Titular Plot Revelation

There's a (I won't call it a blunder) device that you see often enough that involves the title of a work. I'll name a few: Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Artemis Fowl, Indiana Jones, Septimus Heap, Napoleon Dynamite... They all have one thing in common (besides all being male). The Character Title. You've written an entire 80,000+ word book but can't come up with one more thing. The title. Or maybe you chose the Character Title on purpose.

I'll tell why I as a reader don't care too much for the Character Title. It saps some of the tension out of the narrative, especially if there are multiple titles in your series. I know that no matter what the protagonist comes up against, he/she will definitely avoid dying until at soonest the last book. I imagine that George R. R. Martin saw this trope and decided to grossly exploit it. Nearly everybody dies in A Song of Ice and Fire—and that's a problem in and of itself. My question to writers of stories such as ASoIaF is, why should I put so much effort into becoming acquainted with your characters if I know you're just going to kill them off?

And there we've revealed two irksome behaviors. (1) I'm going to tell you upfront through the title that the character you'll grow to love is never really in danger, and (2) you'll soon find that every other character you grow to love will be slaughtered by my pen. Of course, there's another behavior that can be equally as tiresome, the resurrecting hero. If it happens once in your story and you pull it off, your book is going to be amazing. If it starts happening too many times...(Dragon Ball Z *cough*).

Now sometimes your story isn't concerned with life and death experiences (Napoleon Dynamite) and therefore has no quarrel with the Character Title. But let's take Harry Potter. He comes into a "life and death" situation at least once in every book, but (spoiler alert) doesn't die until the final one. That's exactly what the title told us would happen.

An example of some amazing titles are Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. Although LotR doesn't focus around Sauron, it's interesting that the story follows the pattern of titular plot revelation by keeping him alive until the end of book 3. That being said, we know nothing about the fates of the characters we care about. Not all of the fellowship are present at the conclusion of the epic. The title of Star Wars likewise does nothing to reveal prematurely which characters will survive until the end.

Of course you don't always want the characters you're following to die, but it makes every encounter more real if we haven't been told beforehand that they won't. My advice is that if you get to the end of a story (unless it's a standalone or a short story), wring that last little bit of juice out of your imagination and come up with a good title. But who knows, maybe a good title for your book will be the Character Title. I think Leven Thumps worked it quite well as a series.