Ras: Catch-18 – Title Tips

Good titles are mysterious. When a title works, it just seems to snap into place. When it doesn’t, well, you’ll know it and, believe me, you can spend unbelievable amounts of time trying to recast it.

Consider these famous works. Nobody Loves Me, Tenderness, Bar-B-Q, Paul Morel, and A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis. Do they sound like books worth reading or movies worth seeing? How about The Last Man in Europe, I Picked a Daisy, Incident at West Egg, The Magnificent Stranger, or The Summer of the Shark?

Eventually the titles in the previous paragraph turned into The Great Gatsby, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Portnoy’s Complaint, A Fistful of Dollars, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Sons and Lovers, Barefoot in the Park, Jaws, 1984, and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.

Can you unscramble them? (The matchups are at the bottom of this post.)

What are we shooting for, then, when we title a story? In my book a title should do three things:

First, make prospective readers want to try it. Imagine yourself in a library skimming the shelves looking for a good read. A good title will throw up a PAUSE sign in this hurly-burly quest. It should be a little intriguing, maybe a little baffling, and it should make the reader ask a question of herself. A couple I like are Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird or Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. Both are metaphorical, both are slightly shocking, and both make me want to know a little more. What is this human stain? Why are mocking birds being killed? I’ll pick the book up and try the first paragraph to find out more.

A good title also evokes memorability – a certain catchy uniqueness that makes it stick in your head. You want people to remember your title when they look for it on Amazon or Netflix and when they tell their friends about it. One-word power titles – Dracula, Ulysses, Metropolis, Psycho, Superman, Jaws, Hair, Unforgiven, Rent, Armageddon, Avatar – often have this virtue.

So do bits of poetry lifted from famous works and applied to your opus. Think Tender Is the Night, where F. Scott Fitzgerald borrowed a line from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, pulled from Macbeth’s nihilistic soliloquy.

Tennessee Williams gets the memorability prize for A Streetcar Named Desire – a surrealistic title that grabs your attention but at first seems inexplicably weird. But then when you see the play and find there’s a part of New Orleans called Desire and learn that Blanche DuBois has to ride that streetcar to get to the Kowalski apartment, you’re primed for the metaphorical meanings that start to flow when Stanley Kowalski shows up in his sweaty T-shirt.

Last, and this is a real bonus if you can pull it off, a title can reinforce a major theme of the story. War and Peace – yes, two big, worthy issues and that’s exactly what Tolstoy’s book is about if you gaze down at it from 30,000 feet and ask yourself what this cornucopia of plot, characters, and themes means. Tolstoy, by the way, first published his novel in serial form as The Year 1805 and then considered calling it All’s Well That Ends Well. Those who know Russian say the original would more accurately be translated as War and Society. A happy accident then. I like War and Peace much better for the natural contrast it highlights. Society? What a snoozer of a word. Has there ever been a good title, not counting books by a sociologist or an economist, using the word Society? (OK, OK, there was that Crosby-Sinatra-Grace Kelly musical High Society.)

Margaret Mitchell’s original title for her Civil War epic was – no joke – Pansy, the nickname of Scarlett O’Hara. Mercifully, she soon moved on to consider other titles and came to like Tomorrow Is Another Day. That famous remark of Scarlett’s would put a quite different spin on the story’s theme. Mitchell’s publisher pointed out there were a number of other Tomorrow-related titles this could be confused with, and she eventually lit on Gone with the Wind, a phrase from a poem by Ernest Dowson that she dropped into Scarlett’s mouth.. Smart move, Margaret. Do we want to be left with a grand vision of a Southern society swept away by war, or end on Scarlett’s rather Pollyannish note of delusion and determination? Is the novel more Scarlett’s story or the South’s story? Not an easy choice for Margaret Mitchell, but choice is exactly what titling requires.

Do you have any titles that are particular favorites?

If you’d like to see more on how titles of famous literary works came about, try Gary Dexter’s wonderful Web site.

The Matchups

Bar-B-Q = The Postman Always Rings Twice

Incident at West Egg = The Great Gatsby

I Picked a Daisy = On a Clear Day You Can See Forever

A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis = Portnoy’s Complaint

The Last Man in Europe = 1984

The Magnificent Stranger = A Fistful of Dollars

Paul Morel = Sons and Lovers

Nobody Loves Me = Barefoot in the Park

The Summer of the Shark = Jaws

Tenderness = Lady Chatterley’s Lover

And about Catch-18 – my title for this post. That was Joseph Heller’s original title for Catch-22, but a novel by Leon Uris called Mila-18 had just been published, and Heller’s publisher feared confusion. So Heller reluctantly went with Catch-22 and coined an immortal catchphrase.