From china_shop: Where does one find a title? What makes a good

[sprat.livejournal.com]

(Hi, yes, me again. I'm snagging another question for selfish reasons--I really want to hear what you guys have to say about this one. *waves*)

I like writing. Mostly I do, anyway--there are those times when I hate hate hate writing and I want to kick writing's stupid ass because it is stupid. But for the most part, I like it. It's satisfying and absorbing and occasionally giddy-making. I can't imagine any activity that could possibly take its place in my life. It's something I've always done.

But for as long as I've been writing, I've been dreading those moments when it's time to think up a name for the story. Every single thing I come up with seems cheesy, or pretentious, or totally not related to the story in any way I can fathom; I could overthink the decision for hours, if I let myself.

Clearly that would be crazy behaviour, though, so I've had to come up with a few strategies to prevent my weird brain from getting in its own way.

1. Pick out some word from the body of the story that sounds pretty! Add bonus points if the word means two things at once, because then you can kinda imply that you had deeper things in mind than the hotness of Fraser licking Ray's hip.

2. Steal lines from songs you like! I did this with The Best Parts of Lonely (which is from Left and Leaving, by The Weakerthans) and also with April After All (which is a song by Ron Sexsmith). Again with the bonus points if you can kind of draw parallels between the subject matter of the story and the song.

3. When all else fails, panic and call it whatever stupid thing pops into your head when you close your eyes! I, uh, don't actually recommend this. Just, sometimes, for me, it's this or not posting a story at all. Which is how I end up with gems like Untitled Ficlets 1, 2 and 3! Or, you know, Auralphilia. *g*

4. While I was putting this post together, I found this here amazing little script by someone called Maygra, who is maybe or maybe not the same as the LJ maygra, and anyway, it is an automatic title generator! Seriously! I don't know how well it would work in a practical sense, especially for dS fic, but I kind of love it anyway. It gave me "The Silky Thief"! And "The Academy of the Slaves"! Tell me those are not great titles for pretty much anything.

All right, that's what I've got. Obviously, I am in desperate need of some better ideas, and since there are lots of very good story titles out there, I know you guys can help. How do you come up with titles for your stories? How do you tell if it's a title that works? Link us to your favourite resources! GIVE US YOUR SECRETSESSSS!!

Comments

[dragonflymuse.livejournal.com]

Titles are hard. Harder than the writing of the story, at least for me.

The weirdest way I got a title for a ficlet was when I sent it to my Beta for review. Not having a title at the time for it, I labled the file 'Submission' (as it was a submission for some ficathon/prompt thing) and mailed it away. Well, my Beta thought that was the title of the ficlet, and suggested I not change it, because she thought it worked :)

[sprat.livejournal.com]

Hee! Accidental titling! I wish that would work for me. My draft titles are usually something like rayfraserthing1.rtf, so probably not, alas. *g*

[akite.livejournal.com]

I don't have any secrets. I do it pretty much the same way you described.

[sprat.livejournal.com]

*sigh* Titles are HARD.

[sdwolfpup.livejournal.com]

Lyrics are my titling crutch. I love using them, and I love when other people use them, I just wish I could occasionally find something outside of that for myself. Heh.

[sprat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's usually lyrics or one word titles for me, too. There've been a couple of exceptions, and those are usually the titles that came easiest. I wonder what that's about...

[malnpudl.livejournal.com]

Song titles and lyrics save my butt a lot.

Sometimes riffing on the theme of the story will do it. "Tapestry" was an ep tag for an SG-1 episode called "Threads". My beta and I kicked some related ideas around, and "tapestry" was one of her suggestions.

I've also been known to go googling for quotes using keywords from the theme or mood of the story. I don't think I've ever named one of my own that way, but I've helped writers for whom I've beta'd find titles that way.

[sprat.livejournal.com]

"Tapestry" was an ep tag for an SG-1 episode called "Threads". My beta and I kicked some related ideas around, and "tapestry" was one of her suggestions.

Oh, that's cool. I like the relatedness-without-obviousness of it.

I've tried the googling thing when I've been really stuck. I think it might have even helped me come up with a title or two, actually. :)

[bertybertle.livejournal.com]

I totally find titles to be the hardest part...other than a snappy synopsis!!! Both of these things are utterly beyond my feeble skills. So I pretty much do what you do - I nick song titles or find a sequence of words in the fic that can be lifted and still make sense.

There was an author in Stargate who used to have the best titles. They were always one word - usually an obscure one that I'd have to go and look up. In an effort to emulate such cleverness I have on occasion decided what the theme of a story is and then used a thesaurus to find related words to use as a title. Meh! Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

[sprat.livejournal.com]

Argh, yes, writing synopses is completely beyond me. I usually just say which challenge I wrote the story for, or maybe pull a quote from the text. *flaps hands*

I've done the thesaurus thing! Usually it doesn't work for me, but it's a good trick to have on hand...

[sage]

I think all my best titles have come from quotes. I'm going to blame thete1 for this, because back in the day, she said that she relied heavily on Bartleby for her titles. Basically the trick is to plug in a word or phrase from the story and see what Bartleby comes up with. It also has the cool benefit of making you look a lot better-read than you actually may be. :P

Sometimes I get my titles out of the research I'm doing. Like I got "Search Without Warrant" from skimming the RCMP training manual (I was trying to figure out what sorts of stuff Fraser would be learning at Depot). Or else a link will lead to another link that has a perfect word in it.

And sometimes (quite a lot, actually) I get the title (and often an epigraph, too) from opening my Norton Anthology of Poetry at random and pointing blindly at a page. I use other books, too, because sometimes it takes six or seven tries before the right phrase jumps off the page at me.

Normally I have the title well before the story is finished, though. One exception to that was "Vinculum" (which came out of Bartleby's thesaurus). I had a totally different title for it because the story that I ended up with wasn't at all the story I started with. "Vinculum" still doesn't feel entirely right, but I needed an old-fashioned (obsolete) word for marriage and union to fit the story -- preferably something the reader would have to look up, because it was important that nothing about the situation be easy.

Can I say that I love your title to the Graph story? I can never remember the entire thing, but I don't need to -- it fits so well and sets up the reader's expectations beautifully. :D

[sprat.livejournal.com]

Hey, I think you've given me the Bartleby trick before, but when I'm panicking, I always forget such helpful things. I love the research idea, too--you're bound to get something that fits the characters and/or setting, that way, at least.

I needed an old-fashioned (obsolete) word for marriage and union to fit the story -- preferably something the reader would have to look up, because it was important that nothing about the situation be easy.

Oooh, that's very cool. I love the puzzle of it, how nicely it sets up the mood of the story. Makes me want to play around with the title a little more in my next fic--I wonder how much difference it'd make, structurally, if I started with the name of the story and worked outward from there?

(Aw, thank you! That was actually the one and only title that came easily, for me, and popped into being well before the story was finished. I think it was even attached to the first draft I sent for beta. :)

[joandarck.livejournal.com]

I like simple titles (long ones, especially with recognizable song lyrics, especially if that song is from a much later era than the setting of the story, distract me). But I think most of mine are too simple, just stand-ins because there has to be something there. Sometimes they have an obvious meaning and also a secondary one, but I don't try for that. The ones I like tend to refer to something about the story that isn't mentioned in the story. But I guess a clear summary makes a good title too (Like "The American Way".)

Um... I don't know how I pick them, except that if one didn't turn up while I was writing, it usually means I haven't stopped to figure out what the story's about.

[sprat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, song lyrics are tricky. They can be really significant all on their own, personally or culturally or both, even, so you're always risking weird associations when you use them. Ditto for poems, I guess. China Shop's movie title theft is better, for that reason--there doesn't usually seem to be a lot of emotional weight attached to those--but then you do risk being mis-googled. *g*

I can never do summaries, either, so title-as-summary is even more daunting for me. But that seems like sound advice for people who like them.

[joandarck.livejournal.com]

Oh, I didn't mean an actual literal summary, I just meant a title that tells you the main concept like that! (Come to think of it, I suppose I have seen titles like "Ray and Fraser Struggle With Their Intimacy Issues and Then There Is Sex"...) I don't tend to do titles that way though. I just meant that I've found that if I'm not already associating it with something, it's because it's fuzzy in my own head, and stopping to think about it brings something up.

Song lyrics summoning up different associations for different people is a good point! My problem with it is just it makes me very aware of the writer, as a person separate (often *wildly* separate) from the events of the story.

[cathybites.livejournal.com]

I absolutely HATE coming up with titles. If I don't have something in mind beforehand, it usually takes me forever and a day to think of something. So I made up a list of phrases and lines and such that I thought would be good titles, and if all else fails, I pick something at random from the list.

[sprat.livejournal.com]

Ooh, a list! That's a great idea. I love lists. :)

[elementalv.livejournal.com]

I have working titles and official titles (and it's not fun when I have to go track down the files for archiving -- trust me on this). My working titles end up being along the lines of "that BSG thing" or "that CSI thing," because I rarely come up with a title before the story is finished.

For the official title, I'll usually go for something thematic and simple, with bonus points if it's relevant to two or more things happening in the story or if it ends up being a pun. Breathe was about Kowalski coping with his nightmares after MotB and *also* about his increasing panic over the content of those dreams. Dawn of the Dead was about Dawn Summers (Buffy) going to work in the lab at CSI. Lost was about Fraser being physically *and* mentally lost.

Does this help?

[sprat.livejournal.com]

Definitely helpful! I do usually try for a couple of associations, especially if I'm using a single-word title. And "keep it simple" is always good advice.

[catwalksalone]

How do I come up with titles? Easy. I just whine at my beta reader until she does it for me. Sometimes I use lyrics. Other times I beat myself around the head until something falls out.

Other than that I often have a metaphor running through my fic and look for quotes related to that metaphor and use bits of those (The Power of Grace comes from this couplet: Who hath not own'd, with rapture-smitten frame, The power of grace, the magic of a name..

And if all else fails I use a translator to turn something into Latin and then it looks good, even if it's a pile of rubbish.

[sprat.livejournal.com]

I like the metaphor -> quote advice. It's a bit time-consuming, but if you end up with something that's both attractively phrased and thematic at the same time, it seems like it'd be worth it.

And hee, the Latin idea is great! :)

[brynnmck.livejournal.com]

This is what happens to me: I get all finished with a decent draft of a fic, and I send it off for beta or whatever, and then, while I'm still basking in the finished-draft glow, I go: oh SHIT. I NEED A TITLE. And then I cry.

The vast majority of my fic titles are taken from song lyrics. Most of the rest are from quotations or axioms. I only have a few ("Caesura," "Cynosure," "Laws of Gravity" spring to mind) that don't follow that pattern, and those were pretty hard-won. (For "Laws of Gravity," I spent hours on the internet reading about various scientific concepts, which you totally would not know from the utter basic grade-school simplicity of the final title. Heh.)

Generally, with titles, I think the simpler, the better. One of the things I like about song lyrics (and poetry) is that you can often choose a phrase that's coherent and appropriate to the story on its own, and then if the reader knows the song/poem, that can add some extra resonance. (Assuming, of course, the song/poem in its entirety is applicable to what you want to do. Or that your reader doesn't have an automatic dislike for the convention, like joandarck mentioned above.) However, I typically try to choose a song/poem that at least somewhat fits the style of the fandom. So while I would be all about a Led Zeppelin lyric for an SPN fic, not so much for a DS fic.

Basically, finding a title generally sucks, in my experience. :)

[sprat.livejournal.com]

This is what happens to me: I get all finished with a decent draft of a fic, and I send it off for beta or whatever, and then, while I'm still basking in the finished-draft glow, I go: oh SHIT. I NEED A TITLE. And then I cry.

Yes, yes, this is EXACTLY my process! Especially the part with the crying.

Hmm, that's a good point--if you're going to use a song or a poem, try to find something that's not totally out-of-mood for the fandom. It seems that might help alleviate a reader's distraction a bit, if they're already going to be distracted by the presence of a quote--at least this way, they're still in the same world, you know?

[china_shop]

Most of the time, I am with everyone else in the last-minute-use-of-song-lyrics-or-quotes-or-poems for fic titles. But occasionally I have the title before I write the story, and that's always interesting because it shapes the story as I write it: like One Full Day of Empty Threats, which whenever I wondered what should happen next, I threw in another empty threat. And Five Things and 10 Reasons stories are structured around their titles, which can be fun.

I'm enjoying the titles in the Gloriaverse, because I keep writing stories and then looking up the lyrics and going, "My god! This line is perfect!" It's almost like I planned it (ha! in fact Gloria named herself well before I thought of using the song).

Sometimes I use the names of movies (Leaving Normal, The Sweet Hereafter), partly because the show did that, but I always feel bad that people might google the film and find my totally unrelated fic.

Mmmm, yeah. Not much to add, sorry.

[sprat.livejournal.com]

But occasionally I have the title before I write the story, and that's always interesting because it shapes the story as I write it: like One Full Day of Empty Threats, which whenever I wondered what should happen next, I threw in another empty threat.

That's a really cool idea, actually--I don't think I've ever started with the title and worked outward from there, and now I kind of want to try that.

I like your movie title theft, but yeah, I get why you'd be reluctant. I always feel bad when people find my site from some unrelated search term--like I tricked them into my Lair of Porn, somehow. *g*

[pocketmouse]

I tend to use word association, even though it has sometimes led me astray. But sometimes it can be good. It works in two ways. One is where I take the main idea behind the story (like my futuristic post-apocalyptic story) and see what image pops into my head (I admittedly suck at word association because I often think in images, not words), so for my above example I end up with 'Grey Sky and Metal.' Which isn't that great a title, but it directly relates to the initial image I have whenever I think about that story.
Other times the word association is simple word association, leaving my story about Ray the modern artist with the working title 'Welder,' or a series of very disjointed fics to be called 'Shattered.' I tend to go with what I will recognize the story by, as long as its not too plain/common.

[sprat.livejournal.com]

Ooh, cool--I like the idea of using an image as the title, actually. And yeah, making sure the title means something to *you*, the writer, also makes sense. I hadn't thought of it like that. Thanks!

[raggedass-road.livejournal.com]

This is just my two cents, but I think the best titles are memorable ones. Something that gives me (the reader, or the potential reader at any rate) an actual image.

It seems to be the thing now for writers to title their stuff with some kind of abstract word or phrase that sums up the mood or idea of the story. And there's nothing really wrong with that, it just... well, I don't like it. ;) I mean. It's bland! blah! Who cares! It doesn't give me any kind of mental picture! (I'm a reader. I like pictures. You're the writer, it's your job to put them in my head.) Abstract titles like, I don't know, "Saving Grace" or "One Wish" or whatever may actually do a very good job of summing up the story, but I'm never going to remember them, and they don't really attract me to the story. Which are both things a title should do, if possible, right?

I've only written one fic for DS, and that was what I tried to do with the title... I don't know if it actually worked for anybody but me, but it certainly put an image in my head. "Mosquito Field, AFQ" makes me think of some kind of remote airfield, the kind with no control tower, one runway, hell maybe even not a paved runway, the kind of place small enough to get away with a fanciful name. And then of course 'AFQ' is a fictional airport identifier, just to clarify we're not talking an infested couple acres of farmland, or something. Plus it makes the title kind of weird, which, hey, if that gets it a little attention.

[keerawa.livejournal.com]

I keep going back and forth on the purpose of a title. Is it a handle, to help people remember which story is which? Or is it more like the title on a piece of piece of visual art, a hint to the deeper meaning the artist finds within?

I sometimes find myself switching titles, even after I've posted the stories, over just this confusion.

If I'm stuck, I'll use poetry, songs, or quotes for a jumping off point. I just found a new blues song because I'd been searching for a particular lyrics, and came across a song with lyrics so compelling that I downloaded it. Bonus!

[bakaknight.livejournal.com]

It depends on the area I'm writing in. If it's something like a crossover, then I'll try to find something that will reference at least two of the fandoms involved. Or an obscure quote from one of the series which might just apply to the other.
Failing that, obscure movie or book references (note: this also applies to chapter titles).
Taking titles from a particularly far-flung chapter of the fic can work, but it's even more fun to reference the canon directly. I recently betaed for a Tin Man fic for which the author requested a title, and while I haven't seen the series, I'd had certain parts of it quoted at me often enough that the title came quite easily from the one quote that was also found within the episode-tag section of the fic itself. The summary came from an introspection line 'hook' far within the fic itself.
Using other languages can work, but not overusing them; I speak/read Latin (and many other languages), doesn't mean that other people do. On the other hand, using other languages opens up other possibilities, such as providing the dictionary definition of the English meaning, or possibly a bunch of synonyms in yet more languages (inclusion of language of fic is optional), and leaving it at that.
For something with a legal bent, or possibly an angst-moment from a somebody who enjoys the law or other such things, a legal term works.

Simply put, go with what feels right. Strangely, I never have trouble with these things. -shrug-