Inventing Reality: A Guide to Writing Science Fiction

Given the many different ways of coming up with a story title – using a character’s name, using a line from the text or drawing from a conceptual object in the story, to name a few – just about any word or phrase would seem to serve as an adequate appellation.

Not so. In fact, you want to avoid writing an “adequate” title. You want something that stands out, something that grabs your readers, something that makes them wonder what the story is about and proceed to page one. While every reader has different tastes, some titles seem to appeal to the common elements of science fiction readers’ psyches and stand out: “I, Robot”, “The Stars My Destination”, “A Clockwork Orange”, “Fahrenheit 451”, “Lord of the Flies”, “Ringworld”.

To avoid creating an adequate (or even a god-awful) title, don’t use titles that are:

n Unpronounceable - Science fiction readers like to talk to one another about what they’ve read. But it’s difficult to talk about something that they can’t pronounce. Even worse, they might want to ask a book store clerk if that title is in stock.

n Embarrassing to say – Ditto.

n Difficult for others to spell -...

Tags: gobbet title, style, titles

| | del.icio.us

Sometimes authors start with the title and build the story around it. This is called a reverse gobbet (you may recall that a gobbet is a title taken from a story’s text). James Tiptree Jr.’s novel “Brightness Falls from the Air” is an example of a reverse gobbet, with the title originally appearing as a phrase in a poem by Elizabethan Thomas Nashe (well, sort of – it’s a misread line). The reverse gobbet may seem like an odd way to write a story, but sometimes a single evocative phrase can rouse the muse.

Tags: getting motivated to write, gobbet title, reversed gobbets, style, titles

| | del.icio.us

Selecting a title marks one of the most important decisions you’ll make about your story. The title blares across a novel’s cover and is listed in a magazine’s table of contents. For science fiction readers, those few words hint at the story’s meme (or subgenre, such as alien invasion, space exploration, time travel); some readers prefer certain memes over others and will pass over a story (or give it a try) simply because of the meme your title suggests.

The great problem facing writers then is to come up with a catchy – and memorable – title. There are a number of approaches authors take in selecting titles. With examples from “Star Trek: The Original Series” episodes, you could name the story after:

n Characters - “Miri” is the name of an episode about a 300-year-old child survivor of a plague that wiped out all of her planet’s adults; she’s the story’s pivotal character who must mature if the Enterprise landing party is to successfully cure the disease and prevent their own deaths from it.

n Attributes of characters - “The Enemy Within” is about a transporter accident that splits Captain Kirk into two: one that is gentle and rational,...

Tags: gobbet title, style, titles

| | del.icio.us