Title Me This
Today's question: How do you pick your titles?
Titles. Along with blurbing and comp titles and authors, titling your creative opus is work. It has to be thought through. There might be chocolate involved.
Yeah, I have problems with titles. This explains why I number my haikus. When I think of titles, I immediately go to loft and snobbish titles. For years, Falling to Normal was called Trials and Tribulations: Memoirs of a Teenager*. I loved that title and refused to change it for a looong time because nothing I came up with sang to me as my pretentious-almost-Russian-author-esque title did.
Did I come up with the title Falling to Normal? Hell, no. It took an hour brainstorm session where I told Hubby all about my plot and he came up with the title. He's the marketing and sales person in this relationship.
So how do I come up with a title? If I'm lucky, it will just come to me, like most blog post titles. Most of the time, I have to work for it. Most working drafts have vague titles like "Untitled 1st POV" or "short story 29." As it was, when I first drafted Phoenix Rising, it had the most awesome title of "nanowrimodraft09." It took months thinking about the main characters before I got the title I have now.
If you have an actual process on titling, I'd love to know the secret.
Don't forget to stop by YA Highway and learn more secrets of titling!
* Of course, I came up with the title when I was 16 and then-Trials was a 10 page short story.
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Last.fm hit of the day: Hey, Good Lookin' by Hank Williams