On Titles

Office Hours

Hello dear friends.

I’m writing this the night before the election and it will post the day after, so: no reaction to the election here and I’ll just get right to our question…

Q.

Dear George,

Thank you so much for Story Club and for creating the space and the conditions for all of us to gather online to learn and laugh and cry (yes, I have done all these as a Storyclubber ). 

Please can I ask you about your titles, and how you 'deal' with them? By 'deal' I mean do you go out to find them? Or do you let them find you? How important are they to you as a writer? As a reader? Do they play a role in your writing process?

Titles are such a miniscule % of word count, but a good title has me returning to it at the end of a story and saying, 'ahhhhh, yes, thank you, I didn't realise it when I first saw you, but by drawing me in to read this story I now have a new level of understanding of your one word, or series of words, and my reverence for and enjoyment of language has just trebled again!'  An excellent title works even harder: it sets up echoes, it points me to the 'meaning' at the core of a story AND it reveals something I hadn't spotted in the story as I read it. (For example, I've just finished reading Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and love all the themes of division and separation and wildness and danger and journeys that that title radiates.)

As a young writer (not in age but experience), I find my search for a title often correlates with the development of my story i.e. while I'm early in a story, and not sure yet what it's about, I find myself making notes of many possible titles. I swing back and forth between them, delete some, add new ones, just as I swing between clarity and confusion, confusion and clarity, about what the heck the story is about. (Sometimes I decide this is ridiculous and I must have a title - just as sometimes I force a character to do something because I feel so frustrated by how slowly I am writing this story. Yeah, like that works?!)  However, as my story begins to crystallise, I feel myself becoming more discerning of title possibilities and I start to narrow them down, until eventually - and what a joyous moment this is - just as the ending is appearing, slightly blurred, on the horizon, the title (and often one that has never been on my list of possibilities) falls into my mind and, like a vortex, sucks the story into focus and I can finish it. 

I've also had a title gifted to me by a poet friend who read a late draft of a story, and that was also a very joyful experience. 

So, I wonder what do you do about titles, George and, of course, the default follow-on question, what do Storyclubbers do about theirs?

Yours, with the warmest of hearts.

PS: You once asked us, and I forget the exact wording, to nominate the books or writing that had moved us most in the previous year and I have regretted so much not adding my own contribution to that list.  That year the writing that moved me most was the article Todd Cheney posted about Annie Overly, both members of our community. Todd's beautiful writing about a beautiful human being moved me to a heart-full place far beyond where any other words I'd read that year had taken me. "We had words, and open hearts," he told us. "I agree, she wrote, at death...now there is time for everything. I too find that so many things now seem possible that previously were only imaginable." Story Club has made many things seem possible for me now, that previously were only imaginable - and not just about writing. Thank you so much, George and Todd and Annie and all StoryClubbers.

A.

Thank you for the question and especially for reminding me of Todd’s lovely tribute to Annie, and for giving us this chance to remember Annie who, strangely enough, died almost exactly a year ago, on November 6, 2023.  Annie and Todd’s friendship and correspondence was, indeed, a very special moment in Story Club history. 

Sending our love to Annie and to Todd. 

As for titles…

It’s nice to be asked about this, mainly because I haven’t often been.

The first thing that comes to mind is that, for me, the main goal is for a title to stay out of the way – not telegraph too much, not know “more” than the story itself does. 

So, for example, if I had written “Boule de Suif,” which we’ve just read, I wouldn’t want to title it, you know: “In Which the Rich Get Theirs,” or “The Courtesan Who, Unlike the Rich, Had Some Integrity.” 

These are cheesy examples, of course, deliberately over the top, but I bet we could all think of “literary” titles for that story that are a little more subtle than those two and yet 1) give the story away and/or 2) reduce it to a simple moral, and/or 3) are annoyingly clever.

But I’d rather have a title be forgettable than have it try to do too much and, in the process, get in the way of the story itself. 

In this spirit, I’m fond of the simple, one- or two-word title that leaves the door open: “Home,” for example, or “CommComm” or “Sea Oak” (or “Pastoralia” or “Winky” or “Fox 8” or “Thursday”). 

Hmm – I guess I really like the simple one-worders.

I went through a period of longer, purposely bulky titles (“The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil,” “The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip” and sometimes lapse back into that mode (“The Mom of Bold Action.”)

I like it when a title is intriguing or cool-sounding to the reader (before he reads the story), and then, after he’s read it, might provide a little after-shock of extra meaning (but not too much!).  Among my titles, I’d put “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” in that category.  It sounds a little funny and off, especially with the redundant “bad” in there (and the wobbly grammar fits the wobbly moral world within the story) and I’ve always liked the way “CivilWarLand” looks in print, just as a word.  And, after you read the story, there’s that slight double-sense – yes, the theme park is in decline and, also, the theme park is – well, right, America. 

So, the effect is there, but you could easily miss it.

Mostly, my titles come to me while I’m working, without much effort.  There’s often that “just popped into my head” feeling. And that will stay the title until it outgrows its usefulness.

Sometimes, a title will add just a tiny bit of context, that might make the reader read the story with a little more direction.  I have a story called “Brad Carrigan, American,” which might easily have just been “Brad Carrigan” – but the story has a certain political or cultural direction in it, and it felt right to (slightly) underscore that.

My favorite titles from other writers would include “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” (William Gass), “The Overcoat” (Gogol – nice and simple), “Hunters in the Snow” and “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” (Tobias Wolff), “A Small, Good Thing” (Raymond Carver), “Train” (by Joy Williams, for the very (very) subtle double-meaning there, at least to me).

How about you, Story Club?  How do you go about choosing a title?  What are some of your favorites, and why?