Rupert and the Erstwhile Flibbertygibbet
Worms!
Worms Too!
How I ate Breakfast and Went to Work
Halitosis and Heartbreak
How important is a good title? Are these good titles? I don’t know. I just culled them at random from Amazon’s best-seller list.
Not really.
I ask because I have no idea what to call my WIP. At the moment I am considering song names but the things I am listening to (Kings of Leon, Arcade Fire, Neko Case, Communique, Q-tip and Bjork) don’t really lend themselves to the story-line. Because although I’m writing a love story I’m also writing an adventure and a sort of realistic futuristic drama with some humor and relief. It should have a title that pops, that hints at what’s between the pages, right?
My first published book had a pretty long title and words which are hard to pronounce and hard to remember- curious, misadventures, Feltus, Ovalton. If I’d inputted into that computer program that promises to predict whether it would be a best-seller or not, it wouldn’t have fared well. Sometimes when someone asks me the title, I see their eyes glaze over before I’ve finished. It was going to be The Peculiar Misadventures…which I thought was kind of snazzy but for some reason we (my agent and I changed it.) Can’t remember why now. Of course as words go ‘peculiar’ is about as bad as ‘curious’.
I think a shorter title may be in order. Something catchy like the name of a song. Something with cache, and buzz and verve. Look at Twilight. What if Stephenie Meyer had called it “Like a Virgin” or “Papa Don’t Preach”? Hmm Maybe not.
When I think about my WIP all I can think about is Love and the Apocalypse. How about Love in the Time of Apocalypse? I was a punk rocker. I have shelves of nihilistic catchy punk records and some that are less tuneful. Surely something in there will leap out at me? I looked. I pulled out some of my old favorite albums and checked the track listings, looking for something clever. Perhaps a double-entendre. Something that could capture the angst of teen love. I found nothing that spoke to me.
I had a working title. Before I’d ever put pen to paper (or more accurately finger to keypad) I had this title, but after I started writing, the story sort of changed. I changed my heroine’s backstory to the extent that the original title doesn’t work anymore. At the present time, I have my files saved in my computer under the name “Lucky”. Short, to the point, memorable(?). It may in fact be a winner.
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