How do you name your books/poems?

Just wondering how most people come up with the name for their books? I've never been too good at it, so any advice is welcome too.

Me? Titles are hard, yeah

For poetry, I search for a central theme/something significant, important word or line, and smack it as the title. In my NaPo thread, I have a few poems where I can't quite place the title and I leave it as it is.

For books, same thing: some important symbol of the story, character, place, and so forth. I sometimes come up with a title along with a novel idea! c:

Titles that really hit the bull's eye of the story, that make you think, "This is it!", are the ones that work best, in my opinion. So intuition plays a role, I think

Intuition plays a giant role for me! Some novels are easy, just like characters — they just come to me with a title, sometimes even before the story itself. Others, however, take ages, and are extremely demanding, and almost never end up titled in the way I had planned (exhibit A: my current novel, These Brilliant and Beautiful Lies, I had planned to title something short and catchy, impactful for it's simplicity).

Working titles are good. I usually use character names, but sometimes it's about a theme, or a word/phrase, or even a place, whatever you think when you mentally refer to your novel (other than "Novel", although I've had some files titled that as well!). Working titles can stay there for as long as you need: sometimes they end up so fitting that they turn into the actual title, and other times they spontaneously change as you write on and get to know your own story to bits.

And then, if you're aiming at getting it published (self-pub excluded), there's a high chance the title ends up changed somewhere in the process anyway...

I only have working titles so far. So fair warning that I haven't found anything I'm happy with, either, haha.

That out of the way, as far as working titles go: I usually go for a core theme, which can be encapsulated in one word (Retaliation, Balance, Dissonance, Matricide). A lot of my core themes also have to do with puns (Balance was about a set of scales, Dissonance is about a hard-of-hearing woman, Matricide is about a teenager searching for his mother while using mathematical magic via matrices, etc.).

From there, my working titles tend to evolve into something that fits the piece better. Whether because of the conflict, the characters, or the voice.

Balance, for example, changed into Living Statues, which reflects the magic of the piece and the main character's conflict and eventual outcome (he's cursed to live forever as one of the animated statues of the city he lives in).

Dissonance changed into Dancing with Fire when it was about a girl who revives magic with dragons, then a phoenix, but back into Dissonance when I revamped it into the urban fantasy it is now. I'm looking for a better title, but it'll probably be stuck with this one for a while.

A few working titles I like but haven't been able to finish are actually my favorites -- and tend to be phrases. Reap What You Sow, Like You Like Me, The After Watch, Beneath the Shallow Water, The Garden of Proserpine (lifted from the Swinburne poem of the same title), Nowhere's God. They all reflect core themes and conflicts or foci of the pieces, and plenty of them are about the main characters or what the main character goes through over the course of the story.

Basically, ask yourself a few questions about the piece and see what the answers are:

- Who is the main character?

- What is the conflict of the piece?

- What is the theme of the piece?

- What is the moral of the piece?

- What would be a freakin' awesome pun to make into a title that you can giggle at a little every time you write?

Have fun with it! No one said it had to be all serious all the time. Before it was Dissonance, that project was simply titled A Flight of Dragons, because all I knew was there were dragons. Retaliation, on the other hand, started out as Magical Fairy Magic And Other Things (no, I'm not kidding) before I scrapped the fairies and added blood magic. Every Witch Way is a cutesy little title for a hardcore witch rivalry piece I'm trying to write.

Point being, we're not publishers -- we're not editors -- so of course we're going to have a hard time titling our own pieces, because they're so close to our heart. It'll be easier to find a fitting title once the piece is finished, so just call it something silly for now, because you can always change it later, and if you go traditional publishing, someone else will probably change it later, too.

Lareine wrote:Point being, we're not publishers -- we're not editors -- so of course we're going to have a hard time titling our own pieces, because they're so close to our heart.

Ooh, that reminds me. Gotta make a note to find an editor by the time I finish my second draft... Anyways, thanks to everybody for the input.

I tend to think of the longest, most awkward thing I could feasibly fit onto the front cover and go with it.

People don't usually like my titles, but I do ^__^

Titles? I would be worrying about finishing the novel first, omg. XD I can't for the heck of it finish a novel. Sad.

As for how, well, I guess I'm prone to nouns. My first unfinished novel is called Bad Lights, Good Lights before I'm not happy with it and make a second version of it called Light Companion. There's another novel while I'm writing this one called When Dreams and Reality Collide, and right now I'm writing a novel called Hidden Entity. As you can see, nouns play a huge role in my titles.

And they basically represent an important aspect of the novel. In Light Companion, a light is an alien from another universe, and its companion is human who shares its power. In Hidden Entity, said entity is evil and is yet to be found, and has been the cause of the destructions happening in the deities' territory.

Making titles are fun! You have all the time you need to make and change and decide until you finish your novel.