I have written the first words of a new novel. They are, of course, the title. This one is called To the Church in Philadelphia.
Why THAT? What does it mean? Are we going to hear a sermon? That would be an immediate turnoff for 85% of possible readers. ‘Philadelphia’ might catch a few eyes in the (wrong) city of Philadelphia, but it’s hardly going to compensate. This story is not set in Philadelphia. It’s set in London, maybe as little as twenty years from now.
Yet I like it. For me, it has the right sense of mystery, and, when you know it’s a (mis)quote from the Book of Revelation, of foreboding. At this stage, when no reader or agent or publisher has had the chance to express an opinion, I get to choose. Picking a title I like helps build that all-important self-belief as the first passages go onto the page.
Sometimes I think it’s better if it’s not quite clear what the title means.
I remember, about fifteen years ago, I was with a group of teenagers in a bit of the Sinai desert. We were lying on our backs watching for shooting stars in the brilliant night sky. The teenagers wanted to know about The Silence of the Lambs.
I told the story as best I could. ‘Well there’s this policewoman played by Jodie Foster and she has to catch a serial killer, and she needs this crazy guy Hannibal Lecter to help her…’ and so on. And I finished by discussing the title: how it refers to a story the Foster character tells about being a child on a farm watching the slaughtering of the lambs. How the lamb is a symbol of a victim (an edible victim) and the silence of the lamb is the silence of death.
‘Does that make sense?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ said one teenager tolerantly. ‘But I think you went a bit deep at the end there.’
At which point another teenager saw her first shooting star ever and much excitement ensued.
Images are delicate things. If you take them apart to find out what’s in them they tend not to work so well for you when you put them back together again. They are at their most powerful when you sense vaguely what they are on about but don’t stop to think it over too closely. In fact, most readers and viewers probably don’t want to think them over at all. So that great martial arts movie was called Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; and there was no tiger and no dragon, but who cares? Just tell me the story.
But remember this. A reader in a bookshop will pick up a book, look at the cover, look at the title, look at the blurb on the back, and at this point they will decide whether they are even going to open it. Two seconds, that’s all you’ve got. The title has got to count. You can tell the reader a lot about the book in just those few words. They can be as explicit as that, a signpost pointing straight into the heart of the story. (The Time Traveller’s Wife. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry). Or they can be more enigmatic, and their meaning only becomes clear after the story has finished. If you change the title, even subtly, you will change the way the reader approaches the story.
Well. Let’s call it a working title, for now. Feel good. Get writing.
Last Updated on April 30, 2026 by John