The Pitfalls of a Good Title

A good title is a pitfall for the reader, which makes it a windfall for the writer.

I recently finished reading a book of short stories by Irish writer Maeve Binchy. She was a new author to me, but the BookBub description made Chestnut Street sound interesting. And the fact that they were short stories meant I could read them one at a time and squeeze them in between more important matters.

Or so I thought.

Unfortunately, I would finish a story and be immediately intrigued by the title of the next one. I suppose I could have avoided the problem by not turning the page, but that isn’t in my nature. I like to move to the page I will start on next rather than ending with the last one. I’m not sure why, but it seems more hopeful and less stagnant that way. So I saw the title and read on.

To give you some idea of the allure created by Maeve’s short story titles, they include “A Problem of My Own,” “The Cure for Sleeplessness,” “Taxi Men Are Invisible,” “The Lottery of the Birds,” and—my favorite—“The Wrong Caption.”

I always struggle to find the right title for my books, and I fail miserably at times. I sent a book about a riverboat accident to my beta readers with the working title “Tragedy at Dawn,” and one girl said it sounded like a Magic Treehouse book. She was right, and I eventually came up with “Dark Waters,” which is much better. But good titles are hard to find.

They don’t have to be complicated, however. Maeve Binchy’s short story collection is titled simply Chestnut Street. Each short story is about a different character, but they all either live on or have a connection to Chestnut Street in Dublin. I’m assuming it’s a fictional street, but I don’t actually know because I haven’t been there—yet. But the title draws upon the common denominator, so it works for that book.

An interesting title can’t turn a bad book or story into a good one. I continued reading Chestnut Street because Maeve Binchy is a masterful storyteller, not because—or at least not just because—I wanted to see what the titles had to do with the stories. Still, it is the titles that kept me reading when other priorities told me to put the book down and return to it later.

If you are looking for a good read, try Chestnut Street. After all, don’t you want to know what the wrong caption said?

Just make sure you don’t have anything important to do.