For me, titles are either a natural two-second experience or stressful enough to give you an ulcer. If they don’t pop out perfect on the first try, they can be really hard to repair. Or, worse, if the author thinks they pop out perfect, but the publishing house does not agree, it’s difficult to shift gears. And then? Then you go insane.

Crosley frames titling as a paradoxical part of the writing life: either it arrives in a flash of intuitive rightness or it becomes a prolonged, anxiety-producing ordeal. The “two-second experience” suggests that a good title can feel discovered rather than engineered, while the “ulcer” and “go insane” hyperbole captures how much symbolic weight a title carries—marketing, tone, genre signals, and authorial identity. She also highlights a common friction point in publishing: even when an author feels a title is perfect, the publisher may disagree for commercial or positioning reasons, and revising a title late can feel like rewriting the book’s public face.