Choosing a Title

 

Children's Titles

Here are a few great tips about choosing titles from author Bethany Roberts, who can be found at Bethany Roberts.com.

• Keep your titles short and snappy. I have learned this one the hard way! People seem to have great difficulty remembering my longer titles, but no problem remembering the shorter ones. A good general rule is to keep your titles from one to three words, no more than five.
• Catchy sounds - In creating your titles, try playing with poetic devises like alliteration and rhyme. Of my own book titles, I think my favorite is MONSTER MANNERS because the alliteration makes it fun to say.
• Use verbs - Another way to make a title lively is to use an active verb in it. I did that with FOLLOW ME!
• Reflect the theme - a good title, however short and catchy, gives us a hint of what the story is about.
• Hook your reader - The title is your first chance to grab the attention of a reader- or of an editor.
• Has your title been used? Check with Books in Print (at your library), or do a search on Amazon.com

Fortunately, I knew my title before I wrote my book, so I was able to avoid the great title dilemma. Next time, I may not be so lucky. How about the rest of you? How did you choose your titles? Do you have any other tips to add to this list?

Death Comes to the Manuscript

If you're from New Mexico, you probably had to read Willa Cather's DEATH COMES TO THE ARCHBISHOP in high school, the historical novel about the Catholic church coming to this part of the country.


If you're an author, you've probably experienced Death Comes to the Manuscript, that sad but necessary moment when you close the door on an old piece of writing.

For me, Manuscript Death struck twice recently: novels two and three in my file cabinet have been laid to rest (As an aside -- Novel one was horrendous and needs to stay locked away. Novel four is the one that sold. I'm hoping novel five will also see the light of day).

These two fought the good fight. I revised both for years. Number two I started when my now eleven-year-old was born. It's gone through a POV change, a timeline tightening, and dozens of major overhauls. It received a "champagne rejection"* from a lovely assistant editor at Bloomsbury in 2004. My agent loves it. My editor doesn't. But in re-reading it last week, I realized if I was to overhaul it one more time and try again, there was little I could salvage. It was time to let it go.

Number three was eerily similar to Sarah Weeks's PIE, right down to the dueling siblings, the baking contest, and the stolen recipe (there's more, but I don't want to give too many plot points away). The two differences? My story was about snickerdoodles and wasn't half as good as Sarah's. It was time for this one to give up the ghost, too.

I thought it would be hard to walk away from these manuscripts, but somehow it's oddly freeing. They both taught me a lot about writing; both story lines will continue to remain dear to me. They're just not stories for the world at large. And you know what? That's okay.

Has Death ever come for one of your Manuscripts? What was the experience like for you?


*A rejection so positive it's worth celebrating.

How many cliches have I used in this post? Count them up and leave your answer below. One commenter will win a packet of MG and YA bookmarks.

Does Word Count Matter Anymore?

Happy New Year!

Project Mayhem sends you and yours very warm wishes for a happy and prosperous 2012. May you have many wonderful writing successes.

For this first post of the brand new year, I’d thought I’d blog about a topic that seems to keep coming up lately in my own writing circles: word count. Just recently, I had a conversation with a local children’s writer who was fretting because her middle-grade manuscript was nearly 80,000 words, a length she feared would turn off prospective agents and editors.

We’ve all heard a lot about what the word count should be for a middle-grade manuscript. The numbers vary, but a couple of years ago, it seemed like 20,000 to 40,000 got tossed around a lot as a standard range.

Whoops—guess I’m not very good at following standards. Both of my published middle-grade novels came in well over the high end of that range, IVY’S EVER AFTER clocking in at almost double with 75,000, and sequel IVY AND THE MEANSTALK a leaner but still lengthy 56,000. Guess I don’t follow “the rules” very well.

I was really, really worried that length was going to be an issue for the original IVY. I figured the very first thing my editor would request was that I cut a chapter or two—or ten. Imagine my surprise—and delight—to discover that my editor had a really easygoing and fabulous attitude about the length of a book. “If it holds kids’ interest, they’ll read it, no matter how long it is,” she said. After all my fretting and worrying, tossing and turning at night, telling myself I must cut, cut, cut and trim, trim, trim, in the end, the length of the book wasn’t even an issue for my editor at all.

And really, do old word count “rules” still apply anymore? With the longest of the Harry Potter books, HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, tipping the scale at 870 printed pages, and lengthy middle-grade reads like INKHEART and ERAGON and their various sequels topping bestsellers’ lists, hasn’t it been proven that young readers aren’t intimidated by a hefty length?

Currently, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) lists the market trend for middle-grade manuscripts as 100 – 250 typewritten pages. With one-inch margins and 12-point Times New Roman font (also recommended by current SCBWI guidelines), 200 typewritten pages comes in at about 56,000 words on my word processor, so it sounds like that old 40,000 cap, at least, might be a thing of the past.

What do you think? Is there still an “acceptable” word count for middle grade? What kind of word counts do your manuscripts sport?

-Dawn Lairamore

photo credit: Barry Yanowitz via photopin cc

Recycling Old Manuscripts, Rose-Family Style

Cut in half.

Rustle up some silly kids.

Spread out on the kitchen table.

Set up a chart.

Number your pages.

Create a Choose Your Own Adventure Story.

(Ours is called THE BLACK DOOM and includes a haunted castle with a parking lot, an eyeless lifeguard [who later gets olives as eyes], lots of gorillas, a pool full of raspberry Jello, and an annual haunted castle pizza party).

Staple.

Enjoy!