Help needed: Which is the best title?

[LoveHistory]

Is it ok to borrow the title of a poem? A Certain Slant of Light always caught me for some reason.

I hadn't remembered the Biblical origin of the "lily among thorns" phrase. I was thinking of Geoffrey Chaucer in A Knight's Tale referring to himself as a lily among the thorns. Coincidentally he also mentions "gilding the lily" later in the movie.

[Divia]

A certain slant of light is currently a YA novel.

I thought the dying Lie was nice, but it sounds like mystery to me. Its form one o the poems.

[Mythica]

My 2 cents as a reader and not an author (I hope no one minds a non-author posting in this section - I tend to click "new posts" so I see everything new in all sections): I'm not a fan of one-word titles. They don't tell me enough about the book and so I tend to just glaze over them while browsing.

I think my favorite titles are ones taken from the actual text. For example, I loved in "When Christ and His Saints Slept" the line "And so began for the wretched people of England, a time of suffering so great that they came to fear “Christ and his saints slept." And I'm currently reading A Game of Thrones in which is the line "When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground."

I don't know which comes first in cases like that though - does the title come before the novel and it worked into the text or is it taken from the text it's written? Could you sift through your work and see if there are any phrases you could take from a sentence or passage?

Of the ones mentioned here, I liked "Lily Among Thorns" but is this a more hopeful sounding title and if you're trying to convey something darker, I agree with using words like "hell" or "death". But you do want to be wary of it sounding like a horror novel. I'm not very poetic though so I can't recommend anything of my own.

[Michy]

[quote=""Mythica""](I hope no one minds a non-author posting in this section [/quote] I'm not an author, either, and no one's thrown tomatoes at me, so I think you're safe.

I think my favorite titles are ones taken from the actual text.

I like those, also.

Of the ones mentioned here, I liked "Lily Among Thorns"

To me, "Lily Among Thorns" just sounds way too cliche. But that's just me.

[Divia]

[quote=""Mythica""]My 2 cents as a reader and not an author (I hope no one minds a non-author posting in this section - I tend to click "new posts" so I see everything new in all sections)[/quote]


I would like everyones opinion who wants to give it. Author, reader, alien, whoever! I think readers input is important because, well, readers are the audience.

[Shield-of-Dardania]

I was just thinking, maybe Lily of the Valley? Perhaps use it in the sense of an allegory, see Lily's life like a valley. The valley like a metaphor for her life.

Meandering, changing & unpredictable terrain, shaped by the river as well as shaping it etc. etc.

[Divia]

Huh. Hmm. Yes. I wanted something with a farm country feel to it. That certainly has it now that I think of it.