Some years ago, I was beginning a book about the women’s basketball team at Gallaudet University, the renowned school for deaf and hard-of-hearing people in Washington, D.C., when I ran into a vexing problem: I could not think of a good title for it. I did what I normally do when it comes to title-hunting, which is get a yellow legal pad and just start riffing on words or idioms or ideas that might capture the essence of the project in a catchy way. If you write enough things down and play with them, in my experience something good often bubbles up. It took little time to have twenty-five possibilities, but almost all of them were awful. And I do mean awful. A few were flat and boring, others trite, but most of them just tried way too hard.
The Paperbag Princess