When the Gods and Muses Are Silent, or Coming up with Titles

If you’re like me, you sometimes have absolutely no trouble coming up with a perfect title. It just falls onto the page, as if through divine or muse-like inspiration.

But other times the gods and muses are silent. You have the dreaded place-holding “Essay” or “Story” or “[today’s date]” written at the top of the page. And nothing falls from the sky, not even bird poop. I’m not sure I have all the answers (my disclaimer), but I hope that by exploring different kinds of titles, you’ll find some new approaches for titling your work.

First—and this is probably obvious—most titles reflect, in some way, the overarching theme or subject, or an important event or symbol, of a work. That’s not to say titles always give everything away. Having to do some digging to make a connection is common, and probably good. But the connection should (usually) be there.

In what follows I’ll get into eight broad categories for titles. For my examples, I’ll use real titles. I’m not particularly concerned about genre, length, or even medium—great titles are everywhere, from microfiction to tomes, from poetry to fine art. Many of the short story and essay titles come from the three anthologies I often use when I edit: The Best American Short Stories of the Century, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, and In Fact: the Best of Creative Nonfiction. I will also—forgive me—use some of my own titles, if for no other reason than that I (hopefully) recall exactly how I came up with them.

Double Meaning

Many of my favorite titles have double meanings: a literal relevance (usually clear) to the work, and a figurative relevance (often subtle). This latter quality is what gives these titles their heft. I think the best of these double-meaning titles are the ones you have to think about after reading (the connections are not obvious).

A great example is Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” In the story, O’Brien literally describes (in glorious detail) the things a platoon of soldiers in the Vietnam War carried. But they carried much more than these physical objects (they carried sorrow, love, trauma, etc.); this latter, of course, provides the double meaning.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go is titled after a song in the work (a fifties blues ballad by Johnny Ace). The title is also an entreaty, one that becomes all too understandable as the novel develops (with Ishiguro’s usual slow, measured revelations). 

Richard Rodriguez’s creative-nonfiction piece “The Brown Study” references an idiomatic expression having to do with “being in a state of serious absorption or abstraction” (Merriam-Webster). The color in the title also alludes to race in America (Rodriguez is Mexican-American).

I’m finishing up a story of my own. It’s set in the Yucca Valley. I’m calling it “Yucca.” It’s a break-up story, and it’s sad as hell. In fact, it’s downright yucky. (Uh, get it?)

My guess is that many good titles (including a number of those below), in one way or another, fall into the double-meaning category. And I should point out again that all of these titles tie in to the works’ larger themes or subjects in some way.

Phrase from the Work Itself

Like most popular songs (with lyrics), stories and essays (including this one, as you no doubt noticed) often use a phrase from the work itself as a title. The phrase often has one or more qualities: a double meaning (see above), a poetic or eloquent sound, and (again) some essential meaning relating to the work’s theme or subject.

Flannery O’Connor’s classic “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is part of a character’s dialogue in the story. There’s some obvious double meaning here, for, indeed, a good man is hard to find when the protagonists drive off (spoiler alert (although we’ve all read this one, I trust)) to their eventual doom.

One of the greatest—perhaps the greatest—last sentences of a story occurs in James Joyce’s “The Dead”: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” One could teach a masterclass using this one sentence. And not a bad title, I do say.

Like O’Connor’s story, the title of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is pulled from a character’s dialogue (with a slight change). I’m sure there’s some symbolism here, but it also just sounds great.

The title of Nathan Englander’s short story “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” also shows up in the text. It’s rather hilarious: “Everything I know about my family on my mother’s side wouldn’t even make a whole story.” (And yet, the author found a way!)

I use this kind of title often. A few years ago I published a story called “The Immensity of Existing Things.” This phrase is in the story, but it’s also a direct quote from a poem written by Czesław Miłosz (the story’s protagonist); which leads me to . . . 

Phrase from Another Work

These titles are common. The important thing is to make sure your source is relatively iconic or, I don’t know, cool. This is the point.

A classic example is Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which, of course, takes its title from Macbeth’s famous soliloquy in . . . I’ve forgotten the play . . . Hamlet? Shakespeare is a gold mine for titles (e.g., Brave New World (Macbeth), Something Wicked This Way Comes (also Macbeth (I guess Macbeth is a good one)), Infinite Jest (Hamlet), etc.).

The Bible is a common source of titles. Faulkner again: Absalom, Absalom! comes from 2 Samuel 18:33. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises comes from Ecclesiastes 1:5. There are many others.

Finally, poetry shows up frequently, probably because it’s, you know, all haughty and intellectual and shit. For example, Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night comes from a Keats poem. Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men comes from a Robert Burns poem. McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men comes from a Yeats poem. And so on. (Email me at erik@noreply.com if you want the above poems’ titles. I’m just rolling along here.)

By the way, did you notice how good the titles above sound? Always consider the sound of your titles (just as you should always consider the sound of your prose).

Riffing on the Titles of Other Works

Instead of searching within other works for phrases, you can steal straight off the top.

As above, the sources are often relatively familiar. Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) uses (nearly) the same title as the H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897). (Interestingly, the man is literally invisible in Wells’s novel, and figuratively invisible in Ellison’s.)

Nathan Englander’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” (2011) is a riff on Raymond Carver’s classic “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (1981). Englander uses some of Carver’s rough plot points, but the two couples in each story . . . well, they talk about different stuff. (I happen to be reading this collection at the moment. Hence, the double Englander reference in this essay.)

Brian Evenson’s short story “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (2009) uses the exact title of Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay. Unless you’re a student of mid-twentieth-century Marxist philosophy, you might not be familiar with Benjamin’s essay (and for shame!). But, as I mentioned above, asking a reader to dig a bit to make connections is fine, maybe even good, as long as enough people can figure it out. Just the right amount of obscurity can go a long way.

Harold Bloom’s The Anatomy of Influence is a riff on Robert Burton’s classic The Anatomy of Melancholy. (Anyone reading narratologist Harold Bloom will recognize the antecedent. To be clear, this recognition is important for the target audience.)

I recently published a story called “The Phenomenology of Leaving,” which is a bit of a riff on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (which itself is a bit of a riff on Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit (which, for all I know, is a bit of a riff on the phenomenology of something else)). I snuck some of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy (but not Hegel’s) into the piece, to clarify (maybe) the connection. It’s all pretty subtle, and I’m sure no one will get it. Whatever.

And of course: Ulysses! (I could have started and ended with this one.)

First Line (à la Poetry)

My guess is that prose infrequently uses opening phrases for titles because there’s less likelihood, compared to poetry, that these first words will sound good. There’s also, I think, more pressure on titles of prose to “mean something,” to resonate with the larger work, whereas in poetry it’s understood that the first-line title might be for mere convenience.

But I still think it’s a potentially effective title. A recent Pushcart anthology included a short story called “Like Someone Asleep in a Cinema” (Mary Jo Bang), which begins “Like someone asleep in a cinema who wakes to lean over into your space and mock your open-eyed wonder.” (Great first sentence.)

I’m working on a short story of my own that I’m calling “And Then We Went Out, All of Us Together,” which is the first couple of phrases of the story. I kept hitting a wall with this story title-wise, but then (to continue the metaphor?) it hit me. I like the oddness and length of the title, and it does resonate with the story (about a bunch of the writer’s “selves” wandering around together).

Consider this kind of title a possible fallback, and don’t be shy about spiffing up your first few words to make it work; you’ll probably be doing your writing a service in any case.

On the Nose

I’ve noticed that some titles, especially for creative nonfiction, are simple, declarative statements reflecting the piece’s main subject. No bells or whistles. I’m sure we could stretch some of the examples below and find secondary meanings, but for the most part, I think, they are what they are.

The challenge, then, is to make sure they just plain sound good. They should roll off the tongue, or at least, in some other way, invite the reader into the piece.

Grace Paley’s “A Conversation with My Father” recounts, you guessed it, a conversation between the narrator and her father. Hard to read too much more into it.

Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” is about . . . well, you get it. But it certainly invites a reading.

Ironic

Sometimes these on-the-nose titles are, in fact, not really on the nose; they’re ironic (may I say: on the ear?). The piece seems to be about one thing (reflected in the title), but it’s really about something else (having nothing or little to do with the title). (This falls under the concept of “writing thick”; for more on this, here’s an essay I wrote.)

For example, in Alice Walker’s “The Flowers” the protagonist is out, yes, collecting flowers. But then she finds the remains of a man who’d been hanged. Clearly, this story is not about flowers.

I recently published a piece called “Phenakistoscope: An Introduction.” Needless to say, it’s an introduction to the phenakistoscope (an optical toy resembling the zoetrope). But this story is not really about phenakistoscopes, or I should say, the phenakistoscope is just the surface. It’s really about writing, wordplay, loneliness (especially), and probably other things I haven’t thought of yet.

Another idea is to come up with a title that literally (and ironically) has nothing to do with your work. At the Broad Museum in LA a few years ago I noticed a photograph from artist Paul Pfeiffer called Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse #15. As far as I could tell, the title had no connection with its referent. I think that’s cool.

Another example: apparently, no one knows what 2666 has to do with the novel (Bolaño’s magnum opus is set nowhere near the year 2666).

Visual Art, Strange, Long, Nonfictiony

I’ll use this last section to throw out some less-common subcategories, with examples. (Many of these may be more suited to experimental work.)

I was just looking at some old photos I took at a museum in Norway a few years ago, and came across a painting called February, 2 Degrees below Zero (1887). The painting was nothing much (pace Jørgen Sørensen, and may he rest in peace), but what a great title (this is why I took the photo).

Several years ago I copied a number of titles from an exhibit by the artist Lari Pttman at the Hammer Museum in LA. Here’s one: The Senseless Cycles, Tender and Benign, Bring Great Comfort. I would read this immediately if it were prose.

The previous title is a good example of a long one. Here’s another: “On the Gravity of the Americans and Why It Does Not Prevent Their Often Doing Ill-Considered Things” (chapter 15 of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America). I’m pointing out the length here, but what I wonderful title. Tocqueville: soothsayer.

Czesław Miłosz titled one of his poems “An Honest Description of Myself with a Glass of Whiskey at an Airport, Let Us Say, in Minneapolis.” Perfection.

I recently finished a piece of experimental fiction called “The Publication History of Constellations: A Novel by Ben Walter, by David David David, by W. B. Beardsatt, by Matheus Horkono, by Roland Jerrida, by George B. Orgy, by Judith Büt-Faulc, by Kire Phaerr Salks.” The story gets into postmodern rewrites, intertextuality, plagiarism, and much more (or less).

My title above riffs on a typical nonfiction title (“The Publication History of . . .”). Here are a few additional examples of this kind of nonfictiony title: On the Natural History of Destruction by W. G. Sebald, The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, and The Behavior of Moths by Kate Mascarenhas. These titles are relatively easy to make up. Just google something like “famous nonfiction books about gravity” or “famous nonfiction books about mental illness” (or whatever), and see if anything interesting shows up. (Needless to say, the title should have something to do with gravity or mental illness or whatever it is you’re writing about.)

Conclusion

Where to start? Looking for a euphonious phrase within your story or essay might be as good a place as any. Read through and copy any phrases (or words) that might work. Hopefully you get lucky. And always be thinking in terms of double meanings.

If you strike out, turn to Google. Start searching titles of famous works—classic novels, nonfiction, poems, etc.—that might share some themes or subject matter with your own work. Perhaps some of these titles—altered or not—will resonate. If not, crack the books and start looking for phrases.

Here’s a quick example. I’m going to pretend I just wrote a story about, oh, I don’t know, sports (I promise, this was totally random).

Let’s try poetry. I googled “famous poems about sports,” and A. E. Housman’s oft-anthologized “To an Athlete Dying Young” showed up first (sounds uplifting). Skimming, I came up with the following possible titles:

• “The Time You Won” (the poem’s first phrase)

• “Fields Where Glory Does Not Stay” (eh?)

• “Glory Fields” (a rewrite of above)

• “Silence of Cheers” (interesting)

• “The Gaze of Strengthless Dead” (sounds cool)

Might any of these work? I’m not sure (my story, of course, does not exist), but it gives you a sense of what you can do. And this is just one poem. Less than fifteen minutes of research. (I should make clear: you must actually read the poem (or book, etc.) to make sure you aren’t making inapt connections, which would be worse than a potentially boring on-the-nose title).

I also recommend you start thinking about titles in advance. While you read—and I should add: read widely—if you come across a phrase that might be a good title, write it down (start a document). This is something I do all the time, mainly because I like to steal phrases in general for my writing. My point is, clearly many of the categories above benefit from prior planning.

I hope the above gives you some ideas for coming up with great titles. Best of luck!

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