What is the process for creating a captivating title for a novel, screenplay, or TV series? How do successful authors and screenwriters approach this task?

There is no simple, programmatic process for finding a title for a story—it is a creative problem, just like every other element of storytelling. In general, you want to find a title that expresses the content of the story in a way that is brief while also giving a sense of the flavor or tone of the story. Ideally the title will be somewhat intriguing, inviting the reader or viewer to investigate further. I think The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a great title: we sense that we’re looking at a sci-fi story, but from an unusual and perhaps humorous angle. Another excellent title is Jaws. This four-letter title has a lot of impact, especially when you realize that it refers to the business end of a shark. It is punchy and vivid, and alerts us that we’ll likely be reading or watching a thriller.

The TV series that I co-created in the 1990s, The Odyssey, started out as a pilot episode that my cowriter Warren Easton and I called The Jellybean Odyssey. The story was about an 11-year-old boy who falls out of a tree and lapses into a coma, where he finds himself with amnesia in an unfamiliar world—he senses that he must get home, but doesn’t know how. The epic journey for home was an odyssey, but the fact that the adventure involved only kids led us to modify the odyssey with the word jellybean. The story didn’t have anything to do with jellybeans, it’s just that the word suggested kids, and also had the right cadence when spoken aloud with odyssey.

The pilot was broadcast as The Jellybean Odyssey, but when the network opted to pick up the series, it was thought that the title should change. I forget exactly why; probably because the word jellybean seemed too cutesy and “little kid” for a show that had as much edge as the one we had created. As the series ramped up for production, it became known simply as The Odyssey, but the show’s producer, Michael Chechik, offered a reward to whoever could come up with a new and better title. I remember spending time with Warren brainstorming ideas—lots of ideas—for a new title, but in the end we never found one that we liked any better than The Odyssey, and no one else came up with one either. So The Odyssey it was, and that’s how it went on the air.

So there’s a glimpse into the title-finding process among real professional writers. Like so much in the creative world, there’s not much “process” about it. You have a problem, you try to solve it, and you wind up using the best thing you came up with, lame though that might be!