5 Tips for Choosing a Title

By georgelthomas on 5 Apr 2022 • ( 0 )

Hi everyone, I hope you’re all well! Today I’m sharing a few tips for choosing the right title for your work. I hope it’s helpful.

Choosing a title for your work can be tough. After all, you want it to be attention-grabbing, interesting and intriguing to a potential reader, and as writers, we all have to do it. It would be easier of course if we could all just call our work ‘untitled’ but that would get rather confusing very quickly.

So to help grease your thinkin’ wheels a bit, here are:

5 Tips for Choosing a Title

Keep it Short
By keeping your title relatively short, as in, a word or two or even a short sentence, you’re more likely to grab the attention of a reader. Nobody wants to read a whole paragraph of text on the front cover.

Use an Important Event
Using an important event from your story as the title can help to draw a reader in. It can help to create intrigue, as in Adam Silvera’s ‘They Both Die at the End’. This title tells you about an event in the story without spoiling the book or really giving anything else away.

Use a Character
You may choose to name your story after its main character. Lots of writers do this. Some of the greatest works of fiction have characters as their titles, for example, Oliver Twist, Emma, Dracula, and Paddington Bear.

Wait Until it’s Written
While a lot of writers like to begin with a title and work from there, many prefer to wait until the project is finished. Doing this will allow you to have a better sense of what the finished piece actually is. How many of us begin to write, believing we are creating one thing, only for it to take a sharp left turn and become something entirely different?

Be careful with Alliteration
Alliteration can be fun, especially with funny stories or children’s stories. If it’s done in a subtle way it can be endearing but if it’s forced it can be irritating and off-putting to a reader.

As always, thanks for spending your time with me today!

Until next time,

George