Best Book Title or Short Story title?

As a writer I find titles difficult. Sometimes they just appear like a lighthouse beam shredding through the dark  but more often I am left struggling, worrying over ideas, pinching bits off, adding and subtracting until I'm convinced that what I am left with is as illuminating as a spent match.
On February 19 I wrote about the weird and wonderful book titles that are short listed each year for the Diagram Prize but I've been thinking about the great titles: the ones that stay with you and say something when you first pick them up and say something different when the story is over...
They are important to get right because it  sets a temperture for what follows...
Here's a couple that spring to mind:
Books A HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
(although I did once read a review complaining that it was overwritten and it should be really 50 years of...)
Short story I HAVE NO MOUTH BUT I MUST SCREAM one of the best short stories I've read and I am not a big sci fi fan. Written in the 60s by Harlan Ellison, the title and the story have stayed with me since I first read it.
Any personal favourites? Any tips for creating that all important first line of a story (which is what a title is, after all...)

Fanfare! Trumpets! Announcing new blog title

I'm thrilled by the response to this competition - not only by the number of responses, but also the many thoughtful and reflective suggestions made and the few that made me laugh out loud. There were also a few I didn't 'get' and I can't help feeling, dear reader, that the fault was in me. 

In true competition tradition, I'll give you the ones that didn't make it, but deserve an honourable mention.

UNDERTOW - suggested by Elizabeth who was inspired by a line in a Seamus Heaney poem. It's good, isn't it?  An undertow is a strong current that flows  away from the shore, going literally against the tide - something that writers have to be prepared to do. In the end though it didn't make it because, although it works as a title, as a blog title it wouldn't attract casual readers interested in writing.

THE FIVE RULES OF WRITING - suggested by Maria. I'd read a blog called that. I might not agree with it, but I would definitely read it. I haven't chosen it because I don't know what the five rules are...

THE INFINITE MONKEY THEOREM- suggested by Jill. She also supplied this helpful illustrative quote is from Wikipedia

Mr Burns states: "This is a thousand monkeys working at a thousand typewriters. Soon they'll have written the greatest novel known to man. Let's see. (reading) 'It was the best of times, it was the "blurst" of times'? You stupid monkey!"

Why didn't I choose it? It's good, it's very good but it's not quite me. Jill, you can have it back on one condition: use for the title for your own writing blog -  I'll be the first to follow.

THE WRITER'S BLOCK - suggested by Chuqua. Almost went with this - the only reason I didn't was because I found a very good and active blog with that title. (Difficult this title business, isn't it?) 

FRIPPERY - suggested by Stephen because "Frippery is a word that is just not being used these days but I hope it conveys the ephemeral nature of blogging...".

He's right, frippery and blogging go together and it is a word that deserves to be part of our vocabulary.  Still, it doesn't have that immediate writerly quality.... so reluctantly no...

INVENTING THE WHELAN - suggested by Heather. Love it. Love it. May use it (or a variation) somehow someway soon.

There were a lot of very good ones that nearly made. THE DIGITAL INKWELL from Maggi, WRITING BY-WAYS and WORDS TO WRITERS from Vic, WRITE UP YOUR STREET from Alice and no less than 11 from Jazz including WORD CATCHER, ADDICTED TO THE WORD and FOR THE LOVE OF THE WORD.

But finally I've made up my mind....no more flaphing around...

Da-da! Da-dum!I've gone for Eileen's CONNECTING THE POETRY AND PROSE....

-- because I've loved E.M.Forester's Howard's End since I studied it for A level 
-- because I'm a prose writer who enjoys poetry, (when you're writing a novel read poetry - you don't want to get immersed in someone else's story but you do want to surround yourself with rich language used with precision...)
-- because I think it works. Hope you do too.

Although I said there would be no second prize, Jazz offered so many good ideas - all of them workable - that I really feel she deserves a reward. So if she emails me her address I'll send a copy of A GOOD CONFESSION to her too....

 

Choosing a new name for this blog

is hard. Even with 40 suggestions - thank you everyone for joining in the competition - had many more good ideas to consider than I expected.

Do I go for the funny or the accurate?

The intelligent or lyrical...?

Hmmm. Will announce the winner on Monday. Not to prolong it unnecessarily but...

a) because tomorrow will be taken up with Sunday lunch which for once will be roughly at lunch time and preparing for A SPORTING CHANCE tomorrow night (not only reading, but also compering....wish me luck)

b) will run a few of the contenders by the family at said lunch. Completely unbiased as they've never read blog and unlikely to do so in the future. Come to think of it, only one of them has read my novel and the one that did said, and I quote, that it was 'surprisingly good'.  (Excellent example of why adverbs should be avoided.)

Free to enter competition that will only take a few moments...

I need help.

I've written elsewhere that titles are tricky things, hard to get right. The best ones seem to come in a lightening moment of inspiration. I've chickened out with this blog - first calling it the deeply unimaginative Twenty Ten and then deciding that I did probably quite like writing it and was in for the long haul. Fearing that the title would make even less sense in Twenty Eleven, Twenty Twelve etc etc I plumped on Bridget Whelan....I said I needed help.

Ok, so here's the competition.

Think of a title that suits the content and that would encourage writers and would-be writers and casual surfers - someone like you perhaps - to visit on the off chance.

Prize - there has to be a prize. Drum beat. Fanfare. A copy of A GOOD CONFESSION sent to your address (as long as it is somewhere in the British Isles).

Deadline - there has to be one of those as well. September 1st 2010.

That's a whole month to come up with a few words.

You can post your suggestion here as a comment or if you would rather not expose it to public scrutiny straightaway email me at softrain AT ntlworld.com. Put the word title in the subject line.

Think of it as an act of charity....

Just to recap - it's open to anyone with a bright idea but I can only send the fantastic prize to an address in England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

 THANKS!

More about titles

Since writing about The Third Man and the titles of other political autobiographies, I contemplated just how hard it is to get the title right.  I've discovered that Lulu - the American self publishing company - now have a programme to analyse your chosen novel title. It claims that

for the first time in literary history, you can put your title to the scientific test and find out whether it has what it takes for bestseller success.

A GOOD CONFESSION apparently has a 26.3% chance of being a bestseller.  

Bonfire of the Vanities also has a 26.3% chance and The Importance of Being Ernest notched up 26.3%
Sensing that there could be a pattern here (i.e. that everything has about a 1 in 4 chance of being a runaway success according to the wildly optimistic Lulu),  I put in Lolita.  Nabokov's masterpiece only has 20.1% chance of making the big time.

Click on the title of this post to try out the site.

My favourite all time title I think has to be THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD (an Andy Garcia film with a great plot). It scored just 10.2%

Puns and Politicians: Borrowed lines and Broken Promises

TITLES ARE HARD TO GET RIGHT. A few, rare times they drop from the sky before the writing begins, but usually they are the result of a mind changing, cringe making, brain storming process that ends in choosing the one you dislike least...
 
I wonder what discussions Mandelson had with his publishers before coming up with the title for his autobiography The Third Man. It is taken, of course, from Graham Greene's story and today Boyd Tonkin writing in The Independent said that he wasn't sure why the politician...

"chooses on the cover of his testimony to recall a film and novella dominated by a shadowy crook who makes little children die in agony thanks to his trade in toxic remedies."

And ends up in a sewer...
Here's my pick of political autobiography titles (and inclusion has absolutely nothing to do with the views expressed within...).
1) Free Radical by Vince Cable (Always like witty, pithy puns but time has a way of putting a new twist on them...)
2) Climbing the Bookshelves by Shirley Williams
3) I'm Not the Only One  George Galloway borrowing a line from John Lennon's Imagine.
4) Mr Galloway goes to Washington - I haven't looked it up but I presume that's from the 30s Gary Cooper film Mr Dee Goes to Washington. Saw it on TV as a child - the little guy taking the big guys on and winning...lip trembling, heart thumping stuff...
5) Choose your Weapons...what a brave spit-in-your-eye challenge ...disappointed to find it isn't Douglas Hurd's autobiography, but the title of his history of 200 years of British foreign secretaries. He called his autobiography Memoirs. That's not really trying...
6) Let the People Decide by left wing Labour MP by Dennis Canavan
7) In My Own Time by Jeremy Thorpe because it doesn't even hint at the Liberal leader's scandal ridden secret life....

Did Charlie Haughey, the former Irish taoiseach, ever write his autobiography?
Haven'been able to find one but I've discovered that Aongus Collins has written his cartoon biography.  The respected historian T. Ryle Dwyer has written the biography of two taoiseachs: Jack Lynch and Charlie. Jack's is called Nice Fellow and Charlie's...Short Fellow. Ouch!