What's in a Title?

Well actually, quite a lot.  In the office, it’s all about status, position and power.  In the literary words it’s the hook to bring a reader in.

And titles in both areas have been absorbing my time this week.

I’m currently working as a temp, my job title ends is “Analyst”, and on Monday I had an interview for another job, a one year fixed term contract, but that’s more security than I have right now.  On Thursday I was offered the job.  I accepted of course.  It’s not a writing job, but the mantra of mortgage two kids comes up, and there are still bills to pay.  And a job is a job, right.  This one is Investment Strategist, good title huh?  Sounds impressive than Analyst too.

On the writing side, I have been making in roads into the romance story I’ve promised myself to complete this year, and I have submitted two more short stories to competitions.  So I’ve kept up with three of my new year’s resolutions, which isn’t bad.  On the way with another one – reading WM every month, but though it arrived last week, I’ve barely read a page because of the distractions else where.

The pain with the submission of the competition is the difficultly I had finding a title for one of the entries.  The remit was a short story which opens with dialogue of no more than one sentence.

So I wrote the story last month, was happy with it, except for the title. Just couldn’t think of one.  At all.

Titles matter.  And not only in the jobs market.  So I’ve spent some hours trying to come up with a title on this latest entry, and all to no avail.  Been through every synonym I could find for dialogue and gunman to see if there was anything jumped out at me, but really struggled to find something that felt right. Today I had to find the right title, and I had to do it quickly as I wanted to get the submission in.  So I ran several options passed my husband, he didn’t like any of them.  Finally I gave a three word title, and the enthusiastic response was “yeah, that’ll do”.  Not the greatest praise ever, but workable.  It was certainly the best title I could come up with and it’s the one I used.  So fingers crossed it hooks the judges in.

See you soon.