It is essential to give your creative writing a title to make it more accessible to potential readers. Choosing a title for your creative writing should not be difficult; it should be informative and provoke thoughts and reactions in your audience. Remember, a title only provides an overview of your piece – the full context and content should be provided in the body of your work.
Choose An Informative Title
Although your chosen title does not have to be literal, it should be fairly straightforward and provide the reader with some information about the content of your work. To determine the right title for your creative writing, you should consider the type of work you are submitting, whether it is fiction or nonfiction, and the target audience. For example, if you are writing for children, you might want to consider a bright, curious title to attract and engage them in your story. A good example of this would be Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat Comes Back! (or Something Different).
As a writer, you might want to consider titling your work in a way that reflects the style of your writing. For example, if you are writing in a more humorous style, you might want to consider a comic book title like Oddly Speaking or A Slapstick Comedy or Scared Stiff. If you are writing in a more serious vein, you could opt for A Modest Proposal or How to Win the Game or The Perfect Murder.
Keep It Brief
As well as choosing a more informative title, you should try to keep it as short as possible. If someone has to read several pages of a book to find out what it’s called, they may consider it a chore and lose interest. The shorter the title, the more likely it is to be catchy, memorable, and a suitable heading for a bibliography or quick reference guide.
If you are writing for children, a short and snappy title will make your work more attractive to them. If they have to explain what a novel is or if it’s a bit too grown-up for them, you can bet they’ll forget about it soon enough and move on to something more exciting. Be careful not to shorten your title too much, though, as they key purpose of a title is to draw the reader’s attention to your work. If it sounds too much like a tweet or a status update, it might not make for a very effective piece of creative writing.
Avoid Using Excessive Marketing Language
The phrase “[insert brand name] approved!” Or “grab your [insert product name] now and save 10%” should never, ever appear in a work of fiction. If you are writing for children or trying to appeal to a very broad audience, words like “revolutionary” or “breakthrough” might be appropriate in your marketing copy, but nowhere else.
Even in a nonfiction work, excessive marketing language should be avoided as it comes off as disingenuous and is often associated with shoddy writing. If you overuse this kind of language, your work may come off as more of an ad than a piece of creative content.
Follow The TADA Style
When choosing a title for your creative writing, you need to bear in mind the Text-to-Accessibility-Style (TADA) guidelines. Essentially, this is a set of guidelines that help creators make their content more accessible to those with vision impairments and other cognitive challenges. Following these guidelines will help ensure that the text of your creative writing is usable to the most amount of people possible.
If you are unsure about what accessibility features to include in your writing or what guidelines to follow, ask your local library if they can suggest a consultant. They may be able to recommend a good accessibility guide that can help you write more accessible content.
Avoid Using Emoji Or Cartoon Characters
Emoji, or “chibi”, variants are a fantastic way of adding personality to your creative writing and making a short work more engaging. Emoji are immensely popular among Twitter users and many cell phone apps allow users to add stickers, or “emojis”, to their messages. If your work is meant to be humorous, using emojis in your work can actually enhance the humor by making the character more relatable. This is because people can usually relate to cartoons and comics more so than they can to traditional novels and short stories.
Using cartoon characters in your creative writing can also be a way of introducing children to the world of literature. If you are writing for children or if you want to write in a manner that will be engaging with an adult audience, using cartoon characters is a great way of adding humor and a sense of fun to your narrative.
To create a memorable and exciting title for your creative writing, take some time to think of a hashtag or word association that will be useful in getting people interested in your work. Once you have a few ideas, you can choose one to represent your work and build a brand around it. Doing this will help improve your chances of getting your work published, and getting published is what it’s all about! Good luck out there.