Are you sick of one-word Titles? (...and, what would you rename books?)

Hello everyone,

This topic asks two questions in one:

A) Are you tired of one-word titles for books?

B) If you could, what books would you rename titles, and what you you rename them as?

Okay, I will answer my first question: Yes, I am sick of one-word titles. Sure, it was unique amongst the 'Legacy of the Force' novels, but I think that the concept / fad is wearing a bit to thin by carrying the idea onto the 'Fate of the Jedi' novels. I think that using just one word lacks imagination. I like the typical Star Wars titles, as used by the movies and earlier books - they hark back to the good-ole serial days of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

Answering my second question; for example - you could resuse old rejected titles of the movies, such as 'Balance Point' becoming 'Balance of the Force'.

Especially for the one word titles of series such as LOTF - what would you rename them to?

 

I'm certainly a bit bored by the 1 word titles, although in some cases they're appropriate.
Invincible was the worst titled of LOTF... although I'm not sure what they'd call it otherwise... Anti-Climax?
i do love a title that i THINK i heard suggested here : At The End of it All. although i guess that wouldnt have fitted Invincible... as it wasnt the end of it all.
I really loved the Coruscant Nights titles, thought they were some of the best for a long time.

 

I feel a title should always add something to a story. It should never be meaningless. It can be deliberately deceptive, but I did grow very tired of the LOTF titles that seemed to have no reason behind their name.

Sacrifice was good. That was appropriate and worked.

Invincible? I still don't understand the thought process behind that. We didn't even have Caedus going "I AM INVINCIBLE! I CANNOT BE KILLED! OH... WAIT... KARK." Had becoming invincible been a theme of his ascension to Sithdom it may have been suitably ironic, but I don't recall off hand Jacen talking about wanting to become invincible.

Titles also don't always need to be long like LSatSoM or DBoD, but they should at least have some relevance to the plot, not just "Invincible sounds cool."

 

I don't care what they call them. They're just action words. Easy to remember. Though I bet dollars to donuts that there is no omen in Omen.

 

Maybe the title Invincible didn't refer to Jacen. Maybe it referred to Jaina, or the Light Side which won, or the Dark Side (since we know there are more Sith waiting in the shadows -Krayt's goons). The title may not refer exactly to the char your thinking about.

As a random example I'm working on a story called Vindication (yeah, one word title I just realized ). The title is actually about a secondary character's vindication and not the hero's (who decides in the end that damming his soul for all eternity is a small price to pay for getting his revenge).




Or maybe they just choose Invincible since it sounds cool.

 

it's irony, but it's meta-irony, not in-universe irony. See what it's referring to is that LFL is basically saying "look at us, we're invincible, and you'll buy anything we hang out in front of you. Now, here's some wood-books of pretty pictures that you've seen before. Give us $4K. MWAHAAHAHA"

 

I actually like the one-word titles.

Of course, I like them when they work, that is. Invincible, well, didn't seem to work in a book that was all about everyone's vulnerability.

Bloodlines, by contrast, was a great title.

 

Personally I'd prefer some Mindorian type titles. They make cooler abbreviations than one worders.

In an interview Stover explained why they chose "Invincible" for the title. There were several meanings discussed. Han and Leia's love was invincible, which is apparent in the story. The Jedi are invincible. And there is the implication from Denning that perhaps Jacen's vision was invincible, in that in the end unity was achieved and the galaxy was united. When I heard the interview I went back to the text and Jaina's reflection seem to concur with what I felt Denning was implying. Sometimes he's too subtle for his own good...

 

A) Yes and No. Yes because they are easier to identify later on , as opposed to the NJO titles. I think if the NJO had some easier titles to remember then I would have an easier time remembering what exactly happened in each book. The titles like "Dark Blah blah II: DEATH blah onslaught blah blah" just annoy me. The titles like Dark Journey, Balance Point, Star by Star are decent.
As for the no part, some of the one word titles don't make any sense to me.

Betrayal: decent; jacen betrays the jedi/light side by listening to Lumiya and killing Nelani.

Bloodlines: good; esp because they bring Boba back in with all his family issues. I really like this title. Also one of my favorite covers.

Tempest: wtcrap; and Tenel Ka is the one the front. I mean, I guess it makes sense, but it's lost on me. That could be from my own ignorance, but w/e.

Exile: good; Han and Leia are exiled, makes sense.

Sacrifice: good; and obvious.

Inferno: good, I guess; They light Kashyyyk on fire.

Fury: ? ; Ben is mad at Jacen?? Idk...

Revelation: good; I always thought is was because Jaina realized she had to go kill Jacen. or that she had to go learn something that would surprise him. and if this is when Ben finds out Jacen was the killer, then this would make the title jump up to being really good, because then there's multiple revelations. But Caedus is lookin' creepy on the cover, and I don't remember him having a really significant revelation, so that kind of takes away from it for me. Also I just hate this cover.

Invincible: wtcrap; I always thought it was because Jaina was invincible...? When I heard "Han and Leia's love is invincible" I thought that was stupid. Hopefully the next series will make this title look better.

B) I would rename Fury Capture because Jacen kidnapping Allana was kind of a focal point. And this book is when Han and Leia figure out Allana is their g.daughter (one of my favorite scenes ever).

Also I think I remember Denning or someone saying in an interview that they wanted to name Invincible Sword of the Jedi. I like that title for this book and I would have picked that.

 

Same interview I was mentioning. And I agree, I threw my hands up when I heard that had been the working title. Would have loved it. And the abbreviation SotJ...would have been great.

 

Definitely. I wish they would do more with "sword of the Jedi". It's sounds so good, it could be a movie title! They should definitely name a book or a series SotJ.

 

I'm not a big fan of most of the one-word titles, but I'd rather them over titles like "Rule of Two" and "Dynasty of Evil."

 

Sword of the Jedi would have been far better.

Even if they wanted to stick with one word titles they could have just gone with "Sword" and it'd have been obvious what it meant.

Han and Leia's love may well be invincible, but it is far from what I'd have considered the novel's main plot, which is what one usually bases a title on.

 

Most, if not all of the LOTF titles were intended to have more than one meaning, hence the ambiguity.

One word is at least easier to remember and fits on a spine neatly. I'd rather one dumb word than a whole awkward phrase.

 

I tend to favor the shorter titles with one or two main words in them (most of titles NJO on work, imo). It's when the word count rises above three main words that it gets iffy for me- some work; others don't.

 

The shorter the titles, the BETTER!!!! I'm tired of trying to decode titles when certain people take it a little too far. Nothing's worse than......SWRTotoRWBGTWSotDGSPW

 

Having been brought up on the campy Star Wars titles of the movies I just prefer that feel. Admittedly I liked Sacrifice because it summed up the book in one word. But if you're talking about someone who knows nothing about these books or the EU, but loves to read and remembers they enjoyed Star Wars, and they walk by the new book section, what is going to be catch your eye and say, this might be interesting?

Invincible or Sword of the Jedi ?

I'd say the latter would grab a non-EU fan's attention. Just like LSaTSoM could capture people's imaginations. Invincible means nothing; the notion of Jedi and swords/lightsabers, on the other hand, could pique some curiosity based on what people remember from the movies.

 

Sword Of The Jedi is nearly as awful a title as Shadows Of The Empire; it sounds neat and that's about it.

Not that I'm giving Invincible any props; the best I can come up with is that Jacen's original plan was to bring peace to the galaxy and that even in death he achieved that-arguably.

 

The one word titles were okay for one series, but I wish they wouldn't continue the trend in FotJ. It's gotten old.

Not really. Jaina being the "Sword of the Jedi" is a prominent theme in the book and the latter part of the series as a whole, on top of being catchier.

 

I'll still pass; definitely a dull title as far as I'm concerned.

 

I can't see any reason to care, really. It's just a title; it's not the book. If it's not a catchy one-word title, it'll be a catchy three-word title. Tempest, Exile, Abyss, or Fury has as much meaning as Labyrinth of Evil, The Unseen Queen, Ruins of Dantooine, The Unifying Force, Path of Destruction, or Rogue Planet. Destiny's Way? What the hell does that even mean? Who cares? The whole point is that it be interesting or evocative -- it should sound adventurish and exciting, or mysterious and intriguing. And so long as the title isn't obnoxiously bad -- overreliant on "Dark" or "Jedi" or "Force", or as purely uncreative as Death Star, Millennium Falcon, or Outbound Flight (compounded by "the subject is the title is the cover image" syndrome) -- I don't care how many words are in it.

 

That's a good point. In the grand scheme of things, I think titles are only slightly more important than book covers? which is, "Not really important at all."

 

Yeah. The thing with one-word titles is that DR obviously likes them when they also have to deal with a long series title -- we've seen this with FOTJ and LOTF, but also with Dark Tide, Edge of Victory, and Force Heretic in the NJO. And Agents of Chaos and Enemy Lines were the only other series, and they were kept to two words for each title. I wouldn't mind seeing a bit more variety, but as a mechanism to keep titles from becoming ridiculously long (SWDBPODANOTOR, I'm looking at you), it's probably a good idea, and I can't get too upset over it. I think the thing to keep it from becoming monotonous is to cease the megaseries and to allow more one-shots and duologies and trilogies, which have more title freedom.

 

The title may not matter to people like us who are going to buy it anyway. But like TKeira_Lea said, they can affect people who pick things up at random. Things like LSatSoM or DB:ANotOR are blatantly influenced by marketing reasons. Most of the mainstream big mass media projects have had titles that evoke the feel of the intentionally corny film names like "Attack of the Clones", as with "Knights of the Old Republic".

Titles are always part of the creative process. No poet would just name a poem at random without putting any thought in the title, as the title can subtly influence one's perception of what one finds inside. Why "Return of the Jedi?" Why not just stick with the original "Revenge of the Jedi"? Chances are people were going to go see it anyway if they were a Star Wars fan, but for various reasons Lucas decided to change it.

Be it for marketing or creative reasons... titles are not "meaningless". Not to the author, at any rate. Even if we don't all agree, Denning had his reasons for picking Invincible, he didn't just open the dictionary on a random page.

However, were an author to just start slapping down random words without thinking, that's when readers should be worried. If you don't care about the title of your work, chances are as soon as you've been paid you don't have much lasting pride or interest in it either.

Titles may not always be good, but they're never meaningless.

Honestly, I feel it's only us who make this a problem, not the naming conventions. I'm sure Drew Karpyshyn never meant for PoD to be known as SWDBPODANOTOR. You could stick SW before any SW book, so including it in the abbreviation is just being silly. Similarly, the ANOTOR part is just to forewarn people of the era, they could quite easily stick the same thing on any other books. Calling it SWDBPODANOTOR is like trying to call TUF SWTUFANOTYVW. We're the one's obsessing over the pointless minutiae, Drew just named the book PoD. Whatever else got slapped on the cover is more just part of the artwork than anything.

 

A) Yes, I am. Other franchises have books with the same titles (how many Betrayals are there?), and it gets old fast.
B) I don't know the LotF books that well to rename them, but I would use names involving the locations in each book.