Title generator

What it's for

An evocative title, drawn at random, is one of the most effective triggers there is for anyone who writes: faced with «The garden of ashes» your head starts asking by itself whose garden it is and why it's of ashes, and that question is already a story. It's good in writing workshops, for timed exercises, for a group game where everyone writes ten lines on the same title, and for getting unstuck when the page is empty.

How they're built

The titles come from joining two pieces: an opening formula («The last», «The secret of the», «Beyond the») and a word with weight («promise», «storm», «silence», «border»). It's fiction's most widespread pattern, and it works because it puts together something concrete and something abstract: the reader grasps the genre without knowing anything about the plot yet.

The possible combinations number one hundred and fifty, and not all of them make equal sense: that's normal, and part of the game. The title you want is the one that, once read, makes you want to know how it ends.

A title can't be registered as a work

This is useful to know for anyone who writes: copyright protects the text, not the title, which is nearly always too short to count as a work in itself. That's why different books share the same title, and it isn't a problem. Watch out for the opposite case, though: a title that is also the name of a very well known series may be protected as a trade mark, and using it then creates confusion and trouble. The practical rule is the tagline's: search for it first, and if a famous novel already comes up, change it.

Nearby tools

For the names of characters, bands or projects there is Name generator; for an opening line Motivational quotes. If you're really writing, the page count is done by Editorial pages, the word count by Word counter and readability by How readable is a text.