Forum: Writers


Subject: Naming Your Baby: How to Choose a Selling Title

dialyn opened this issue on Mar 09, 2005 ยท 7 posts


dialyn posted Wed, 09 March 2005 at 3:18 PM

Epic! I think titles change as we get to know the story we are writing. Sometimes the title doesn't change (the short story I wrote called "The Scavengers" was always named that, and will always be named that for me), but other times, something happens that make it necessary to reconsider the first impulse. I have a hard time coming up with interesting titles. One of my novels has a working title of "Memories, Murder, and Other Lies," because that's pretty much a synopsis of what the book is about. I don't remember the other titles I tried, but there were several. Another is called "The 39th Quadrant" because that's the address where the action primarily takes place. Why 39? Because it's 3 times 13 and I thought 13 would be too predictable a number for the kind of story I was writing, and I am attracted to three as a number. My brain works like that.