Sunday, June 18, 2006
Titles are my nemesis, how about you? I talked to an agent who told me that titles are fifty percent of what draws him to a book. I hate titling my own work! Which since I'm a marketing professional and have no trouble naming contests or news franchises or coming up with catchy phrases to brand blocks of programming, you'd think I could do. I think I've come up with probably 2 good titles in my life.
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6 comments:
I don't generally have a problem coming up with titles. They may not necessarily be titles a publisher would be happy with, but that's why I don't have a problem coming up with them. Because you are in marketing, you are conflicted between trying to find a title that is catchy and trying to cap your work of art with a title that is representative of any statment you are making with the work. Writing and marketing are often at odds. Writing is an art. Maybe marketing is as well, but the two have two different goals and when you try to satisfy both goals with one work, one or the other or both are going to suffer.
My two cents worth.
Even before I got into marketing, I could never title anything. I had a group of poems published when I was in high school in a local arts compilation. My poems had numbers instead of names and the people at the publication gave them titles. I was absolutely FURIOIUS. I think titling really is the same as good marketing. You must never, ever lie to your reader/consumer. You have to tell them simply what's in it for them if they read your work and you don't try to be too clever. Of course it took me four years to figure out what my main character's last name was. Once I had it, I started writing about him and could not stop. I think once I find my titles for my series, I'll feel silly that I didn't get it sooner.
Poems with numbers instead of titles! Radical! Hey, it worked for Shakespeare!
The Hebrew names for books in the Bible are usually the first words in the book. Like Genesis is Bereshis which means "in the beginning". Ditto for individual chapters. That's also what MS Word does if you save a document without giving it a name. Maybe writing the first few words on a piece of paper and then sort of playing with them, brainstorming, would be a good technique for coming up with a title.
I had considered calling my first novel "He Shot Me."
I'm much better at titling than I used to be-- titling made me want to pull my hair out. I think I got better once my own style of writing really got rolling.
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