Your Guide to Writing the Perfect Story

Choosing a Title

A lot of the time, people don't pay the title of their story any mind until they get to posting their first chapter and they realize it's necessary. Sound like you? Don't panic! People make choosing a title a lot more complicated than it needs to be. Usually I'd suggest waiting until you've written the book before deciding on a title but I realize that this isn't exactly an option on Wattpad. However, so long as you have a rough sketch of what will occur in your story that should suffice at least temporarily. You can always change it in your final draft. 

Now, I'm going to try and make this as simply as I possibly can for you. The way I see it, there's only four main thing you should think about when choosing a title. The rest is up to you. 

a) Is it related to the plot?

b) Is it intriguing?

c) Does it spoil the plot?

d) Is it too long?

I'll go through each of these in detail.

1. Related

The one thing I just don't understand is when someone chooses a title like "Opulence" and then have nothing even related to the title. Sure, opulence has a nice sound to it, but it leads me to believe that the author completely misunderstood the definition of the word when it has no relation to the plot whatsoever. 

If you look at basically any bestselling novel, you'll notice something that they all have in common: all of their titles are relevant. Take "Divergent" for example. Tris is Divergent and that is the reason for most of the conflict in the stories. Think of "The Hunger Games". That is literally what the book is about. List all of your favourite books. 

Matched

The Forgotten Garden

Dash and Lily's Book of Dares

All of them have titles related to the plot. 

2. Intriguing

The second thing I said to think about is whether the title is intriguing or not. For instance, does it raise questions? Does it sound appealing? For the sake of consistency, I'll use my previous examples. "The Hunger Games" is intriguing because the reader doesn't know what the hunger games is unless they read the blurb on the back. "Divergent" is intriguing if you don't know what the hell it means or why it would be related to the book. "The Forgotten Garden" is intriguing because of the idea that the garden is forgotten. Why? What happened? That's just to list a few.

You could also make an intriguing title by making it a metaphor, or an emotion or even a quality, such as in "Pride and Prejudice". My short story has the title of "Open Cage", which is metaphorical. There is no limit to how you can make a title intriguing, just that it should be. I've only listed a few of the many ways to make your title great.

3. Don't Spoil the Plot

Up until I joined Wattpad, I thought that this was pretty self-explanatory. How could you even have room to spoil anything in a book title? I mean, titles are only a few words anyway, right?

Wrong. 

Apparently, there's this species of author out there that thinks it's a good idea to literally spell out the plot of their story for us. In the title. 

I'm going to give you a few real life examples. And I mean real life. If you search these up, Wattpad will have them. That's a guarantee. So let me humour you.

"I'm Sixteen and Pregnant" is one and oh, goody! How about "Harry Styles got me Pregnant"? Or there's the classic "I'm Dating my Best Friend's Brother". Lord, I don't think I can go on or the tears might flood my house. The saddest part is that these have all been on the hot list. I'm telling you now that I don't give a damn whether you have the best story in the world -- I will not ever in my entire life read your first chapter if your title is as pathetic as that. 

4. Keep It Short

By short, I mean maybe four words. Max. Most titles are one or two words, but it's sometimes acceptable if you go a bit over. Of course, there are always exceptions, but that's a good rule of thumb to follow. So don't think you can sneak a sentence-long title in there. It won't go over well. So "In Which a Girl Falls in Love" won't cut it. And I hope you never even consider a title like that. I would barf all over you.

Well, that would be gross so I wouldn't, but you get the idea.

That's all for titles! Maybe now that this is out into the world, I won't cry for all the pathetic title-givers out there on Wattpad. I hope this helped and you'll continue reading! Don't forget to comment!