The Title is the Spine of the Book

Hi friends.

I love coming up with book titles. I would even consider it a hobby. I keep running lists of titles from each year. They are mostly titles of books I would never write but could still see existing. I find it keeps my mind sharp to brainstorm them; it entertains me to think of the plot and cover that might match the title. It’s also a way of practicing something that is a specific craft.

A title does a lot of work. It has to both sound good to the ear and look cool on the cover, and it has to be memorable enough so that someone can walk into a bookstore and know how to ask for it. It has to be accurate to the subject matter (no one likes a bait and switch), and it has to leave some sort of feeling behind, even if that feeling is just a simple laugh. It is one of the things that makes you pick a book up and look at it if you weren’t looking for it in the first place. But it also has to be true to the spirit of the book. It has to connect to the material and elevate it. The title works hard for you. It’s worth spending some time figuring out the right one.

Lately I’ve been trying to come up with the title of my new book. I’ve been wandering around looking at all the books on my shelves, looking online, too. I’m trying to see which ones are bestsellers, but don’t have titles that feel overtly commercial, that have the promise of some literary magic.

The one-worder memoirs speak to me: Wild , Shrill, Heavy, Hunger. The more intricate, poetic ones: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, All The Light We Cannot See, Sing, Unburied, Sing. The titles that sound like A Thing (and have won the Pulitzer): The Nickel Boys, The Overstory, The Sympathizer, The Goldfinch, The Underground Railroad, The Hours, The Road, The Orphan Master’s Son, The Known World. (Thank god for Olive Kitteridge and A Visit from the Goon Squad just to mix things up.)

We know what kind of titles we like, what entertains us, what intrigues us. One title that I particularly love, because it feels personal, funny, and memoiristic but also ridiculous and also aspirational is My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I like things that make me laugh, and I like things that pop, and are kind of tart or ironic. Another important thing I try to remember with titles: don’t pretend the book is something that it’s not.

But how do we come up with a title?

Sometimes titles show up when brainstorming with a friend. I asked Cheryl Strayed how she came up with the most perfectly-titled (and book-covered) Wild and she messaged:

What happened is this: I had begun writing the book and bringing pages of it into my writer’s group each week. One of the group members was Chelsea Cain, who I had only met a year or so before, when I’d joined the group. Our kids were in preschool together at the time and one afternoon I took my kids to her house for a playdate (and a date for us too). I told her I had started to ponder the title for this book I seemed to be writing. I said I needed something that captured both the wilderness aspect of it AND the emotional aspect of it and of course since she’d read parts of it, she knew exactly what I meant. We came up with things like “The Nature of Love,” though we knew that wasn’t it. We tossed various ideas back and forth and came up with nothing. I left. An hour or so later, my cell phone rang. It was Chelsea. “I have it,” she said. “What?” I said. “Wild,” she said. Nailed it. Never, ever looked back.

We don’t all have Chelsea Cains in our life (we wish!) but we do have friends who are readers, who know what titles turn them on, who might be a good focus group for you. And we have local bookstores and libraries where we can scan the staff recommendations and bestsellers (if not in person lately then online) and see if there are connecting fibers.