Alternate title: stop hiding in my bushes, you stalker! (Well, she does look like she’s fed up with him in this picture.)
Where does a writer get the title for their book?
Not a rhetorical question. When I first wrote up the one-paragraph blurb for the Manuscript Matchmaker contest, I blithely slapped on a title without much thought. The story was about a woman who is fighting to keep her homestead claim and her fiancé, so Claiming His Heart seemed to fit. Then I got to the end of the story, then to the end of the rewrites, and I looked back at that title from the perspective of hundreds of pages and wondered if it really fit after all.
The trouble was, I had no idea what to suggest as a replacement. Now I’m brainstorming, writing down every title I can think of without judging it too harshly (yet).
This blog post has some excellent ideas on ways to find a good title, including these suggestions:
- What role does the hero play in the story? Is he a troublemaker? A peace maker? A quilt maker?
- What is the heroine’s career? A firefighter, a teacher, a detective?
- Can you use the setting of the story in the title?
- Scan through the story and see if you can find any catch phrases that would work as a title