Titles! And Why They Suck

Good afternoon, everybody. Hope everyone’s week is going well, or at least as well as it can be going in the wonderful year 2020. Today, I’m going to write about titles, which are, in my humble, subjective opinion, the absolute worst thing about writing.

This counts for fiction (as in, my book Perspective, now available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats) and non-fiction (like, say, my Master’s thesis, Fighting for Home: Reassessing Sparta’s Contributions in the Second Persian Invasion of Greece). What do these two works have in common? Absolutely nothing, other than the godawful time I had trying to title them. Do you know when I settled on the title Perspective for my book? About twenty minutes before I published my first blog post on here, following weeks of banging my head against the wall trying to come up with something. Well, maybe months. Wellllll, maybe years.

I came up with the idea of writing this book sometime around 2015, believe it or not, while I was bored during a break between college classes at Minot State in North Dakota (Go Beavers!), a story that I’m sure I’ll write about at another time. When I first jotted down a few notes about the theme behind this story, as well as a few character beats, I wrote at the top of the page the glorious first title: Untitled Story About Dummy Teenagers. And, believe it or not, that title stuck for two whole years. In that time, I’d very, very slowly written the entirety of the first act and a decent chunk of the second. At that point, I realized I’d better come up with a title. I wracked my brain for ages trying, and failing, to come up with something until I found my proper working title, Three Days in 2011. This title came about because, shockingly, the story takes place across three days in the year 2011. Sounds straightforward, right? Simple, concise, to-the-point. All good, eh? No, not good. Every time someone asked me what the title was for my work-in-progress, I’d give it to them, and then watch something die in their eyes a little. I knew the truth. They knew the truth. The title sucked. But, what to change it to?

In truth, there is a very good chance I was overthinking the whole situation (I have been known to do that). With the book as-yet unfinished, I knew that I had plenty of time to come up with something better, but it got me thinking… what exactly makes a good title? I’ve given that quite a bit of thought, especially in the past few weeks, and come to a conclusion: nothing makes a good title. There is no title that is inherently good. What makes Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone a good title? What makes Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage a good title? What makes It a good title? On the movie side, what make Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri a good title? Personally, I’m not sure any of the titles are ones that you could look at from a distance, with absolutely no knowledge of the book’s contents, and go, “Well, that sounds awesome!” This has led me to a conclusion. Titles are, perhaps, not as important as they appear. Unless it involves a very popular brand name, I’m not sure that they’re that much of a deciding factor in terms of whether or not someone picks up a book. If anyone reading this has any thoughts on the topic, feel free to drop a comment! Actually, if anybody out there who reads this happens to be an author, feel free to throw some advice at me. But to me, personally, they aren’t as important as they might appear. Or maybe that’s just my rationalization for being utterly incapable of coming up with a good one on my own. Whatever helps me sleep better at night.

Three Days in 2011 stuck for a very long time, during which I consulted with many, many people around me trying to come up with something better. I’ll try to list a few of them—Lord knows, I don’t remember them all. Maybe some of them are better; it’s more likely that most are worse. From early 2019 to September 2020, I went through Three Days, Three Days in Senior Year, Senior Year, High School Problems, Senior Crisis (which was dropped because it makes it sound like the book might be about elderly individuals going through various struggles), Mid-Class Crisis, Summer-Fall-Winter, School!, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel, Peter in Senior Year, Peter vs. Senior Year (which I actually liked, but it’s way too similar to Scott Pilgrim vs. The World), How to Be a Happy Teenager (it was surprisingly difficult to find a title that didn’t sound like a non-fiction self-help book), The Story of a Teenager Who Entered Senior Year Neurotic and Exited Senior Year a Couple Months Later With Some New Ideas, and many, many more. The second-to-last title I had was Outlook. This was after a period of meditating staring at the ceiling while reruns of ER played in the background. I liked it, it was pithy, it fits the theme of the book, BUT it did have a problem in that I was mildly concerned that Microsoft wouldn’t appreciate me using that (because, of course, as a first-time self-published author, Microsoft is definitely going to notice me). I tried to find another word that resembled Outlook and came, at last, to Perspective.

I still don’t think it’s perfect. Maybe I should have listened to the guy who recommended I go with P3rsp3ctive (rejected because it seemed like something the Fast & Furious franchise would do). But the moral of the story is that I really don’t think there’s such a thing as a perfect title, and with that in mind, maybe authors should worry a bit less about them. Books may be judged on their cover, but that doesn’t necessarily include the name.