How to title your work

or how I got over myself and learned to love the headline

Coming up with titles for my creative work is something I’ve conceptually wrestled with over the years.

There was a point in time where (like question marks at the end of a sentence) I actively detested them and refused to use them for the most part. My reasoning was titles (like question marks) gave too much away. That they were too explicit, and therefore cheap. Why should I provide a preamble? Readers are smart enough to decipher my work through the context of its content without needing instructions on how they should feel about the work before even starting it.

I have no idea how I got to that conclusion, but I felt very strongly about it. It’s funny to look back on how rigid I was with these little self-imposed writing rules I had created for myself. When I think about it more, these rules were most likely a form of protest, a response to not feeling like I belonged among serious and professional writers and therefore needed to differentiate myself even more. Like, oh they won’t let me in their club so I’ll just create my own with only myself as a member. Low self-esteem can be such a bitch, and I’m glad to not be drowning so deeply in that negative mindset anymore. I mean, I still don’t quite feel like I belong, and I like being different, but I’m much less of a sore loser about it now!

Anyway, I saw this note from Larry at

Flash Fiction That Escaped My Mind

and it got me thinking about my relationship with titling.

Most of my early poems do not have titles, which is partially due to my prior opinion about titles feeling cheap, but also because books like You Could Never Objectify Me More Than I’ve Already Objectified Myself are meant to be read as one long stream of thought. Titles are not only a starting point, but also serve as a stop from the previous poem or story, and I didn’t want to break up the reading experience by creating a pause between pieces. That makes sense, right?

These days it’s more of a fun challenge to create a title for a piece. I like to think of early Bright Eyes albums and songs, which always had intricate long-winded titles that were sometimes mini poems or humorous adages in and of themselves (think: “The Calendar Hung Itself,” “Haligh, Haligh, a Lie, Haligh,” and “When the Curious Girl Realizes She Is Under Glass” from Fevers and Mirrors). That’s what I aim for. A title doesn’t have to be a summary of what’s to come in the piece. It can be a vaguely related line, or a line that didn’t work within the piece but still feels like it belongs to the piece, or something completely separate from the piece but somehow works and adds a layer of mystery and intrigue.

Titling books, my poetry collections and novels, is a bit more difficult of a task. There are always so many different ideas of what I want to be the one thing that people will read first before delving into the work, and those ideas fluctuate and evolve throughout the writing process. I can sometimes get stuck on an idea because it has personal meaning for me, or is some kind of inside joke I have with myself, but those are not usually the best titles.

Before it was a place a feeling something he said to you, a memoir/novel told in second-person about domestic abuse, I was calling it Hate Train. That title came from following Nicki Minaj’s 2018 cancellation, which has nothing to do with the book, but I liked the sound of that phrase. I think I was also using it as a way to emotionally distance myself from the work. The story is so personal, so raw and uncomfortable, I thought I needed to put up a barrier to protect myself. Similarly, I was thinking of calling it Sympathy and Payola, another Nicki Minaj soundbite from that era that resonated with me because the abuser in my book was a manipulative man who relied on nepotism and making people for sorry for him. Ultimately, neither of those titles really worked, and I chose a place a feeling something he said to you (suggested by my friend Amy Berkowitz, who helped me edit the book) since it’s a line that shows up throughout the book and evokes, in my opinion, a kind of mood of what’s to come in the book.

If I had the opportunity to go back and re-title my first novel, American Mary, I would. I wish I had googled the title before deciding on it. If I had done that, I would have known that American Mary is also the title of a Canadian horror film. Really messed up my SEO by not thinking that one through. At the time, I had chosen it because it’s the title of a song by The National that I liked, whose lyrics I felt inspired by while writing and forming the novel. My working title was a riff off of Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson. Reading and studying that book, not for school or anything but on my own personal journey of artistic discovery, gave me the confidence and push to write my own novel. It probably would have been a good idea to explore that idea more or use it as a jumping-off point for creating a list of possible titles.

It really can be fun and helpful to keep a list of title ideas before deciding on the final. For the project I’ve recently completed and am currently querying for, I had several notebook pages full of titles I was considering. Whenever a new title came to me, I’d jot it down for later. It’s kind of cool to look at all of the titles in one long list. Maybe I’ll make a poem out of them one day.

There is no formula for titling, and I’m not sure if “the perfect title” exists since phrases and words might call upon a different connotation or association for whoever is reading the title at the time, but it is a good thing to take seriously. Just taking the time to think about crafting your title, and doing some research, can save you a lot of heartache in the future. Again, the title doesn’t need to be a summary of your work, nor should it be. Like Larry said, you already spent so much time writing the story, so why not live in it a little longer? You can stay in that place that got you to the end of the story and find some souvenirs to bring back with you, some words of remembrance or a phrase that can instantly transport you back. That’s what a good title does to me, anyway.

One other thing: I recently wrote a guest post over at

Black Lipstick

where I reviewed Internet Girlfriend by

Stephanie Valente

. I also reminisce a lot about the early internet and the relationships I formed there. Please check it out, and subscribe to Black Lipstick if you haven’t already!