How Titles Can Shape Your Story

Shannon Dittemore is the author of the Angel Eyes trilogy. She has an overactive imagination and a passion for truth. Her lifelong journey to combine the two is responsible for a stint at Portland Bible College, performances with local theater companies, and a love of all things literary. When she isn’t writing, she spends her days with her husband, Matt, imagining things unseen and chasing their two children around their home in Northern California. To connect with Shan, check out her website, FB, Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest.

While one book is out on submission, I've been working on another--totally unrelated--story. For drafting purposes (and because Microsoft Word forces you to come up with a file name) it's been saved on my computer as Homeless in Hawaii.

Pretty blah title, right? And I'm sort of at the place in the drafting process where having a killer working title could help by bringing a little focus to my writing. I thought it might be beneficial to you to see just how a title can pull things together for an author.

This made itself clear to me when I was drafting my third novel in the Angel Eyes trilogy. I was marketing my first book, editing my second and drafting my third. In the thick of things, I received an email from my editor asking for a synopsis of my third book to take to a titling meeting set for the next day.

Yeah. The next day. Nothing like a little pressure to get you cooking.

For the uninitiated, a titling meeting is when folks from different departments--Editorial, Marketing, Publicity, Sales--toss around ideas for book titles. See, just because YOU come up with a title for your book does not mean your publisher will stamp it on the cover. All sorts of folks are involved at this stage and even though I had little notice, I did not want to disappoint them.

Of course I didn't have a synopsis for book three. Book one had just come out, for crying out loud. All I had were some ideas and a vague sense of direction. I was still playing with character development and voice and trying to decide who got to live and who wouldn't make it through. The idea of sitting down to sum up the conclusion of a trilogy with only 24 hours notice was daunting.

You know what I did? I loaded up my littlest rugrat in the stroller and I bought myself a Mexican Mocha and I walked the mall until I knew that I knew that I knew what I was writing about.

And then I went home and scratched it out. I wrote a synopsis. A short one, mind you. Very short. One page, actually. But it was the one page that changed everything for me.

This barely adequate synopsis brought my writing into focus. All the OTHER STUFF that I would need to later sort out, fell by the wayside, and I focused only on Brielle's journey and on the things that would prevent her from reaching her destination. And by the time I finished that single page, I KNEW what my title should be. What it had to be, really.

I sent my editor the synopsis and a handful of title options--because I'm a good little soldier--but I put a big fat star by my favorite. And when my editor emailed me to say that the titling committee agreed wholeheartedly with my first choice, I was not surprised. I was ecstatic but not surprised. It was the RIGHT title. It was the ONLY title, really. And when I see Dark Halo ghosting across the cover, I can't help but remember that day and a frantically scribbled synopsis that shaped an entire trilogy.

Now. It's not always that simple. But, even if my publisher had vetoed my title idea, the time I spent working on that synopsis and the time I spent thinking about my story would not have been in vain. I needed to think about my title far more than my publisher did and their quickie deadline forced me to do it at just the right moment.

Today, I was flipping through Betsy's Lerner's writing book, The Forest for the Trees, and I came across a passage I'd forgotten about. Lerner tells the story of how Amy Tan changed the title of her first book from Wind and Water to The Joy Luck Club. Here's what Tan said about it:

Lerner says that after Tan settled on The Joy Luck Club, "the club and its members became increasingly vivid to her." The title pulled the story together.

A good title will do that. Even if it's only your title. Even if, down the road, a publisher changes it. A good working title can focus you and shape your story and while it is perfectly normal to not have a title when you start drafting, I wonder if, like me, there will come a point when your story could benefit from some hard thinking and some title pondering.

Tell me, have you thought about titling your story? At what point in the process do you do that? Do you change your title often? And have you found that titling your tale helps pull your plot together?