Looking at the list of Hugo Award winners and nominees shows why titles matter to stories. Right off the bat, let me point you at a piece of evidence more compelling than any argument I could muster: the list of short story Hugo winners on Wikipedia. Look at that first one, Eric Frank Russell’s winning “Allamagoosa” in 1955, starting us off with a quirky bang. It’s worth going through that list to see how consistent the quality of the titles is.
Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star” (winner in 1956) actually violates what I tell my students. It’s the sort of name, an article and common noun, devoid of verb that I would circle on a paper. But it’s such a classic story of its time, shamelessly yanking out every emotional stop, and so it’s pretty easy to see why it was that year’s winner.
Past that, others bear out my thesis. Avram Davidson’s “Or All The Sea With Oysters” (winner in 1958) is a stylish killer of a title, carrying a whiff of Caroll-esque steampunk long before its time. Robert Bloch – “That Hellbound Train” (winner in 1959) (What train, the reader wonders, what is it like, who are its riders?); Anton Lee Baker – “They’ve Been Working On…” (nominee in 1959) (Who are they? What are they working on, and why does the author give us that trailing off, that textual pause of the …?); Alfred Bester – “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” (nominee in 1959) (Murder’s a sinewy lump of a word that sometimes overpowers the rest of the title, but here it’s effective as can be.); Algis Budrys – “The Edge of the Sea” (nominee in 1959) ( plain language in a poetic construction, which manages to pull it off given that Bester is usually a guarantee of decent quality that will justify it); C.M. Kornbluth – “The Advent on Channel Twelve” and “Theory of Rocketry” (both nominees in 1959) (simple but powerful); and then Fritz Leiber’s audacious and (imo) funny as hell “Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum_Tah-Tee” (nominee in 1959).
Look at the more recent stuff if you don’t have time to delve lovingly through that list (which I think would be a useful exercise for any writer, I plan on doing it myself), which continues to support my claim. There’s Michael Swanwick’s “The Very Pulse of the Machine” (winner in 1999), “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur” (winner in 2000) and “The Dog Said Bow-Wow” (winner in 2002), David Langford’s “Different Kinds of Darkness” (winner in 2001), Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald” (winner in 2004), David Levine’s “Tk’tk’tk” (winner in 2006), Elizabeth Bear’s “Tideline” (winner in 2008) (short and sweet and powerful), Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” (winner in 2009), and most recently Will McIntosh’s “Bridesicle” (winner in 2010).
The writer can’t afford to throw away the possibilities of the title, there’s just too much chance to set the hook in the reader there with the right cast. Make your lure beautiful, jingly with poetic principles, flashy or intricate or if you’re among the most daring, something so simple and beautiful in its form that it’s irresistible. Load it with the sensory or weight it with muscular verbs, but make it pull the reader in so your first three paragraphs can render them helpless and absorbed and yours for the story.
A title’s often the last thing I add to a story in completing it. I may go hunting through books of poetry to find something suitable, or listen to song lyrics, or even just daydream about verbs. I may comb through the piece looking for images or particularly lovely lines, particularly ones that occur in moments of high tension, revelation, or in the last few paragraphs.
What’s your favorite title – either your own or someone else’s?
One of my SF titles, “Touching from a Distance,” came from the lyrics of a song that was very inspirational to the work itself (“Transmission” by Joy Division). I think it’s pretty simple, but has a nice poetic ring to it, as well.
In recent memory, my favorite titles are probably “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” by Vylar Kaftan — definitely hooked me with that one — and Joe Hill’s “You Will Hear the Locust Sing.”
Great titles, like a great opening paragraph, throw questions at the reader; those questions serve as the hook. When I was still a member of Critters, at least one reader told me that they chose to critique my story solely because she liked the title — so yes, they’re very important.
“Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” – title of an Ursula K. Le Guin sci-fi stands out. So does “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “A River Runs Through It.” What’s the ‘it’? Ah, so hooky.
I’m terrible at titles myself. And I’ve not yet found great advice on selecting them, so thanks for providing your insights!
I think they’re hard to do, and one of the reasons it’s useful for writers to learn something about poetry. I jot down ones that occur to me whenever they appear. I find if I harvest them that way they tend to keep growing back in new forms.
I love “That Hellbound Train” as a title. And “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” is even better.
I think my favorite title of my own is “Scatter and Return, the Eyes of the Princess”. Partially because it took me a longer time and more work to come up with than any other title. I started off with something really boring like “The Princess and the Golem” and kept trying out different variations like “Heart of a Golem, Eyes of a Princess”.
I think both of my published book titles: “Discarded Faces” (dystopian sci-fi) and “Mistress of the Topaz” (epic fantasy based on Middle Eastern culture) are good titles. I thought long and hard about them, especially the first.
My favorite title of a short story that I’ve written is “The Ruin Of Avalon” because it’s not only evocative, but as you read the story you realize that the title has at least three equally valid meanings…
There Will Come a Hard Rain by Ray Bradbury, and a title by Harlan Ellison I wish I could use as the final line in one of my own stories, I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream.
Also, a story I sold in 2000 to Dark regions: “A Gift for the Chosen” was not the first choice. The original was “Shades ad Shadows”. The editor suggested I try others. That was about the fifth effort.
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Perhaps Useful For People Who Want to Write Faster
This was a really useful article. Some highlights:
“Every writing session after this realization, I dedicated five minutes (sometimes more, never less) and wrote out a quick description of what I was going to write. Sometimes it wasn’t even a paragraph, just a list of this happens then this then this. This simple change, these five stupid minutes, boosted my wordcount enormously. I went from writing 2k a day to writing 5k a day within a week…”
“…my productivity was at its highest when I was in a place other than my home. That is to say, a place without internet. The afternoons I wrote at the coffee shop with no wireless were twice as productive as the mornings I wrote at home. I also saw that, while butt in chair time is the root of all writing, not all butt in chair time is equal.”
“Those days I broke 10k were the days I was writing scenes I’d been dying to write since I planned the book. They were the candy bar scenes, the scenes I wrote all that other stuff to get to. By contrast, my slow days (days where I was struggling to break 5k) corresponded to the scenes I wasn’t that crazy about.”
I’m going to try to do more coffee shop writing in the next couple of weeks as well as put more time into planning (I just outlined the story I want to write today, for example, scene by scene) and see what effect it has.
How I Went From Writing 2000 Words a Day to 10000 Words a Day. When I started writing The Spirit War (Eli novel #4), I had a bit of a problem. I had a brand new baby and my life (like every new mother…
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As mentioned in the Wall Street Journal (hello new readers coming from there!) last year, I came up with a new class, “Punk U: The Whys and Wherefores of Writing -punk Fiction“, which attempted to explore some of the -punk subgenres, starting with cyberpunk and progressing through steampunk, dieselpunk, nanopunk, solarpunk, afropunk, monkpunk, mannerpunk, and a dozen others. Of all of them, the most fascinating to me — and the one that’s had the greatest influence on my recent fiction, is hopepunk.
What is hopepunk? The term was first coined by Alexandra Rowland as the antithesis of “grimdark,” a speculative genre featuring fatalistic nihilism and a tooth vs. claw environment. She wrote:
“The essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. It’s looking at human nature and going, “˜The glass is half empty. “˜Hopepunk says, “˜No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half full.’ Yeah, we’re all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. We’ve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and here’s the important part) we’ve also been soft and forgiving and kind. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion.”
Just the amount that I have seen people get more politically active in the last year has been amazing. I want to point out that kindness doesn’t necessarily mean softness. Kindness can mean standing up for someone who’s being bullied. If someone has a gun to your friend’s head, punching the guy with the gun is an act of kindness because you’re saving someone through that. So kindness is not always soft.
Kindness is not necessarily passive. Kindness is something that you can go out and fight for. Going to a protest, if you frame it in a particular way, is an act of kindness because you’re doing something for the future. You’re contributing to the future. You’re putting more good in the world is I think how I would define doing kindness. If you see someone being shouted at by a bigot on the subway, just standing up for them and having their back is an act of kindness.
And being kind also is something that requires so much bravery sometimes.
Others seized on the term with joyous abandon — and one of the signatures of hopepunk is, in my opinion, a sense that the writer is creating happily and full throttle. I’d call a number of the works on this year’s Nebula Award ballot hopepunk, particularly Trail of Lightning and The Calculating Stars, and I suspect there will be plenty of it on the Hugo and World Fantasy ballots this year as well.
Hopepunk is a reaction to our times, an insistence that a hollow world built of hatred and financial ambition is NOT the norm. It is stories of resistance, stories that celebrate friendship and truth and the things that make us human. In today’s world, being kind is one of the most radical things you can do, and you can see society trying to quash it by prosecuting those who offer food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, and shelter to those in need.
Claudie Arseneault spoke why she wanted hopepunk in her essay, Constructing a Kinder Future, for Strange Horizons:
The truth is, I’ve had enough of stories where your best friend or your closest family members are your most bitter enemies, where anyone you’re not in love with is an opponent to defeat, a potential traitor. Enough of stories where heroes must use each other as mere pawns, nothing more than pieces in a game, and abandon the “weak,” the naïve, the nice ones. Cruel ruthlessness is not our strength. It will not save us, and it should not be hailed as an acceptable means to an end, no matter the end. Our strength is in collaboration, in communities who link arms in the face of dangers, in perfect strangers donating to other people’s crowdfunding campaigns, and I want fiction to reflect that. I want characters who value their friends, who see perfect strangers as full-fledged human beings worthy of their help, and who fight the world with hope and kindness to be rewarded for it.
Is this desire for hope something new? No, it’s something that we’ve always celebrated in stories. Think about the moment in the Lord of the Rings when acts of kindness — first on Bilbo’s part, then on Frodo’s — lead to the moment where Gollum enables the ring’s destruction when Frodo falters and is on the brink of giving up his quest. Or go even further back, to Ovid’s Baucis and Philemon, who are rewarded for offering hospitality to strangers who turn out to be gods.
But in recent decades we’ve let other, darkerstories, mocking the earnest and shredding empathy, supplant those fables. Stories written by the kleptocracy, designed to make its victims despair and give way to apathetic acceptance, stories spat out daily by the messageboard shitlords trying to convince us that meme-based mockery should be the first reaction to any appeal to the human heart. They’re there to enforce the rule that to step away from the line– to be joyous or non-conforming or outside the system in any way — is to be aberrant and wrong.
One of the things resisting that is hopepunk. The movement has caught on, with some perceiving it as vital to sowing the seeds of resistance, as with Vox describing it as “weaponized optimism”, adding “Hopepunk combines the aesthetics of choosing gentleness with the messy politics of revolution.” In an article for America, Jim McDermott went so far as to call it “quintessentially Catholic“, saying:
Death on the cross, understood not as some brutal cosmic math equation but a personal choice to continue to love and give and believe even when your life is at stake, is the beating heart of Catholic hopepunk. So is Jesus’s vision of the Kingdom of God as a banquet where all are welcome and called to kindness, and the lives of holy people like Martin Luther King, Jr., St. Francis of Assisi or Mary MacKillop, R.S.J., who refused to accept the premises of the reality in which they lived and experienced their own deaths and resurrections as a result. It’s Greg Boyle, S.J., insisting “There is no “˜them’ and “˜us,’ there is only us,” young people from all over the world traveling to Panama to create and imagine the church or Mary Oliver inviting us over and over in her poetry to consider “our one wild and precious life.”
Hopepunk is a movement that understands the importance of stories and how they can affect change, and so hopepunk often — perhaps even usually — has casts that are as diverse as the world around us, featuring characters of color, transexuals, a-romantics, differently-abled, and more, building empathy by showing that there are certain basic things any of us want, regardless of which other or others we do or don’t belong to.
In thinking about it, I find that hopepunk has crept into my life over the past few years. The Feminist Futures Storybundle I just curated holds more than one example, as did last year’s version of it. The anthology I edited last year, which appeared at the beginning of this month, If This Goes On, is full of examples of it.
One of the charms of the hopepunk definition is that it’s somewhat expandable — happy + hopeful, plus an insistence that it’s not a totally hostile universe, seems to be the base definition. In fact, it doesn’t have to be speculative fiction. Here’s Bryn Hammond talking about examples of it in historical fiction.
One of my favorite writers, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., often preached kindness in his work. He also said, “Be careful what you pretend to be, because you become it.” Try being kind, being mindful of your impact on the world and lives around you, and you may be surprised at exactly how kind you can be.
Recently hopepunk has elbowed its way into my writing as well, insisting on the importance of kindness and community. I just finished up a story where that instinct plays an important part, and I know that the next story I’m turning to, about animatronic Beatles in a post-apocalyptic landscape, will have many of the same resonances. Is this a deliberate focus or accidental? I’m not sure, but I feel hopeful about it.
How I Went From Writing 2000 Words a Day to 10000 Words a Day. When I started writing The Spirit War (Eli novel #4), I had a bit of a problem. I had a brand new baby and my life (like every new mother…
16 Responses
One of my SF titles, “Touching from a Distance,” came from the lyrics of a song that was very inspirational to the work itself (“Transmission” by Joy Division). I think it’s pretty simple, but has a nice poetic ring to it, as well.
In recent memory, my favorite titles are probably “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” by Vylar Kaftan — definitely hooked me with that one — and Joe Hill’s “You Will Hear the Locust Sing.”
Great titles, like a great opening paragraph, throw questions at the reader; those questions serve as the hook. When I was still a member of Critters, at least one reader told me that they chose to critique my story solely because she liked the title — so yes, they’re very important.
Favorite of mine: “The Vessel Never Asks For More Wine”
Favorite title (Harlan Ellison): “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore”
“Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” – title of an Ursula K. Le Guin sci-fi stands out. So does “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “A River Runs Through It.” What’s the ‘it’? Ah, so hooky.
I’m terrible at titles myself. And I’ve not yet found great advice on selecting them, so thanks for providing your insights!
I think they’re hard to do, and one of the reasons it’s useful for writers to learn something about poetry. I jot down ones that occur to me whenever they appear. I find if I harvest them that way they tend to keep growing back in new forms.
I love “That Hellbound Train” as a title. And “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” is even better.
I think my favorite title of my own is “Scatter and Return, the Eyes of the Princess”. Partially because it took me a longer time and more work to come up with than any other title. I started off with something really boring like “The Princess and the Golem” and kept trying out different variations like “Heart of a Golem, Eyes of a Princess”.
I think both of my published book titles: “Discarded Faces” (dystopian sci-fi) and “Mistress of the Topaz” (epic fantasy based on Middle Eastern culture) are good titles. I thought long and hard about them, especially the first.
My favorite title of a short story that I’ve written is “The Ruin Of Avalon” because it’s not only evocative, but as you read the story you realize that the title has at least three equally valid meanings…
Andre Norton’s “The Stars Are Ours” seized my imagination when I was a kid. For my own titles, I’d say “A Kiss For Damocles” (WiP) is my favorite.
There Will Come a Hard Rain by Ray Bradbury, and a title by Harlan Ellison I wish I could use as the final line in one of my own stories, I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream.
Also, a story I sold in 2000 to Dark regions: “A Gift for the Chosen” was not the first choice. The original was “Shades ad Shadows”. The editor suggested I try others. That was about the fifth effort.