Long It Feels Like Up To Me. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. All Quiet on the Western Front. The Call of the Wild. Obscure Destinies. Sometimes a Great Notion. Loser Take All. Pale Horse, Pale Rider. The Little Disturbances of Man. Briefing for a Descent into Hell. A River Runs Through It. Beautiful Losers. The Way We Know in Dreams. Far From the Madding Crowd. An American Tragedy. Great Expectations. Miss Lonelyhearts. The Last of the Mohicans. Jude the Obscure.
W.D. Wetherell is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist who lives in Lyme.