Recent weeks have seen us receive a number of stories with terrific titles, which set me thinking. So what does a good title need? It should:
* Be easy to remember. Yes, I know there have been successful books and stories with long titles but how many can you name? Go for no more than five or six words tops
* Be appropriate to what you are writing. I learned this lesson from my publisher, Robert Hale. I wrote a novel which I wanted to call Ghosts, which they asked to be changed because it made it sound like a ghost story, which it wasn’t. It ended up called The Long Dead, which I think works much better
* Pose questions. Something that makes you wonder. Taking The Long Dead as an example, who are long dead? Why are they long dead? How did they die? If they are long dead, why do we care now?
* Maybe go for a name of a person and maybe make it a possessive title - think Angela’s Ashes
*Or maybe a place. Think Northanger Abbey
* Maybe pick a line from the work itself such as They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
John Dean
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