Story Title Generator

What the story title generator does

A title has to do an unfair amount of work. It is the first thing anyone meets, often the only thing they meet, and it has to promise a whole book in three or four words without giving the book away.

Tap the button and it hands you title-shaped phrases, the kind that sit on a cover: Emperor Of Stardust, Border Of Time, Officers And Rebels. Pull a batch and wait for one to suggest a story you suddenly want to write.

Before you agonise over getting it perfect, it is worth knowing a strange and comforting fact: some of the most famous titles in the language were not their authors' choice, arrived at the last minute, and in several cases were picked by somebody else entirely.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. Pull a big batch if you are hunting rather than deciding.
2. Press Generate. A fresh set every time.
3. Press Copy to take the whole lot with you.

The titles you know are often not the ones the authors chose

Consider a few books you were probably made to read.

Pride and Prejudice was not called that. Jane Austen submitted it to a publisher as First Impressions, and it was rejected by return of post. She spent years reworking it, and by the time it was published in 1813 it had the title we know. The novel that defines the phrase pride and prejudice began life under a completely different name.

1984 was The Last Man in Europe. That was Orwell's title, and his publisher found it flat and uncommercial, and suggested he use the other name he had been turning over. The year became the title, and "Orwellian" and the number itself became shorthand for a whole kind of nightmare. The Last Man in Europe would have meant nothing to anyone.

The Great Gatsby nearly went out under a shortlist that should frighten every writer. Fitzgerald seriously wanted Trimalchio in West Egg, a reference to a decadent host from a Roman satire that almost no reader would catch. He also weighed The High-Bouncing Lover and Gold-Hatted Gatsby. The final title was settled just weeks before publication in 1925. Picture a student a century later writing four sides on the symbolism of The High-Bouncing Lover.

And the sharpest one of all: Catch-22 was Catch-18, all the way through writing. Shortly before it came out in 1961, another war novel appeared, Leon Uris's Mila 18, and Heller's team feared readers would confuse the two. His editor, Robert Gottlieb, reached for a different number. They tried eighteen, then eleven, blocked again by a film, and eventually landed on twenty-two, chosen for no reason except that Heller liked the sound of it. One of the most famous titles in modern fiction, a phrase that entered the language as the name for an impossible bind, exists because another book took the number first.

The pattern, once you see it, is everywhere. To Kill a Mockingbird was Atticus. The title you think of as inseparable from the book was frequently the second, or the fifth, and frequently not the author's at all.

Why the second title usually wins

Here is the part that is actually useful, rather than just a good set of facts. The replaced titles are not random. Look at what changed, and a rule emerges.

Nearly every original title was more specific and more literal than the one that replaced it. The Last Man in Europe tells you the ending. First Impressions describes the plot mechanism, plainly. Trimalchio in West Egg names a character and a place. They are all trying to describe the book, and that is exactly why they are worse.

The titles that won do something different. They do not describe the book. They compress it into something that rings. 1984 is not a description, it is a feeling attached to a year. The Great Gatsby puts one ambiguous word, great, next to a name, and lets the whole tragedy hang off the tension between them. Is he great? The title will not say, which is precisely why it pulls.

This is the thing to take from all of it. A title is not a summary. The moment a title tries to explain the book, it shrinks the book to whatever the title can hold. The good ones leave the book bigger than the title, hinting at a scale they refuse to spell out, so the reader has to open the cover to find the rest.

The titles this generator produces work by the same instinct. Emperor Of Stardust does not describe a plot. It slams two words together, grandeur and cosmic dust, and lets you feel a story in the gap between them without being told a single fact about it. That gap is the whole job.

Choosing a title that carries the book

Generating candidates takes seconds. Here is what separates a title that works from one that merely fits.

Say it out loud. A title lives in speech, recommended across a table, asked for in a shop, said once and remembered or not. Several of your candidates will sound clumsy the moment they leave your mouth, and you want to find that out now rather than after it is printed.

Resist the urge to explain. The strongest pull in titling is toward telling the reader what the book is about, and it is almost always the wrong instinct. Trust the tension. A title that raises a question beats one that answers it, because the unanswered question is what makes someone open the cover.

Check it is not already taken, and not already loud. Titles cannot be copyrighted, so duplication is legal, but walking into a very famous title invites a comparison you will lose. Catch-22 changed its number precisely to avoid standing too near another book. That instinct is sound.

Let it be a little strange. The safe, descriptive title is the one that vanishes on a shelf. The ones that last are usually slightly off, an unexpected pairing of words, and they last because nothing else sounds quite like them.

Take what this hands you as a shape, then say it aloud and see whether it leaves the story bigger than itself. If it does, it is doing the one thing a title is for.

Where these come from

The titles are built from a set of evocative words our team assembled and curated by hand, combined into the shapes book titles tend to take. Your browser puts them together at random. Nothing you do here leaves your device.

Questions people ask

Is the Catch-22 story really true?

Yes. Heller wrote the book as Catch-18, and when Leon Uris's Mila 18 was about to appear, his editor Robert Gottlieb pushed for a change to avoid confusion. After a couple of blocked alternatives they settled on twenty-two. The number carries no meaning; it simply sounded right, and it went on to become an everyday word for an inescapable bind.

Do authors even choose their own titles?

Often less than you would expect. With a traditional publisher the title is a shared decision, and the marketing side carries real weight, because the title is a commercial object as much as an artistic one. Self-published and independent authors keep full control, which is freedom and risk in the same breath.

Can two books have the same title?

Legally, yes. Titles are not protected by copyright, so the same title can appear on many different books. The reasons to avoid a clash are practical rather than legal: you do not want to be confused with, or measured against, a famous book that already owns the phrase in readers' minds.

Can I use one of these as my title?

Yes. Treat what you get as a starting point, say it aloud, and check it against anything famous before you commit. A title is a phrase, not an invention someone can own, and by the time it sits on a finished story it will feel like it was always yours.

How long should a title be?

There is no rule, and great titles run from a single word to a whole clause. What matters is not length but tension: whether the words leave a question open. A short title with nothing behind it is weaker than a longer one that makes you want to know more, and either can be right depending on the book.

References

1. What 10 classic books were almost called. Mental Floss. https://mentalfloss.com/article/26044/what-10-classic-books-were-almost-called
2. The High-Bouncing Lover or "The Great Gatsby"? CNN. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/10/22/mf.classic.book.names/
3. Catch-22 (logic). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22_(logic)