Titles are not my greatest strength. However, titles are important. The title is the door to your story’s house, and it plays a key role in marketing your story. While novels get an artfully designed cover to help entice readers, short stories (and especially drabbles) typically only get a title to encourage readers to open that door. This is one reason why short story titles tend to be longer than novel titles: they’re doing more work.
I recently researched strategies to write better short story titles with the goal of improving my own titling abilities. Here are my top ten tips from that research.
1. Brainstorm on a whiteboard (whiteboard not required).
My first piece of advice comes, not from the realm of fiction, but from content marketing. It’s simple: Write down ten different titles. The key here is to turn off your editor brain and let your creative juices flow. This will help you think outside the box and not simply name your story the first thing that pops into your head. Once you get all ten titles down, you can turn your editorial brain back on and perfect your chosen title using some of the other tips and styles noted below.
Central to this strategy is quantity. While it is technically possible to write down ten truly crappy titles, that is pretty unlikely. If you come up with ten, there should be at least one that works.
2. Lift an evocative phrase from your story.
Here’s a chance to steal from your own writing. However, I find that this is harder than it initially sounds. The phrase you lift needs to be relevant to the overall theme and tone of your story and be evocative. Often, these phrases come from the end of the story. However, they can also come from earlier in the work—even the opening line.
In very short stories, such as drabbles, repeating more than a single word or two can feel repetitive—so you need to choose a truly eye-catching phrase to pull it off.
Examples:
- “All the Difference” by David M. Barry (Small Wonders)
- “Black Wine from the Slopes of Dawn” by Rajiv Moté (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
- “That Which Brings Death” by Thomas J. Griffin (100-Foot Crow)
3. Craft a metaphor that (at first glance) doesn’t make any sense.
This title format is hot right now! To use this strategy, you just say that something is something else. The comparison must appear nonsensical. The key to making this work and not pure baloney is that when the reader finishes your story, they must understand the metaphor.
Examples:
- “A Book Is a Map, a Bed Is a Country” by Angel Leal (Uncanny Magazine)
- “Wonderland Is a Parking Lot in Revere” by John Chu (Uncanny Magazine)
- “Faith Is a Butterfly Resting on a Rotting Eye (or The Art of Faith)” by Gabrielle Emem Harry (Strange Horizons)
4. Stab it with some prepositions (the weirder, the better).
If you have a title that is okay but you don’t love, you might be able to prop it up by adding a simple preposition, infinitive, or spicy adjective. Don’t just say “Mirage,” say “Mirage in Double Vision.” Don’t say “A Hunter,” say “To Be a Hunter.” This additional detail adds intrigue and rhythm, and makes it stand out.
Examples:
- “Mirage in Double Vision” by Tia Tashiro (Uncanny Magazine)
- “The Texture of Memory, of Light” by Samara Auman (Clarkesworld)
- “The Weight of Your Own Ashes” by Carlie St. George (Clarkesworld)
- “To Be a Hunter” by Kai Delmas (100-Foot Crow)
5. Make the title part of the story.
Thinking of your title as part of your story is a particularly good tactic for short pieces, such as drabbles, because it essentially increases your word count and ensures your title is meaningful to the story.
If your work is epistolary or some other type of found footage, the title can explain what the found letter or item is. Then you can jump straight into the meat of the story on line one without having to explain what the item is or where it came from.
Examples:
- “The Mote in Bird’s Eye; or, Note Attached to a Frozen Corpse Retrieved from Deep Space” by Jon Lasser (Lightspeed)
- “The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube” by Steven Genise (Mythaxis Magazine)
- “Process Cycle for the Med-Droid ZZX” by Michael Gardner (100-Foot Crow)
6. Say exactly what’s in the tin.
For this strategy, you describe exactly what happens in the story in plain English. The weirder the story, the better this works. These are often used with list-style stories (e.g., Five Times… The Seven Reason Why…)
Examples:
- “A Gardener Teaches His Son to Enrich the Soil and Plan for the Future” by Jennifer Hudak (Small Wonders)
- “How the Emperor of All Space and Every World Awoke to the True Nature of Reality and Why it Didn’t Matter” by PH Lee (Escape Pod)
- “The Six Clues That Tipped Me Off That You Were an Assassin from the Future Coming to Kill Me” by Allan Dyen-Shapiro (Small Wonders)
7. Take a known phrase from elsewhere.
You can lift a phrase from a known work—such as a poem in the public domain, a work of Shakespeare, the Bible, or another phrase or saying that has meaning beyond the literal words. The danger of this strategy is that you can end up with a title that sounds good (because it was written by a skilled poet) but does not fit your story. The pulled phrase must work thematically and stylistically with your own words.
Examples:
- The numerous titles (“Burning Bright,” “Forest of the Night,” etc.) taken from William Blake’s poem “The Tyger”
- “Nine Tenths of the Law” by K.J. Parker (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
- “Please Contact Our Sales Department” by Andreas Flögel (100-Foot Crow)
8. Say it thrice.
There is something satisfying about a trio. Although short, it feels complete, and it has an appealing rhythm. It can also be comedic if the third item breaks the pattern set by the first two. This works for any length story.
Examples:
- “Hello! Hello! Hello!” by Fiona Jones (Clarkesworld)
- “Molum, Molum, Molum the Scourge” by Rich Larson (Clarkesworld)
- “By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars” by Premee Mohamed (Strange Horizons)
- “BRIDE / BUTCHER / DOE” by Lowry Poletti (Strange Horizons)
9. Mention that weird thing and the other weird thing.
Don’t have three things in your story to stick in the title? No problem. Two things will work just fine—provided they’re strange, alliterative, or otherwise intriguing!
Examples:
- “The Deformed Saint and the Poison Wind” by David McGillveray (Clarkesworld)
- “In the Walls and Beneath the Fridge” by Jonathan L. Howard (Nightmare Magazine)
- “The Ferns and the Fiddleheads” by Leah Ning (Apex)
10. Don’t overthink it.
Still struggling? Give yourself some space. Take a break. Go for a walk, and let your subconscious muse on the idea. If there is no looming deadline, sleep on it for a few days or even months. Creativity can take time (and practice).
Final thoughts
I’ve never rejected a story for 100-Foot Crow because I didn’t like the title. The story is always what matters most; however, a great title is certainly an asset, and there are some cliché titles that are sorely overused (Check out the top 10 most common titles submitted to Clarkesworld).
Ultimately, the most important element is that your title fits your story. If you have an incredible sounding title, but it’s incongruent to the story, it’s not a good title. Readers will feel misled. If they come to your story thinking it’s going to be fun and quirky based on your title, they will not enjoy a somber, brooding tale—even if they’d normally enjoy that type of story.
Now go forth and write some great titles!
This blog was first posted at the 100-Foot Crow.
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