Titling Short Stories

I'm trying to overcome Generic Title Syndrome, where every story is "The X". Lately I've been trying to use lines of dialogue as jumping points for titles, which might or might not be genre obvious (I don't sweat it, since my genre should be obvious from the market I'm submitting to and from the content of the story itself). Another way is to somehow incorporate a noun or proper noun into the title--"The Prince's X," "X's Time-Traveling Emporium", "The Fortress of Y"--although those are a little cliche. You could browse around Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, or Fantasy and see how the stories are titled in them.

This blog post is about titling, and comes from my SFF background. It was written for novel titles, but I don't it would be hard to translate to short fiction.

I don't think you need a "genre" title, as long as the title says something about the story. The various types of titles in the post are set up to let you pick a title that doesn't rely on genre conventions.

For shorts, it's more important for the title to stand out from other titles, than it is for it to sum up the genre. Most magazines and anthologies have a theme, so you're not trying to tell the reader you fit that theme. You're trying to make them flick to your story first, because the title sounds interesting.

I usually pick a distinctive phrase or concept from the story. You could go through making a list of any phrases that catch your eye. Then see if any of them could be a title.