What Do You Call This? Creative Linguistics and Useful Schemes for Titles, Chapters, People, Places, and Things in Speculative Fiction Narratives

This is an essay version of the talk I gave at the Stonecoast MFA Summer Residency at the University of Southern Maine, where I now find myself somehow a grown-up faculty member.

Or at least, a third of it.

I couldn't even get through all of it with a two-hour lecture slot, and when I fleshed it out into an essay, Patreon couldn't hold the character count. So I've split it into the three sections mentioned, and will post it in parts. Here is part one! I hope it's as helpful to you as it was to my students, and at the end I'll give you all the same exercise to practice that I gave them, in case you want to try it out AT HOME.

In the meantime, please enjoy a lovely slice of official MFA instruction for a significantly lower price!

First of all, let me preface this by ritually intoning the truth of all writing instruction: if this isn’t useful to you, you should absolutely reject it and do your own thing. There are no rules. Do whatever you want. My feelings won’t be hurt, nothing matters except beauty, excellence, and a finished story. The only rule there ever is in art is the rule of cool—if it’s awesome, who gives a shit if it breaks the rules? John Dies At The End violates several of the things I’m about to say and yet, it’s a historically great title.

But these are things that help my brain when the title, or structure, or names, or fun words for weird things, do not fall gracefully from on high into my skull—thinking about the options available and choosing from various sets. None of this is exhaustive, and I’m probably missing a few tricks, because we all miss tricks from time to time. I’ve used all of these methods in various books. Whatever gets you across the finish line was the right choice.

Does that mean I have a title for the book I’m working on now? Oh, absolutely not. But it is much easier to talk about how it’s done than to do it, so HERE WE GO.

We’re going to talk about three separate but equally important linguistic activities here:

-heuristics for titling novels, series, and stories.

-strategies for dividing and sub-dividing those stories, including but not limited to, chapters, and various options for titling those sections and subsections.

-much more broadly but very vitally, methodologies for naming characters, places, concepts, and objects, including what not to do.

In the end, all these are, however, the same linguistic practice: narrative requires naming things. Sometimes our own book. Sometimes the people in it. Sometimes planets; sometimes coffee. This may seem like icing on the cake of the story, lovely decoration, but not the meal. And indeed, some treat it as such, though that was much more common during the golden and silver age where every astronaut was named John or Jim or Luke or Paul and we liked it uphill both ways, I guess. And you’re free to not care about this as deeply as I do, but if you make that choice, you’re missing out on a hugely powerful expository, structural, and worldbuilding tool.

To understand why this is important enough to justify a 90-minute talk, let’s think about the function of titles, chapters, and names.

Titles are hard. They just are. There are thousands of books published every year and obviously titles differentiate one from the other, but they’re also the first thing anyone ever knows about your book, even before cover art. It is literally the name of your book, no different than the name of the protagonist, which is why I’ve linked these two seemingly only tangentially linked concepts.

But something we’ll come back to over and over:

Titles are first up to lift the unbelievable weight of the expository load. Every new n

            Exposition is basically a constant challenge, for every writer, with every book. How to explain what needs to be known to go on with the story without an obnoxious infodump or a series of as you know, Bobs or conveniently-timed media broadcasts or any number of tricks, most of which have been done to death in this post-post-post modern world. But it’s especially difficult with spec fic. We don’t just have to tell you who divorced who or whose parents were supportive and whose worked 12 hour shifts or the details of a city’s culture and geography or the history of one war or the other, we have an entire world, sometimes galaxy, to explain, explore, and define before we even get to what the actual story is about. Worlds which rarely have the same physics, weather, genders, species, crops, philosophies, history, laws, traditions, religious options, cultural touchstones, family arrangements, suns, moons, countries, oceans, possibly not even the same gravity as our own. And that’s on top of any real-world frontstory and backstory that may be necessary and cannot be tossed off on the pile of Common Knowledge. Like, you know, just for example, the history of the Russian revoltion on top of the Russian experience of WW2 on top of Slavic folklore on top of a new magic system on top of how communism thinks it works on top of how communism actually worked in practice on top of a young girl’s coming of age story.

            It’s a lot to tell a reader about, and all those things forever underpin any given narrative. We are our culture; our narratives rely on that culture to be communicable at all. When you invent a culture and the universe it developed in out of whole cloth, or invent new rules for our world to deal with, the expository load approaches tonnage.

            So while you’re free to name your book Untitled #4 (which honestly I could even like, provided the #4 is included), the thrifty and athletic writer cannot afford to leave anything that carries a pound of expository weight in one word or phrase on the table.

To begin at the beginning, as my man Mr. Thomas said:

There are two broad types of titles (and any of the below may be combined, as in a character and a place, etc):

Titles Which Are Intrisic to the Work

Titles that reference or play on:

-a character or characters’ name or reference to it (often with a modifier to make it more interesting, ie Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer, Gideon the Ninth, The Once and Future King, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Sunday in the Park with George, Bartleby the Scrivener, Frankenstein with its two meanings)

-place from within the work (Palimpsest, The City in the Middle of the Night, Tale of Two Cities, Down and Out In Paris, On the Road, Hyperion—which is a ship but still a place—and indeed The Canterbury Tales)

-Action or event within the work (Dirty Dancing, Wishful Drinking, The Things They Carried, John Dies At the End, The Odyssey, Murder on the Orient Express)

-quote or phrase that occurs within the book (very, very common, but it better be a banger)

-concept or object from within the work (The Gift of the Magi, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)

-refers to central theme or genre of the work (Obsession, Atonement, Gangster Movie, Space Opera, Blindness, Men, Radiance, Ghost Story, these often have another or altered meaning in retrospect of the entire work)

-Tin Titles: does what it says on the tin (The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, Cowboys vs Aliens, Dinosaurs of the Old West, A Boy’s Life)

Titles Which Are Extrinsic to the Work

-character from outside the work (usually a famous fictional or historical one, Ulysses which is both within and outside the work, Socrates In New York, Kafka on the Shore, fairly but not entirely rare. The original title of The Great Gatsby was Trimalchio of West Egg.)

-quote from outside the work (very, very common, Comfort Me With Apples, but also Bitter, Bitter, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Of Mice and Men, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Brave New World, etc. Shakespeare and the Bible are extremely well-mined here)

-An aphorism that does not occur within the text but applies to it as a whole (whether well-known or not well-known within the culture of the main target audience, Ready Player One, Get Out, In Cold Blood, Catch-22, we could be here all day on this one, but always google these to make sure no one else has used them within your genre, recently, or very successfully. Comfort Me With Apples was used already…by a cooking memoir, so we figured it was fine.)

-Altered quote (in which a word is changed to change the meaning of the original, sometimes punny in some way, sometimes not. The Wind Done Gone, Catcher in the Rye)

-Altered aphorism (Available Dark, Whipping Girl, First Among Sequels)

-Altered title from another work (The Graveyard Book, The Android’s Dream, Black House, The Big Over Easy, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Blank, Down and Out in Blank, those last two being VERY used)

-Refers to a place, event, or concept within the work in a way that does not actually occur within the work, or outside the work but altered to be work-relevant (House of Leaves, City of Saints and Madmen, World War Z)

-Song titles or lyrics (which are always free use as titles!)

-An interesting phrase that either does not occur within the work, or only does in a modified sense, sometimes altered to be quippier by removing articles and prepositions (Gone Girl, All Day Permanent Red, Tell Me I’m Worthless, Those Who Walk Away from Omelas, All the Light We Cannot See, The Shining Girls, and, much as I hate it, 50 Shades of Grey is a fantastic title)

-A phrase which will have a different meaning at the end of the book than the beginning (I Am Legend, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lovely Bones, Use of Weapons, Empire Falls)

-A question which will be answered within or an answer to a question posed within (It’s a horrific crime of a book, but Why I Did It is actually an amazing title)

If you go with a single word, it better be cool as hell or highly interpretively flexible as the reader moves through the book. Obsession and indeed Possession being great examples. Who is obsessed? Who is possessed? The answer is different as the story moves.

Ultimately, if you want to name your book Blue, go for it, but blue better be a big deal in the book and mean something different at the end than it does in the beginning. Feed by Mira Grant is a purely excellent example of doing this right.

Dos

-We love alliteration

-Even in a serious book, a bit of humor catches the eye

-Make sure it has a nice meter and flow, you want to be able to say it over and over (and over) and have other people say it to their friends

-Have fun with words, who are your friends! If you like it, and it feels right, it doesn’t matter if it’s not like the other titles. Maybe the other titles are jerks.

Don’ts

-Don’t pick a title that’s hard to pronounce like I don’t know, Palimpsest, which I will go to my grave yelling is both pronounced and spelled phonetically. You want people to tell other people about the work without stumbling over it, and also it’s unbelievably annoying to, again, could be talking about anything here, have to correct your own editor about the spelling of your phonetically-spelled title.

            -If your title uses made up words they had also better be phonetic and easy to say.

-Generic, and therefore both boring and forgettable, while lifting no expository weight

-Generic within the target genre (Swordslinger, Astrogun, though Have Astrogun Will Travel kind of slaps) these are functionally blank spaces to fans and flashing neon no signs to non-fans that This Is Not For Normals.

-The Male Profession’s Female Relation

-A Blank of Blank and Blank (Those will both probably be fine in ten years! But they’re vastly overdone now. So pay attention to title trends—and for the record I did a Girl Who before everyone was doing Girl Whos HUMPH.)

-Don’t forget to google your clever title to see if it’s been done before. Sometimes that’s ok IF in another genre or very old or unsuccessful. Sometimes you just make the best of it—there are THREE horror novels called Tradwife coming out just this year. But mostly SEO still matters and you want to stand out.

-Spoil your own tension by telling us the reveal (unless it’s John Dies At the End and the tension comes from that knowledge hanging over the story)

Pick two minimum: intriguing, relevant, specific, fun (to remember, say, interpret/reinterpret)