Finding Your Story's Title

Which might be about finding your overall story? A taxonomy of titles. Living the long game of writing. With writing encouragement from Shena McAuliffe.

Hi, friend.

Today, we will write. Find a comfy spot, perhaps get a warm beverage, and soon we will begin.

Before we do, I wanted to talk a little about finding your story’s title, offer a taxonomy of titles I’m building, and share writing encouragement from fiction and nonfiction writer Shena McAuliffe.

ON TITLES

I’ve been working on a new novel for three years and yet it took me 2.9 years to find what I *think* might be the novel’s title. The right title often corresponds with a certain kind of completion in the drafting process and so for at least a year I’ve had this pebble in my shoe about the title. The “working title” was never working. My novel was not finishing itself at the speed I’d like it to be. I thought a good title was a meat thermometer for how done my book was. I would have been much further along in the drafting process if I passed the test of having a good title. Every dress I had the novel try on as a title was ill-fitting. Too bright, too long, too neutral. I wanted the title to be done because I wanted the book to be done.

First, my title was something like [cringe] “The Ohio Novel” – too neutral. For a while it was “Abundant” and I really liked that title until a book with a similar name and crossover themes was published plus I started seeing everything titled with something abundant, from yoga workshops to gardening classes, so I knew that one had to go, too.

Then it was “Sometimes the Floor Needs Swept” –too long, plus a carryover from an essay I wrote and this is a novel, and I did not want readers conflating the two. My first reader also rightly pointed out that they’d just be thinking about sweeping the floors as they read the book.

I needed a title that did not just point in one direction. Something that suggested lightness and fonder feelings and something that suggested harder narratives and something that spoke to the specific language of the people in the book. I’m not sure if I’ve found it yet.

Beheld fit for a title for my second novel when I saw its multiple options for interpretation and suggestion: to see and witness (the past, the murder in the book, the perspectives of what went down around that murder) but also I found the language, in another tense (behold)  in the Bible, a text important to the separatist puritans that populate the novel.

For a while, this third book’s working title was What We Did and Did Not Know but my gut is not loving that, plus, my first novel, The Wives of Los Alamos, was retitled that in the German translation, so this would be confusing if the third book is published in German. [I’m linking to the big giant store b/c the books are out of stock on Bookshop.]

For now, and maybe forever, the working title of this third book: TO BE. My heckler reader, i.e. my partner, was like, “That’s a bit…grand.” My first, albeit slightly defensive but also rightly feminist reaction was, “So. Maybe it is grand.”

But then I explained how “to be” is the thing that gets dropped in the dialect of where I am from and where the story takes place. Like, the floor needs to be swept, but we just say, The floor needs swept. I hope the title is affirming presence (being), and suggesting the opposite not to be, and also speaking to an ongoing theme in the book about what to do with a complicated relationship with where one is from, and using the “to be” as a thing that does this other work of demonstrating the conflicted feelings about what to carry, in language, in sentiment, in feeling, etc.. So maybe? My heckler reader liked it after the reasoning, so maybe this is it? Nevertheless, I am going to write more title options to consider, if not for this book, for other stories.

A TAXONOMY OF TITLES I LIKE

•A phrase that takes on multiple meanings throughout the story: Wait Til You See Me Dance by Deb Olin Unferth or All Adults Here by Emma Straub or Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson

•A word or two words that conjure a unique time, feeling, and place relevant to the story:  How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang

•A character with compelling descriptors or with a location/context built in: Frail Sister, My Dark Vanessa, Brief Interview with Hideous Men, Lincoln at the Bardo [I’m getting lazy about author names but you can google.]

•A command that takes a turn in the story: Steal This Book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

•Verb + location: Raising Arizona

•Descriptors of the location: Gold, Fame, Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins

•a single impactful verb with a subtitle, rarely seen in fiction (unless to say “: a novel”) but common in nonfiction: Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

• a title that explains the project, like the oulipo folks did: Attempts at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec, as well as A Void or in French, La Disparition, meaning "The Disappearance" a novel written entirely without using the letter e, Queneau's Exercices de Style

•A specific, mysterious visual from the story: A Cup of Water Under My Bed

•An activity with a dark turn and emotional weight or that means something different in another context, so the delight is in how you reuse that phrase/thing:  Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

•I also don’t mind the “My Year of” books, beginning for me with Ruth Ozeki’s wickedly funny but also sad and gross My Year of Meats

•Titles that reference the play on a previous novel’s structure or book’s predecessor like Demon Copperhead for David Copperfield and The Fire This Time coming after Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time

•Irony, grand titles, how dare they? A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko, maybe my title TO BE?

I would love to hear from you if you’ve noticed other kinds of title categories that you like.

Researching Your Title

Things I do when researching if a title will work: