Story Title Generator

How the Story Title Generator works

Story title generator: where the names come from

A short story's title sits on a contents page beside a dozen others, so it has to be distinct in a line and read well in a sentence, "have you read The Lodger", and short fiction has settled into shapes that novels mostly do not use, which is why this page is separate from the Book title page and why the Genre select changes the words and the Shape select changes the grammar. The The-plus-noun form, The Lodger, The Last Orchard, The Witness in the Boathouse, is the classic short story title from the nineteenth century onward, one object or person the story turns on, and the adjective before it sets the genre: Missing says mystery, Hollow says horror, Little says fairy tale. The A-plus-abstract form, A Small Kindness, A Year of Silence, An Afternoon of Forgetting, A Quiet Inheritance, is the literary story, an indefinite article and a quality, and it reads as a story about a feeling rather than an event. The The-one-who form, The Girl Who Kept the Weather, The Miller Who Could Not Sleep, The Woman Who Never Forgot, is the fable and the fairy tale, a person defined by one act, and it is also the shape of the modern magic-realist story because it promises a small impossibility. The two-word snapshot, Night Bus, Cold Season, Orchard Weather, Hollow Nursery, is the contemporary literary shape, two words with no article, which reads as a photograph of a moment. The What-happened form, What Happened at Redwater, What We Found in the Cellar, The Night the Lighthouse Forgot, The Summer We Buried the Piano, is the mystery and the coming-of-age story, a title that names an event and withholds it. The possessive-occupation form, The Clockmaker's Apprentice, The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter, The Beekeeper's Last Customer, is the historical and the literary story, a trade and a relation, and it is common enough in book titles that the Book title page has the novel-length version. And the list form, Instructions for a Long Winter, Nine Ways to Leave a House, Notes on Forgetting, A Field Guide to Lost Gloves, is the structural short story, the one told as a list or a manual, which flash fiction and the literary magazines made a recognised shape.

The nouns are ordinary English and the trades and places are invented or generic, so a result is a new combination rather than a real story by design, though short story titles are shared constantly, The Lodger and The Visitor have each been used by many writers, and titles are not copyrighted, so a coincidence is normal and expected. A story title is also set on a contents page in the same type as its neighbours, so the shapes here are one to seven words.

For the collection or the novel, the Book title page; for a poem, the Poem title page; for a chapter inside the story, the Chapter title page; for the writer's pen name, the Pen name page in the People section; for the characters, the People section; and for the setting, the Fantasy and Fiction section.

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