What's a Good Title for a Book? Ask a Tabloid Journalist

I’ll never forget the night I took my wife-to-be out to dinner and subtly asked about her parents.  When you get serious about someone, you naturally want to find out who your future in-laws are going to be.

“So what does your mom do?” I casually asked. 

“She writes a gossip column for a...well, some people might call it a 'yellow' newspaper.”

I searched the restaurant for the nearest exit—we hadn’t actually ordered any food yet.

“Come on, Mike.  She’s really sweet, I promise.”

Yeah.  So is a Bengal tiger, when its belly is packed full of fresh meat.

My fiancée dug around in her purse and pulled out a photograph.  "Just look at that face..."

The woman was grinning at me, a pencil behind her ear, one eyebrow raised.

This didn’t help.  Talk about “walking the line!”  One wrong move and she could destroy me with a single stroke of that pencil.

Well, love overcomes fear, and I got married anyway.

It turns out that, as a novelist, having a gossip columnist for a mother-in-law is one of the best things that ever happened to me.  And not for the reasons you may think—Luba has never written one word about any of my books (not that it would do any good—she lives and works in Latvia, which is not exact the center of my geographic market!)

What Luba is a genius at is titling books.  Having worked for so many years as a “yellow journalist”, she knows exactly what hits readers’ hot buttons.

When I finished my international thriller about currency counterfeiting, I titled it In God We Trust.

It hardly sold a single copy.  One day Luba overheard me complaining about it.

“Is it a religious book?” she asked.

“No, it’s an international thriller.”

“Sounds like a religious book.”

Exasperated, I said, “It’s not a religious book, Luba.”

“What kind of book is it, then?”

“Well...it’s about lust...it’s about money...it’s about murder—”

“There’s your title,” she said, pointing at me.

“Where’s my title?”

 “Lust, Money & Murder.”

I was skeptical, but I decided to try it.  As soon as I changed the name of the book, people started buying it.

Not long after that, I was finishing up another novel, a paranormal thriller.

“What’s it called?” Luba asked.

Hesitating, I said, “A Gift from the Stars.”

She lolled her head to one side, closed her eyes, and made a snoring sound.

“Luba!”

“Well, it sounds boring.  What’s it about?”

“It’s about this guy who mysteriously disappears when his family is on vacation in—”

“A mysterious disappearance, then.”

“Yes.”

“What’s the guy’s name?”

“Kurt Kramer.”

She pointed at me.  “The Mysterious Disappearance of Kurt Kramer.”

I changed the title. 

The book started selling. 

Now, I no longer resist Luba’s suggestions.  I recently published a novel that I was calling Cosmic Casanova, and it wasn’t selling at all.

“Sounds like science fiction,” she muttered.

Even though I don’t resist her suggestions, she still makes me mad.  “It’s not science fiction, Luba.  It’s a romance novel.”

She raised an eyebrow.  “Oh, really?”

“Yes, really.  It’s about this guy who’s dating several women at the same time, and he wants to keep them secret from each other—”

“So it’s about secrets.”

“Yes.”

“Lover’s secrets.”

“Yes.  The guy in the story is kind of dodgy, is hard-to-get.  You know, elusive—”

She pointed at me.  “Secrets of the Elusive Lover.”

I don’t have to tell you how that one ended.

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Writing: A Career You Can Fall Forward On

When I was 16, my dad casually asked me if I’d decided on a career.  I told him I wanted to be a writer.

He looked a little pale.  “You mean a journalist, right?”

“No, I mean a fiction writer.  You know, one of those guys who writes novels.”

He looked even paler.  He then proceeded to advise me, in a fatherly way, to choose a practical career I could “fall back on,” and that I should go to college and get some experience in that career.  Afterwards, I could “play around” with fiction writing, if I was so inclined.

I took his advice.  The practical career I chose was engineering.  Electrical engineering, to be exact.  With a specialty in computer hardware/software design.  You can’t get much more practical than that. 

Ironically, after only one week working at my first full-time job, I was taken off the computer design project I’d been assigned and was given the task of writing a user’s manual.  I was insulted.  By that time, I had all but forgotten that I wanted to be a writer.  I felt like I was being demoted.

Nevertheless, I gave the user’s manual my best shot.  I had no clue as to what I was doing.  I simply tried to make it as interesting and engaging as I possibly could.  If I did a halfway decent job, I reasoned, they would put me back to work as an engineer.  

I printed the manual out and turned it into my boss on a Friday afternoon.  First thing Monday morning, I was called into his office.  His boss was present, too, the department manager.   I knew I was about to be fired.

“Mike, this is fantastic!  It's so good we want you to rewrite all our user’s manuals.”

I was stunned.  And even more insulted.  I’d just suffered through four hellish years in engineering school so I could write freakin’ computer user’s manuals? 

“To be honest,” my boss said, “you’re a much better writer than you are an engineer.”

I quit right then and there, walked out of the office and did not look back.  But I found it very difficult to get a job as an engineer.  I ended up starting my own computer business with my stepfather.  It all seemed very easy at first, until we actually tried to find customers.  It turned out that to make sales, I had to do a lot of writing.  Tons of writing.  Press releases, proposals, advertisements, newsletters, brochures, telemarketing pitches...and, yes, user’s manuals. 

Eventually we sold the company for a tidy sum of money.  That nest egg gave me the freedom to write two screenplays and more than 20 novels, some of which you will find online.

I often hear parents advising their children to choose practical careers, careers they can “fall back on.”  This is probably good advice.

But at the end of the day, I don’t think you choose your career.

I think your career chooses you.

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How to Write a Short Synposis for Your Story

For most writers, creating a compelling synopsis for a short story, novella or novel is a challenge. Many people pull their hair out over this. You have to compress your entire story into just a few sentences...yet you have to catch the overall arc of the plot, make the characters seem appealing, give readers an overall feeling for the story's style and tone.  This is a daunting task for even the best writers. On top of that, the thing has to be good. A powerful synopsis for a novel will make the prospective reader feel that he or she just must read the book.

How the heck do people do it? Is synopsis-writing a black art?

Well, it turns out there is a very simple, easy-to-apply formula for writing story synopses. It was developed in Hollywood and is one of the most powerful writing tools I know. It will allow you to write a strong synopsis for your story in only two sentences. Don't believe me? Read on.

First, you have to understand and agree that every story is composed of the five basic elements. If a story doesn't have any one of these elements, it isn't a story. These five elements are: hero, situation, goal, villain, and disaster.

If you string these elements together as follows, you form a synopsis:

(1) hero who finds herself stuck in a (2) situation from which she wants to free herself by achieving a (3) goal. However, there is a (4) villain who wants to stop him, and if he's successful, will cause the hero to experience a (5) disaster.

Now, before your Inner Artiste tarts screaming, "This is a formula! This is a formula!" I want to stop for a second. Yes, this is a formula, and anyone with any experience in writing (or painting or composing music, etc.) knows that formulas do not work when creating a new piece of art--the most you can hope for is a cookie-cutter type result that will be mediocre, at best. However, what we are doing here with this formula is summarizing a piece of art that has already been created.

Having said that, the only thing that is actually formulaic about this approach is the order in which the five elements are presented, and the structure of the sentences. You can change this around later and make the synopsis appear as original and unique as you desire. (Are you satisfied now, Inner Artiste? Good, now settle down!)

So, back to the method. Another way to write this compressed synopsis is to move the goal into the second sentence into the form of a question, as follows:

Hero finds herself stuck in situation from which she wants to free herself. Can she achieve goal, or will villain stop her and cause her to experience disaster?

All you have to do is identify the elements and plug them in to create a rudimentary two sentence synopsis for your own story.

The best way to demonstrate this formula is with a real example. As virtually everyone knows the story of The Wizard of Oz, let's use that. The five elements are:

HERO Dorothy, a Kansas farm girl

SITUATION Finds herself transported to faraway land called Oz.

GOAL To find her way back to Kansas

VILLAIN The witch

DISASTER To be stuck in Oz forever

Plugging the elements into the two-sentence structure, we have:

Dorothy, a farm girl, finds herself transported to a faraway land called Oz. Will the witch kill her before she can find her way back to Kansas?

Now, before you begin to think that this sounds too simplistic for your story, or if you don't believe your book contains one on more of these elements, or that they seem too melodramatic, etc.--you're wrong. Your story has all five elements, or it would not be a story.

Your story must have a hero, even if that hero happens to be a cat. And your hero must be stuck in an untenable situation and develop a goal to escape that situation, or you have nothing but a character study, not a story. The untenable situation could be something as mundane as boredom or as abstract as a blocked unconscious need to act out rebelliousness. But that untenable situation is there, and the hero must have a goal to escape it. Furthermore, if there is nothing to stop the hero from achieving her goal (i.e., a villain), then you have no conflict. No conflict, no story.

Granted, some of your story elements may require some thought to identify. For example, your villain might be society as a whole, Mother Nature, or even your hero's self-doubt. Similarly, your disaster could be little more than your hero having to live with an unbearable self-concept or overwhelming guilt. It's also important to remember that the "disaster" is seen through the eyes of the hero. This is usually the worst possible scenario he or she can envision at the beginning of the story, but may in fact be the just outcome, or the outcome that does the hero the most good in the long run.

Back to The Wizard of Oz. While the two sentence synopsis we wrote is accurate, it is also painfully dull. This because we started with the five story elements distilled into their absolute minimal forms (done intentionally by me for the purpose of this exercise). To jazz it up, let's go through the list and expand each element:

HERO - Dorothy isn't just a farm girl, she's a lonely, wistful farm girl

SITUATION - Dorothy isn't merely transported to Oz, but is whisked away by a tornado and dropped there. Also, Oz is far more than a faraway land, it's a magical but frightening place, full of strange characters, little people call Munchkins and witches, both "good" and "bad."

GOAL - Dorothy's main goal is to get back to Kansas, but she soon learns that only the great and powerful Wizard of Oz can help her do that, and he lives in Emerald City, a long and dangerous journey from her starting point (You'll note that in any story, the hero's main goal breaks down into a series of sub-goals).

VILLAIN - The witch is more than "just a witch"--she is the Wicked Witch of the West.

DISASTER - Dorothy's possible fate is actually worse than being stuck in Oz forever--the Wicked Witch of the West is determined to kill her.

So, let's plug these expanded elements into the original formula.
 

Dorothy, a lonely, wistful farm girl, is whisked away by a tornado and dropped into in a faraway land called Oz, a magical but frightening place, filled with strange and wonderful characters--little people called Munchkins, and witches that are both good and bad. Can Dorothy make the long and dangerous journey to Emerald City to see the Wizard, the only one who can help her return to Kansas, or will the Wicked Witch of the West kill her first?

Note that we still have exactly the same structure as before which does make the synopsis read a bit clumsily. But you have to admit it's a lot more colorful and engaging. For better reading flow, the first sentence can be rearranged as follows:

When a tornado strikes her home in Kansas, a lonely, wistful farm girl named Dorothy finds herself transported to a faraway land called Oz, a magical but frightening place, filled with strange and wonderful characters--little people called Munchkins, and witches that are both good and bad. Can Dorothy make the long and dangerous journey to Emerald City to see the Wizard, the only one who can help her return to Kansas, or will the Wicked Witch of the West kill her first?

Once you have this much, you can keep expanding, rearranging, and enriching the synopsis to make it as long and original-sounding as you like. You can pull in more information--for example, that Dorothy's house fell on the Wicked Witch of the East (which sets up the motivation of why the Wicked which of the West loathes Dorothy, as the two witches were sisters), and you can break the main goal down into sub-goals (for example, that Dorothy is only told that she must "follow the Yellow Brick Road" to reach Emerald City, and that once she does manage to see the Wizard, he tells her she must bring him the Wicked Witch's broom in order to prove her worthiness, and so on).

In my query letters to literary agents, I always include a two sentence synopsis similar to that above in terms of detail, then usually expand on it in another paragraph and introduce more subtle elements. In this second paragraph, I always try to point out the villain's motivation to stop the hero (as above) and also the most important character conflict. Although I did not do this above for The Wizard of Oz, the most important character conflict in that story might be between Dorothy and the wizard--after she does manage to return with the witch's broom, he gives her the runaround, and she must find the courage within herself to stand up to him and demand that he deliver on his promise.

The two-sentence synopsis method takes a little practice, but once you get the hang of it, you will find the task of writing synopses--of any length--much easier. In fact, now I often write this type of two-sentence synopsis as soon as my story idea has jelled, because the "top down" approach helps me stay focused as I begin the actual process of putting it into words.

One word of caution: if you are having trouble generating interest in your book, resist the urge to "reposition" the story to make it more appealing to agents who represent other genres. For example, if you had written The Wizard of Oz and could not get any fantasy genre agents to read it, you could compose the following short synopsis:

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets, then teams up with three total strangers to kill again.

I'm joking, of course, but you get the idea. Such repositioning misleads agents and wastes their time.

To see the two-sentence synopsis method applied to ten different well-known stories from literature and film, go to Story Synopsis Quiz. All ten of these synopses are written in exactly the same form as I have outlined here. To practice, you might try writing up a few from your favorite books, plays and films.

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