Tips on Creating an Interesting Title
by Mary Arnold

When it comes to creating titles, I know of no other writer who does it so well as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did. Even Agatha Christie, the Queen of Mystery, never produced a title as intriguing as those of Doyle. Christies titles usually leaned towards describing the setting of the novel: Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, A Caribbean Mystery, Death in the Air, and They Came To Baghdad, for example.

Doyles titles for his short stories and novels leap off the page and demand to be noticed, and thus, read. Titles such as 'The Five Orange Pips,' 'The Man with the Twisted Lip,' 'The Adventure of the Engineers Thumb,' 'The Musgrave Ritual,' and 'The Adventure of the Dancing Men' grab ones attention immediately and inspires intrique and puzzlement. What does he mean by 'Dancing Men' anyway? What happened to the 'Engineers Thumb'? And how did the man get a 'Twisted Lip?'

When thinking on a title for your short story or novel, you want it to be eye-catching but also to tell something about your story or novel. Speaking from my own experience, titles that say nothing about the story or novel leaves one rather disgruntled. I think, 'Why did the writer use that title? Its totally unrelated to the story!'

While some titles are obviously better than others, I've only come across one writer who has made me feel irritated over her choice of titles: Carol Higgins Clark. Some of these titles are Twanged, Fleeced, Iced, Decked, Burned and Popped. While these titles have a certain cuteness to them, they tell next to nothing about the novels and leave me feeling a little affronted.

To sum up, choose a title that will pique interest, that has a clue to whats hidden inside, and pass up any cutesy titles.

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