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100-Foot Crow

What Do I Call This Thing? (10 Tips for Titling Your Tiny Story)

by: Victoria Brun

Titles are not my greatest strength. However, titles are important. The title is the door to your story’s house, and it plays a key role in marketing your story. While novels get an artfully designed cover to help entice readers, short stories (and especially drabbles) typically only get a title to encourage readers to open that door. This is one reason why short story titles tend to be longer than novel titles: they’re doing more work.

I recently researched strategies to write better short story titles with the goal of improving my own titling abilities. Here are ten tips from that research—as well as some thoughts on how they specifically apply to 100-word stories.

1. Brainstorm on a whiteboard (whiteboard not required).

My first piece of advice comes, not from the realm of fiction, but from content marketing. It’s simple: Write down ten different titles. The key here is to turn off your editor brain and let your creative juices flow. This will help you think outside the box and not simply name your story the first thing that pops into your head. Once you get all ten titles down, you can turn your editorial brain back on and perfect your chosen title using some of the other tips and styles noted below.

Central to this strategy is quantity. While it is technically possible to write down ten truly awful titles, that is pretty unlikely. If you come up with ten, there should be at least one that works.

The largest words are: Time, run, running, last, love, night, new, dreams, day, water, one, and world. Other words are in a smaller font.
These are the most common words used in titles submitted to 100-Foot Crow during the first two submission periods.

2. Lift an evocative phrase from your story.

Here’s a chance to steal from your own writing. However, I find that this is harder than it initially sounds. The phrase you lift needs to be relevant to the overall theme and tone of your story and beevocative. Often, these phrases come from the end of the story. However, they can also come from earlier in the work—even the opening line.

This strategy certainly works for 100-word stories (see example below). However, I think it is harder to nail than in longer pieces. Because drabbles are so short, repeating more than a single word or two can feel repetitive—so you need to choose a truly eye-catching phrase to pull it off.

Examples:

3. Craft a metaphor that (at first glance) doesn’t make any sense.

This title format is hot right now! To use this strategy, you just say that something is something else. The comparison must appear nonsensical. The key to making this work and not pure baloney is that when the reader finishes your story, they must understand the metaphor.

Examples:

4. Stab it with some prepositions (the weirder, the better).

If you have a title that is okay but you don’t love, you might be able to prop it up by adding a simple preposition, infinitive, or spicy adjective. Don’t just say “Mirage,” say “Mirage in Double Vision.” Don’t say “A Hunter,” say “To Be a Hunter.” This additional detail adds intrigue and rhythm, and makes it stand out.

Examples:

5. Make the title part of the story.

Thinking of your title as part of your story is a particularly good tactic for drabbles, because it essentially increases your word count and ensures your title is meaningful to the story.

I’ll let two 100-Foot Crow contributors explain how they do this:

Dale Parnell said “with a drabble, a good title can help give you a leg up with the 100-word limit. You can hint at the story’s setting or theme, even set a location in the title, freeing up valuable word count in the main story… and if you do it right, the title could even be the ‘punchline’ to the story itself.”

Gideon P. Smith had similar advice, noting that titles “are an opportunity to set the scene (character name, setting, genre, and time-period) without using word count. Or it may highlight some theme, symbolism, or dualism (an alternate way to read the story other than taking it at face value) that you might not otherwise have realized. Or it can foreshadow. It’s also often helpful in having images or associations that help fill out the story background but would be awkward to place in the story itself.”

Examples:

6. Say exactly what’s in the tin.

For this strategy, you describe exactly what happens in the story in plain English. The weirder the story, the better this works. These are often used with list-style stories.

For most drabbles, this strategy would be hard to pull off without it feeling extremely repetitive—but it could still work for a truly bizarre drabble.

Examples:

7. Take a known phrase from elsewhere.

You can lift a phrase from a known work—such as a poem in the public domain, a work of Shakespeare, the Bible, or another phrase or saying that has meaning beyond the literal words. The danger of this strategy is that you can end up with a title that sounds good (because it was written by a skilled poet) but does not fit your story. The pulled phrase must work thematically and stylistically with your own words.

Examples:

8. Say it thrice.

There is something satisfying about a trio. Although short, it feels complete, and it has an appealing rhythm. It can also be comedic if the third item breaks the pattern set by the first two. This works for any length story.

Examples:

9. Mention that weird thing and the other weird thing.

Don’t have three things in your story to stick in the title? No problem. Two things will work just fine—provided they’re strange, alliterative, or otherwise intriguing!

Examples:

10. Don’t overthink it.

If you’re still struggling, take advice from 100-Foot Crow contributor and Flash Point Science Fiction editor Thomas J. Griffin, who said “my first rule with titles is ‘don’t overthink it.’ Titles can cause a lot of unnecessary angst and even writer’s block, so just name it something, then let your subconscious keep stewing while you write and edit the piece, and typically a title that resonates with the central themes will bubble to the surface eventually.”

Final thoughts

I’ve never rejected a story for 100-Foot Crow because I didn’t like the title. The story is always what matters most; however, a great title is certainly an asset, and there are some cliché titles that are sorely overused (Check out the top 10 most common titles submitted to Clarkesworld). 

Ultimately, the most important element is that your title fits your story. If you have an incredible sounding title, but it’s incongruent to the story, it’s not a good title. Readers will feel misled. If they come to your story thinking it’s going to be fun and quirky based on your title, they will not enjoy a somber, brooding tale—even if they’d normally enjoy that type of story.

Now go forth and write some great titles!

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Posted November 17, 2024.

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