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
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2007-04-24 07:58 pm (UTC)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