Staggeringly Good Titles
One of the best titles I've ever read is on a contemporary collection of short fiction by Stacy Richter:
My Date With Satan.
Gets your attention, doesn't it?
Sometimes agents and editors help authors with their titles. I don't know if Stacey Richter came up with that title herself, but since it's one of the titles of the short stories inside, I'm guessing she did.
And great titles sell books.
Great titles can grab the readers' attention and make them read the back of the book (or the Overview/Description of e-books). A great pitch in the "Editorial Review", as it's called, will encourage them to open the book and read the opening sentence. A fantastic first sentence might make them read the first paragraph. "Urgency" at the end of that first paragraph will make them want to continue reading. Appropriately placed "urgency" throughout the book will make the readers buy it.
(If you don't yet know what "urgency" is, read Alexandria Constantinova (formerly writing as "Sherri") Szeman's "Urgency: Good Writing Needs It" (which originally appeared in The Writer, and which was reprinted in The Writer's Handbook 1997 and in The Novel Writer's Handbook).
Consider some of these wonderful, attention-grabbing titles of published works (all genres):
Church of Dead Girls
(Stephen Dobyns)
The Killer Inside Me
(Jim Thompson)
I Married a Dead Man
(Cornell Woolrich)
A Hell of a Woman
(Jim Thompson)
Waiting to Exhale
(Terry McMillan)
Possessing the Secret of Joy
(Alice Walker)
The Killing Gift
(Bari Wood)
Of Human Bondage
(W. Somerset Maugham)
The Man in the Iron Mask
(Alexandre Dumas)
The Ballad of the Sad Café
(Carson McCullers)
The Kommandant's Mistress
(Alexandria Constantinova Szeman)
(writing as "Sherri")
A Good Man is Hard to Find
(Flannery O'Connor)
Do With Me What You Will
(Joyce Carol Oates)
Love in the Time of Dinosaurs
(Alexandria Constantinova Szeman)
Cracking India
(Bapsi Sidhwa)
The Binding
(Brenda Barrie)
A Suitable Boy
(Vikram Seth)
Zombie
(Joyce Carol Oates)
You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down
(Alice Walker)
Dead-Eye Dick
(Kurt Vonnegut)
Fatal Vision
(Joe McGinnis)
Gone With the Wind
(Margaret Mitchell)
How the Strong Survive
(Newton Love)
The Confessions of Nat Turner
(William Styron)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
Sophie's Choice
(William Styron)
Holden & Me
(Alan Balter)
Stab of Intelligence
(CJ Cooper)
Rat
(Kevin Lavey)
As I Lay Dying
(William Faulkner)
A Streetcar Named Desire
(Tennessee Williams)
Deliverance
(James Dickey)
After the Splendid Display
(Don Bogen)
Why People Don't Heal and How They Can
(Caroline Myss)
Girl, Interrupted
(Susanna Kaysen)
Me Talk Pretty One Day
(David Sedaris)
Those titles cover a wide range of genres: plays, short stories, essays, non-fiction, creative non-fiction, memoirs, and poetry.
They also come from various types of non-fiction and of fiction: literary, romance, adventure, detective, mystery, noir, comedy, etc.
A trip to your local bookstore or library will reveal an exciting array of titles. Some are good; some aren't. (It seems that a few authors, once they've achieved fame or wealth or both, don't bother to write good titles or good opening sentences, and their editors don't improve them, which is a pity.)
Open the books with the titles that catch your attention. Do the opening sentences maintain your interest? Does the first paragraph make you long for more?
That's what you're aiming for, no matter what genre you write.
And it all starts with a title.
in all Genres; Revised & Expanded, 10th Anniversary Edition
© 2001, 2011, 2012 by Alexandria Constantinova Szeman
(formerly writing as "Sherri")
RockWay Press, LLC Logo © 2004, 2012 by Alexandria Constantinova Szeman.
Wet-plate Collodian Photograph of Cathedral Rock © 2004 by Robert J. Szabo. Used with artist's gracious permission.
Web-site Updated: Tuesday 1 May 2012
