Title matters

Part two of coming up with words to name art, books, and more...

A page from Sara Bader’s quote collection Art is the Highest Form of Hope

Hey y’all,

You shared so much good stuff about titles in the comments of my letter “Working Titles” that a followup letter was in order. I thought it might be fun to come up with a catalog of different methods for titling work.

Previously, I covered the combinatorial approach of (fictional) Judith Jones pushing around key words with index cards and pushpins until the right order appears.

I also covered the steal like an artist approach of simply lifting words from another text, like the Bible or Shakespeare. (There are transformative variations of this, like what Ian calls “flip it and trick it” — take a famous title and flip it. A prime example is Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, which is a flip of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.)

A close relative is the bibliomancy approach of opening a book to a random page and simply seeing what shows up. Michael Stipe of R.E.M. claims that he found the name for the band while randomly paging through the dictionary. This is a good case for keeping paper reference book around — a few of you mentioned finding inspiration in phone books and the thesaurus.

One can’t underestimate the power of chance and randomness. Hattie told us about her printmaking professor Jack McCaslin, who had a special drawer for titles:

Anytime he came across something that struck him as a good one he’d write it on a scrap of paper and chuck it in the drawer. When he made a new edition of prints he would reach in the drawer without looking and pull one out at random. His rule was that whatever he got would be the title- which works nicely for the very abstract prints he makes… Jack’s method had a kind of magic to it as well in that sometimes the titles would be dead on somehow, looking like he’d looked at the print and titled it based on what it was, but others were delightfully enigmatic, making the viewer stand and puzzle over them and try and figure out why it was called that.

The drawer functions as a kind of “swipe file.” (Bob Dylan once told Joni Mitchell that he had a box that wrote his songs for him. “I write down things from movies and things I’ve heard people say and I throw them in the box.”)

An easy way to title things is to just have a big list of running titles going all the time and dip into it whenever you need one.