Shakespeare may have had a point about names and the sweet smell of roses, but I have to admit that I don’t feel that way about book titles. The process of choosing a title for a book is complicated, especially once an agent, an editor, and a marketing team get involved. You can find your beloved title tossed on the scrap heap, or conversely, you can find your totally mediocre title emblazoned on thousands of covers. For example, in my mind Lie Lay Lain was just a working title, until suddenly it wasn’t.
Although the novel I just sold is currently called What Belongs to You, it has also carried some other names. For much of its querying career it was The Sun In Cassiopeia, a title I never liked, and for a briefer while, it was Orion in Winter, a title I liked even less. I often joked about what its title might be, when it finally sold. Perhaps The Art of Making Meth, when we were in the Art of Something phase.
Whatever a book ends up called when it finally reaches readers, I find that working titles have to be something I can face every day that I hope to write. The working title becomes the bit I put in my mouth while I pull the plow. Almost from the first words I wrote of this latest book the story’s working title was Thirteen, the age at which Wavy’s life is shattered.
Up until yesterday, my efforts toward my unofficial NaNo project have been thwarted by the lack of a working title. Triplets was the name of the folder on my computer, but that implied that the triplets were the most important characters of the book. There was another notes file for the story called Mermaid, but that implied that the mermaid was the main character. I toyed briefly with retitling these files things like Short Stop, Apollo, Cut-Off, but they all fell short, because Apollo isn’t himself the most important thing in the story. I tried Sideshow and Athletic Show, both circus references, but neither one really fit.
As silly as it seems, when I went to open the files to work on the story, I spent most of my writing time obsessing about my failure to have a working title I could live with. Then two things happened.
1. I went to my local Habitat for Humanity ReStore and found this:
We have a winnah!
2. I remembered the great exchange between Charles Wallace and Calvin O’Keefe in Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. “I’m a sport,” Calvin says. “I don’t mean like in baseball.” Charles Wallace provides the definition: “A change in gene … resulting in the appearance in the offspring of a character which is not present in the parents but which is potentially transmissible to its offspring.”
That is, after all, what Apollo is: a sport. Not just in the genetic sense, but in the baseball sense, too. It was just a simple matter of renaming my files Sport. Now that I have a working title, I am putting down words. I am building characters and crafting dialog. It’s the best part of writing. Remind me of that later, when I’m crying over revisions.
What about you? How important are titles to you as a writer? As a reader? Does the title change your attitude toward what you’re reading or writing?
ETA: Sometimes you find that you’ve rushed yourself, forced a working title on something. Later, you sneak back and change to the thing that really calls to you, which is why this project is now known as A Marvel of Nature, or Marvel for short.
Bryn Greenwood 
Titles are the first thing anyone reads of a book. If it’s lined up, spines out, it’s all the reader can see. So it gots to be good.
But what makes a good title, LT?
TBH, I’m not keen on one-word titles. They’re too generic and don’t grab my interest or stick in my head, unless it’s some really uncommon word. And the ones that go on so long that they need punctuation (argh no moar title colons plz) are trying too hard.
I’m terrible at thinking of titles. There are days where I’d almost prefer to just number the posts on my blog because trying to think of a good title is too hard.
I’m glad you didn’t use The Sun In Cassiopeia or Orion in Winter: they sound like the titles of science fiction novels from the 1950s and early 60s. (This isn’t a work of science fiction, is it?) I think genre is important in thinking of a title: a modern fantasy, for instance, can play with fairy tale or even medieval tropes. Some words generate certain associations: I thought “Twilight” was a romance, not a vampire novel, though I suppose you could argue it was a sparkly vampire in the Northwest romance novel. 😛 Gone Girl made me think it was a YA novel or chick lit. Boy, was I wrong about that one….
I wonder if the best way to think of a title is to have a bunch of friends read the ms, then invite them over for a party and have them suggest titles, preferably before they get too drunk and the titles too silly. But know myself, I’d probably reject all of them, thinking in self-pity, “Nobody understood my opus!”
Coming up with titles is frustrating, more so than writing a book is. You’re supposed to somehow distill the essence of the book into a handful of words. One interesting thing that has been born of the trend toward self-publishing is statistics on titles. Smashwords did a title/sales survey of all their books and found that books with four-word titles did better than titles of any other length, regardless of the genre or ranking of the book. In short, four words is the sweet spot in titles. That said, for the purposes of a working title, one word is the magic. That way when you bitch about it to your writing compatriots, it’s easy to reference the book that is trying to kill you.
I am always thinking up good (meaning bad, I think) band names or album names, not so much in the way of book titles, though I suppose the album titles could be book titles if I thought in those terms. (and don’t ask for examples, it’s like an off the top of my head thing I don’t collect, it’s like, that’s my new band name, or that would make a good album title and then it’s gone.) I have no idea what makes a good title but I agree with what HG said about the science fiction novel sounding ones.
I love hearing about the process. I don’t think in terms of titles, but I am constantly thinking “That would be a great name for a dog.”
Some titles come to me easy, some just don’t come at all. My pirate novel has been seeking a decent title for over ten years. But my crime novels have had perfect (to me) titles pop up quite readily, and they’re both three-word titles that sound good if it were to be the start of a series. Oh, and I’ve had a great title without a short story to go with it for about two decades. I have a situation for it, but not a story.
Lauri, I’m always thinking “that’s a good name for a cat!” and since I know I won’t have many more cats in my life, I save them up for random cats to put in my writing.