Titling a book -- AAAARGH!

I learned something yesterday: If you want people to read something, you do not title it "Today I want to talk about age as a symbolic construct". Too scholarly, right? I tend to groove on those types of analyses because I'm an academic, but I suspect you'd have read it more easily if I'd called the essay "Age and Meaning", although that sounds like a PBS special. Still, it doesn't sound like a stuffy lecture.

I hate giving a title to a book more than any other aspect to writing. When I wrote my dissertation on husbands and housework (did you think I was an English professor? No!) I had no title on the day my advisor and I sent out copies and paperwork to my dissertation defense panel. Dr. Hafstrom wryly noted, "We need something to put on this blank here." My response: "How about 'Fred'?" Not surprisingly, she didn't accept that. The final title was: Women's Work, Men's Work: Division of Labor and Wife's Employment. Or something like that. Although the title doesn't grab the casual reader, the academic reader can find that in an electronic card catalog and say, "I really need to read that for my dissertation!"

I find titles for fiction to be even more difficult. My latest novel (currently abandoned in favor of my fifth edit of my first novel) bore the original title of The Ones Who Toppled The World. Which sounds like the title of a Fifties' horror movie but would have worked if the protagonists really toppled the world. They did, but in such a subtle way that the world didn't realize they were being toppled. Think of it as pushing a can of beans on the bottom of a big pyramid-stacked store display. The cans would eventually topple when the right vibration unlodged the keystone can one tiny fraction more. That's what my protagonists did in effect -- in a very strange and subtle way based on quirky innate powers. I ended up naming the book Prodigies, because the innate powers showed up in individuals who also were young prodigies in their respective interests.

I run titles past my husband, who has read enough science fiction that he can spot real clunkers. "I don't think Future Past will work as a title because it sounds too much like 'Days of Future Past' by the Moody Blues." I respond sweetly with, "Too bad, because I'm naming my next novel that." See how collaboration works? 

The title you want has to give the idea of the book without giving away too much -- Everyone Dies in the End, for example, is described as a "light-hearted coming of age story" by Goodreads. The title gives a glance at the murderous plot and the snark of that phrase as used by the average reader to describe a book. Gone With the Wind describes both the romance and the devastation of that book. Bimbos of the Death Sun -- don't laugh; it's an excellent mystery novel set at a science fiction convention -- reflects the joy that is pulp science fiction novels, and is an incredibly evocative title.

I don't know that my titles are that exciting: Gaia's Hands; Mythos; Apocalypse; Voyageurs; Reclaiming the Balance; Prodigies. Not yet written -- Gods' Seeds; Future Past; and I don't have a name for the last one, but the working title is "Dirty Commie Gypsy Elves", a really poor title. That's what we get if I'm left to my own devices naming things. 

I appear to like short titles, don't I? That's probably because I am in love with words with impact. Some of those are names of shadowy groups in the book -- Voyageurs; Prodigies; Future Past. I love shadowy groups with cool, cryptic names. (Too many superhero movies, perhaps?) They're also character oriented, which is near and dear to my heart. 

My least favorite title -- Reclaiming the Balance. It flatly states what the book is about, which is the travails of a pacifistic collective recovering from a battle to defend themselves, where they turn against members who are half-human despite the collective's charter to forsake discrimination. I just don't know if it grabs people.

If anyone has an idea for the above title please let me know!