Insecure Writer’s Support Group November 2021

Today I shall answer the question that was posed by the lovely co-hosts Kim Lajevardi, Victoria Marie Lees, Joylene Nowell Butler, Erika Beebe, and Lee Lowery.

The question for this month is this: what’s harder to do, coming up with your book title, or writing the blurb?

For me, both are difficult to do, but writing the blurb is difficult. I get lost in the weeds of the book because I want to discuss everything within the blurb, but it needs to be enticing. That part is difficult because for a plot, there are typically multiple subplots that are intertwined where you state the primary goal of the protagonist and potentially the problem.

For creating a title for a novel or a short story that I’ve written, I write a phrase that is the theme or the mental state of the protagonist. For example, Wandering Affection came into being because I didn’t want to label the short story as “Soulmates.” It isn’t truly a title to me, and the love story comes and goes, both romantic and platonic. For “The Forsaken Tale” I literally workshop it here as a post. It was initially “The Swan Fairy Tale,” but it didn’t fit due to it not being the focus of my protagonist Kellina. To her, she is not a Tale of Swan Lake, she is someone who willingly wants to be forgotten by the magical realm.

For blurbs, you are working at the draft and it is mostly a work in progress. While you have an idea of what you want to write, an outline in hand or if you are winging it, you are always tweaking it to try to fit a demography. For me, I typically write for the audience of one before writing for an audience of many.

Well these are my insights regarding a book title or a blurb. I hope you folks are hydrated and I’ll post a new NaNoWriMo post later.