It’s 11:47 PM on a Sunday and I’m staring at a Submittable form for the New York International Fringe Festival. The form wants: project title, one-line description, two-paragraph synopsis, and $35. Deadline: midnight. I have the synopsis. I have the $35, technically, if you don’t count the $40 I owe the bodega for the tab I’ve been running since Wednesday. What I do not have is a title for the solo show I’ve been workshopping for four months.
The piece is about my grandmother’s immigration story, the specific way grief moves through a family across generations, and also—somehow—my relationship to my own hair. It’s fifteen minutes of material and I’ve been calling it “The Hair Piece,” which I think we can all agree is not a title. It’s a placeholder that got comfortable. Moved in. Put its feet on the furniture. Now it’s been on every draft of every document for four months because I couldn’t think of anything better and I kept hoping the right title would arrive fully formed during a rehearsal, or in the shower, or while waiting for the L train—which, as we know, is the location of all my best ideas and also most of my existential dread.
Here’s what nobody tells you about the portfolio career: you spend a surprising amount of time naming things that don’t exist yet. Workshops that might become shows. Shows that might become something larger. Solo pieces you’re developing in a borrowed rehearsal space at the Mark Morris Dance Center on a Tuesday afternoon between other people’s classes. Reading series you’re co-producing with two friends in the back room of a bar on Smith Street. The one-act you wrote in a fever dream after a breakup and submitted to three festivals with a title you now find physically painful to say out loud.
We rehearse the work. The monologues, the transitions, the curtain call. We do not rehearse what to call it.
The First Bad Title Is Free
My working titles are, historically, terrible. The solo show I did at the Access Theater in 2019—before it closed, which is a different kind of grief—was called “Untitled Solo Project” for eight months. Eight months. I brought that title to production meetings. Said it out loud to the lighting designer, a man named Caleb who deserved better. The poster said “Untitled Solo Project” in a font I chose specifically because it looked intentional, like the missing title was a deliberate artistic choice and not a symptom of creative paralysis.
Eventually I renamed it “What We Keep,” which is a perfectly fine title that three other shows were also using that year, including one at the Edinburgh Fringe that had nothing to do with my piece and everything to do with hoarding. That made my Google Alerts a very confusing six weeks.
Before that, there was “The Project,” which I submitted to the Downtown Urban Theater Festival in 2017. There was “A Thing About My Mother,” which I said to a producer at a bar in Williamsburg who nodded like she understood and then never emailed me back. Fair. There was a version of a piece about my grandfather that I called “Grandpa” in an application for a residency at the Vermont Studio Center—a place I was not qualified for and did not get. The rejection email addressed me as “Georgie” and said they appreciated my “bold, personal approach to naming,” which I think was a joke but might have been sincere, and I’ve never been able to find out.
The point is: the first title is always bad. The first title is supposed to be bad. It’s the creative equivalent of a first draft—it exists so you have something to revise. But somewhere along the way, I internalized the idea that naming was a different kind of labor than writing or rehearsing. Something that should come effortlessly. A gift from the muse rather than a skill you develop. And because I believed it should come effortlessly, I avoided working on it the way I work on everything else: with discipline, with repetition, with a willingness to be bad on the way to being less bad.
What I Actually Do Now
Two years ago, after the Fringe submission debacle of 2021—I submitted a piece called “Body of Evidence” that was not about crime and was, in fact, about my grandmother’s kitchen, and I will not explain the connection because there isn’t one—I developed a system. It is not a good system. It is a system that works for me, which is the only kind of system worth having.
Here it is: I write twenty terrible titles before I’m allowed to keep one.
I sit down with a notebook—the same notebook I use for audition notes and grocery lists and the phone numbers of people I meet at parties and immediately forget—and I write twenty titles. They can be bad. They should be bad. The point is volume. Getting the obvious, the cliché, the embarrassing, and the nonsensical out of my head and onto paper so that somewhere around title twelve or thirteen, I stop trying to be clever and start actually describing what the piece is about.
For the solo show about my grandmother, the list looked like this:
1. The Hair Piece (the incumbent, the placeholder that would not die)
2. My Grandmother’s Hands
3. What She Carried
4. The Kitchen in July
5. Hair and Other Inheritances
6. The Country She Left
7. Braiding
8. The Weight of Small Things
9. My Mother’s Mother’s Mother
10. Something About Hair
11. The Braid
12. What Grief Sounds Like in a Kitchen
13. Three Generations of Not Talking About It
14. The Immigration Piece (the new placeholder, already worse)
15. Salt and Iron (stolen from a generated list, more on this later)
16. What We Keep (already taken, see above)
17. The Things That Survived the Crossing
18. My Grandmother’s Voice in My Mouth
19. Inheritance
20. The Weight of What Was Left
Number eighteen was the one. Not because it’s the cleverest or the most poetic, but because by the time I wrote it, I’d stopped trying to sound like a person who writes titles and started trying to sound like a person describing her own work. “My Grandmother’s Voice in My Mouth” is what the piece is about. What it’s always been about. I just needed to write seventeen wrong answers to get to it.
The rule is simple: twenty titles, no stopping, no editing, no crossing out. You can be stupid. You can be pretentious. You can write a title that is just a single word in all caps because you’re tired and angry. You can write a title that is a full sentence. The only rule is that you keep going until you have twenty, and then—and this is the part that matters—you read them all out loud, in order, and you notice which one makes you feel like you’ve been caught doing something true.
The Submittable Form Is Due in Forty Minutes
Here’s the problem with the twenty-titles system: it requires time. A notebook and a chair and the willingness to be alone with your own bad ideas for long enough to get to the good ones. But the reality of a portfolio career is that you are frequently naming things under duress. The Fringe form is due at midnight. The grant application is due on the fifteenth. The producer needs a title for the poster by Friday because the printer needs it by Monday because the festival is in three weeks and the marketing needs to go out and nobody cares that you haven’t landed on the title yet because the title is not the art, the art is the art, the title is just—
Just what? Just the thing that goes on every poster, every program, every listing, every review, every conversation about the work for the rest of its life? Just the first thing anyone hears about the piece before they know anything else? Just the two to seven words that will determine whether someone walking past a flyer on Bedford Avenue stops or keeps walking?
The title is not the art. But the title is the door to the art, and a bad door means nobody comes in.
So when I’m stuck—when I’m staring at a form field at 11:47 PM and I’ve written three titles and they’re all “The Hair Piece” in different fonts—I use a tool. Not because the tool writes the title. Because the tool gives me options, and options break the paralysis, and broken paralysis is the only state in which I can actually think.
Specifically, when I’m stuck on title generation for a solo piece or a workshop application, I sometimes use a novel title generator tool to break the blank-page paralysis—not because it produces the final title, but because seeing bad options side by side helps clarify what I actually want the piece to feel like. A generated list will give me “The Cartographer of Drowned Cities” and “Small Talk with Strangers” and “Everything We Left in the Kitchen,” and I’ll look at that last one and think: no, but closer. Not “everything”—something specific. Not “left”—something inherited. And from that no, that closer-but-not-quite, I can usually get to something real.
This is, by the way, exactly how the Reedsy book title generator frames its own usefulness: as a way to spark direction rather than land the final answer. Their free book title generator notes that a generated title like “Between Two Worlds” might not be your title, but it might confirm that you’re looking for something about duality, which gets you closer than you were. They also point out that Fitzgerald went through a dozen titles—including “Gold-Hatted Gatsby,” “The High-Bouncing Lover,” and “Trimalchio in West Egg”—before landing on “The Great Gatsby.” Which is either comforting or horrifying, depending on how many bad titles you’ve been living with.
I take some comfort in the fact that Fitzgerald, who is widely considered to have been quite good at writing, was also bad at titles. I take more comfort in the fact that the Authors Guild, which represents people who write for a living, has published best practices for authors navigating AI tools that explicitly distinguish between using AI to spark direction versus using it to produce final creative output. The Guild’s position is that a writer’s original voice, thinking, and creativity are what make their work theirs—a principle that extends to the small, unglamorous act of naming a project. If professional writers are actively grappling with when and how these tools can assist without replacing creative judgment, then I, a theater performer staring at a Submittable form at 11:47 PM, am probably allowed to use a title generator as a thinking tool without forfeiting my identity as an artist.
What the Title Is Actually Doing
Here’s what I’ve figured out, slowly, over the course of too many bad titles and a few good ones: the title is doing three things at once. You have to understand all three before you can name anything.
First, the title tells people what the piece is about. This is the most obvious function and the one that trips people up, because “what the piece is about” is not the same as “the plot of the piece” or “the theme of the piece.” “The Hair Piece” told people nothing. “My Grandmother’s Voice in My Mouth” tells people something specific: this is about inheritance, about women, about the way the past speaks through the present body. It doesn’t describe the content. It describes the feeling.
Second, the title tells people what kind of thing the piece is. Is it a solo show? A play? A performance art piece? A reading? The title signals genre, tone, and scale. “Untitled Solo Project” signaled nothing except that I had given up. “What We Keep” signaled earnest, personal, probably someone’s MFA thesis. “The Weight of Small Rooms” signals something more formal, more constructed, possibly more experimental. When you’re submitting to a festival, the title is doing genre work before anyone reads your synopsis.
Third—and this is the one I didn’t understand for a long time—the title tells you, the maker, what the piece is. Naming the thing changes the thing. I did not fully understand what my solo show was about until I named it “My Grandmother’s Voice in My Mouth.” Before that, it was a collection of stories and images and a section about hair that I kept because it was the strongest material. After I named it, the hair section made sense. It was about the body as a site of inheritance. The title didn’t describe the piece. It revealed the piece to me.
This is why naming is labor. Not because it’s hard to think of words—it’s always possible to think of words—but because the right title clarifies something that was previously unclear, and clarity is work. Real work. The kind that doesn’t look like work from the outside because it’s just sitting in a chair staring at a notebook, but is, in fact, the specific creative labor of deciding what you’ve made.
The Twenty Titles, Revisited
After I submitted the Fringe application at 11:58 PM with the title “My Grandmother’s Voice in My Mouth”—a title that had existed for approximately eleven minutes and that I had written as number eighteen on a list of twenty—I sat on my bed and ate the leftover dumplings from the bodega and felt the specific relief of having named something. Not the relief of finishing, which is different and more short-lived. The relief of knowing what you made.
The show didn’t get into the Fringe. It didn’t get into anything, actually, that year. I workshopped it at a reading series at a bar in Crown Heights, and then I put it in a drawer, which is where it still lives. But the title stuck. I use it when I talk about the piece. I use it when I think about the piece. The title is the thing I have, even though I don’t have the show.
And here’s what I’ve noticed: every time I name something now, I get a little better at it. Not because I’m more creative—I’m not, my brain is the same brain it was in 2017 when I called a show “The Project”—but because I’ve stopped treating naming as a mysterious gift and started treating it as a skill. Skills get better with practice. Gifts either show up or they don’t, and waiting for a gift is a terrible way to meet a deadline.
So here is my actual advice, for what it’s worth, which is the price of a bodega dumpling and four years of bad titles:
Write twenty titles. Use a tool if you need to break the paralysis. Read them out loud. Notice which one makes you feel caught. Submit the form. Eat something. Go to sleep.
The title is not the art. But the act of naming is a small, stubborn creative practice that belongs to you as much as the work does. And in a life where nothing is guaranteed—where the show might not happen, where the festival might say no, where the piece might live in a drawer for years—the title is proof that you made something. That you knew what it was. That you called it by its name.
That counts. I promise it counts.
