I hate titles. With a passion, a fury, etc. When I was told that a workshop story needed to have a title, I wanted to poke the professor in the eye. Yeah, sure, maybe that was the wrong thing to want to do, but I don’t claim to be perfect. (Unlike, you know, this guy.) I don’t know when I started hating titles, but I suspect it was around the time I had to start titling my own works and realizing I was really, incredibly inept at choosing a title.

I think most young writers go through a phase of selecting alliterative or punny titles for things, and that (hopefully) goes away. Maybe it morphs into plainly descriptive titles or titles based on the name of a character (The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman comes to mind, a book which someone I respect very much once described as “The most perfect book the world has ever known; if only the world knew about it.”)

But what makes for a good title? First, I think we have to step back further and define what we mean by “good.” Read more »