Friends, I’m having Substack issues. This is the third time I’ve written this post (it keeps crying ‘network error’ and vanishing). Also, you’ll probably get another newsletter later today that’s empty, or has one garbled line. I apologize; there’s nothing I can do about it.
Greeting, writers—
I am terrible at titles. It took me three months to figure out the name of this Substack, and I wasn’t even the one to come up with it in the end (the credit, and my gratitude, goes to Jon Raymond).
When I was writing my first book, the working title was Hello, Goodbye, which I never really liked. But I could think of nothing better, and nor could anyone else, and so I talked myself into its charms. Several years later, when the editor assigned to my book1 published her own novel called Hello, Goodbye, and Everything In Between, I wasn’t sure if it was a compliment, a pointed revision, or if her choice had nothing to do with my book at all.
I’ve always done the writing first and hoped that the title would come to me. The working title of the book I’m trying to write now is, I kid you not, The Book. It’s not quite as stupid as it sounds, because it’s a book about books (it’s also not quite, fingers crossed, as boring as that sounds?). But I’m assuming a better title is, as they say, TK.2
Harlan Ellison, the author of many, many science fiction and fantasy stories, novellas, and screenplays, and by all accounts a wild and irascible person3, was of the opinion that titles had to be Awesome. “A title [must] titillate, inveigle you, tease or amuse you,” he writes. “But not confuse you or spill the beans.”
Ellison likes: Midnight at the Well of Souls. The Devil Will Drag You Under. Getting into Death. Fun with Your New Head.
He does not like: The Box, or The Journey (“The dullest title I could think of”)
“I cannot stress enough the importance of an intriguing and original title,” he writes. “It is what an editor sees first, and what draws that worthy person into reading the first page of the story.”
And, should one’s book be published, readers absolutely will judge it by its cover, and the title is likely the part over which the author has the most control.4
Wander over to your bookshelf. Which titles are the most Awesome?
On a page of your notebook or in a separate document in your computer, write down ten actual titles that you like. Then make up ten new ones.
Pick your favorite, and then write a scene to fit it.
If you aren’t near a bookshelf, you can just borrow one of David Foster Wallace’s best titles and write from there: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.
Happy writing—
Emily
P.S. Mark your calendars for our next free Generative Writing Zoom class! April 10, 7 pm Pacific.
P.P.S. Portlanders, there are (as of this writing) three spots left in my May novel workshop, hosted by Literary Arts.
In an all-too-familiar publishing tale, the editor who acquired my book on proposal left Random House before I’d finished writing it.
Last summer I picked up a book called The Novel, because it was in a free library and because the author went to my alma mater, but I couldn’t get past page 30. Kirkus called it “an easily digested stew only the undemanding will find nourishing or tasty.” Ouch.
His description of himself, which was included in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre: “My work is foursquare for chaos. I spend my life personally, and my work professionally, keeping the soup boiling. Gadfly is what they call you when you are no longer dangerous; I much prefer troublemaker, malcontent, desperado. I see myself as a combination of Zorro and Jiminy Cricket. My stories go out from here and raise hell. From time to time some denigrater or critic with umbrage will say of my work, ‘He only wrote that to shock.’ I smile and nod. Precisely.”
I really didn’t want stock photography on my cover, but I got it anyway.