Objectively, titles are the worst part about writing. I don’t care how you feel about beginnings, endings, or middles.
Titles.
The Worst.
Crafting titles for high school or undergrad essays was one thing. The only stakes involved with your Hamlet pun was whether or not you’d bring a shred of joy to your jaded English teacher’s existence. It was a low bar.
Stories and novels are a different beast.
It is hard enough to draft 3,000 clever, original, and engaging words to fill a short story, let alone 60,000 + words to form a novel. Accomplishing the same feat in one to five words is an unforgiving task.
I have three methods for coming up with titles.
Title First
Rarely, I will be hit with the creative inspiration for a title before the substance of the story coalesces in my brain box. This happened with my story The Bog Season. I was walking in the post-winter woods, half-drowned in dead pools left behind by the receding snows. It put me in the mind of Baba Yaga and the title The Starwood Witch came to me. I sat on that title and the seeds of a story for over a year before I finally wrote it and changed the title to its current iteration.
Captain Obvious FTW
Most often, I will write a thing and the first title that comes to mind is the one I roll with. Chimera, the book I’m currently querying, is about a girl who fears she is a chimera. So, in a fit of inspiration, I named the book Chimera. Yeah.
Title? Who needs a title?
I throw in a placeholder, write a thing, and then wrangle endlessly with the recalcitrant title. This is the process I am currently muddling through. I have almost finished the first draft of my work-in-progress and all I have so far is the ridiculous placeholder I chose for this website. I went for a walk today to try to drum up a name, and I have … not much to show for it. Outside In? All of Me? Inside, I’m Normal? Normal Inside?
If you have another method, please let me know. Better yet, just send me an oracle AI that I can feed my story into in return for a title.
Andrea Bradley 
Yes I can imagine this is a very difficult task!
Bog Season! Love this name. Have I read this?
Good luck with the new title. I’ll let you know if all of a sudden I’m struck with a great name (I doubt it though) haha
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Bog Season is unpublished so far, but I can send it your way!!
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I do like Normal Inside – it has a hook to it!
Or maybe channel Mr. Scott, who knew when you were just a baby writer that you are born for this! I have no suggestions but I will tell you how deeply I love your writing and I know you’ll kill it with the title when the time is right.
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Thank you!!! Maybe I should call on Mr. Scott for help. English teachers should have their own Hamletty version of the bat signal.
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Hahaha yes! Just yell a sonnet into the wind and his typewriter will ding. (Because typewriters “ding”?)
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