Thursday Flash Fiction Craft: So Much Depends Upon the Title

Some quick tips for titles:

1. See if the first line can be deleted and work instead as the title. Example:
   

   She's a Stork

   She's a stork and [And] that makes it ungraceful to bowl. The only thing falling for her here are pins, and not that many.

2. Same with the last line.

   I'd Hardly Call Making Out a Few Times Dating

   Over the cubicle, I kept reassuring him, "But you're Owen Wilson." A computer beep--and there it was, the reply, not the thing you wanted, something harder[.] : I'd hardly call making out a few times dating.

3. In fact, check any line that gets deleted through drafting and revision as a possible title. A line not needed in the body might work perfectly as a title.

   Like So Many Things in That Childhood

   My father pushed against the pedal, and the dog flew past my window as if caught in a cyclone, up and away, like so many things in that childhood. In the passenger seat, on that dirt road in Potter County.

4. Someone once told me to count five lines up from the bottom. There you'll find the title. Every time. Here's the fifth line of a recent story:

   Someone makes her way out of one of the cottages on the hill. She wears the white bathrobe from the resort. She smokes a cigar.

   A possible title might be "Resort" or "Someone Makes Her Way" or "Cottages."

5. Use an allusion/line from a well-known work, such as "The Right Place for Love" from Robert Frost's "Birches" or "Too-Rough Fingers of the World" from Langston Hughes's "The Dream Keeper" or "Skip a Life Completely" from the Velvet Underground.

6. Something of the prompt, if the prompt generated the story, could work. The title "Skip, Patch, Eye, Brownie, Chalk" came from the five prompt words that generated the piece. For example, a SmokeLong Quarterly prompt from Meg Pokrass asked writers to do the following:

   Imagine one of those annoying family Xmas letters you get too many of. Where everything seems incredible, unless you read between the colorful lines. Write your main character as a family members who feels cheated by the way it's worded about her/her. Maybe the mom writes the letter in a way that subtly puts her husband down (I'm just saying). Your narrator will be that person, the one who gets put down. Or your narrator can be someone observing this chronic seasonal abuse!"

   Possible titles might include "Where Everything Seems Incredible" or "Chronic" or "Maybe the Mom Writes the Letter."

7. Poets often use titles to direct readers to the central metaphoric image, as in William Carlos Williams in "The Red Wheelbarrow," Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," Anne Sexton's "The Witch's Life."

Things I might avoid in titles? Giving away the last line, having it repeat the first line, its appearing too early on in the piece, being "too clever" like the NY Post headlines.

A longer discussion might talk about the purpose of titles�and how that purpose might be different for (very) short fiction pieces. Any other title ideas�either about what to do or what to avoid�along with any insights into the unique role of titles in (very) short fiction would be greatly appreciated. Of course, once you give up the secret(s) of your titles and we all starting using them, yours won't seem so special anymore. Let's hope that's a risk you'll be willing to take.

Originally published in July.