FRIDAY NOTES & NEWS: Choosing a Title and Other Dilemmas

BY N

ANCY KAY CLARK
CommuterLit editor and publisher

I hate choosing titles. You would think that after spending months and months writing a story I would be able to come up with a perfect title, but it eludes me. So I make great lists of possibilities and run them by trusted people, but their various—mostly contradictory—opinions just add to my confusion. So I research the best-selling titles in the genre, in hopes of gaining some insight, but end up wondering if I shouldn’t be more original and not just piggyback off of something someone else has come up with.

And I have a second dilemma: how do you know when a piece of writing is finished? We writers are forever fiddling with our copy. Countless times writers have withdrawn their submissions to CommuterLit with the promise of resubmitting a much better, updated version of the same story. Some writers even attempt to do that after I have accepted the original version of the story for postingSo how do you know when to call it?

If anyone has some insight into either of these dilemmas, please leave a comment below.

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Eric Witchey‘s afterlife fantasy Littliest Death: A Labyrinth of Souls Novel is a Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver medalist for Fantasy Fiction and a International Book Award Visionary Fiction winner. Eric also teaches writing.