WIP Challenge Check-in, Day 21 -- Tuesday

[linaewen]

Hello on Tuesday!  Is today a good day for you?  Hope so!

Did you write today?

• Yes!
• No!

If yes, what kind of writerly activity did you engage in?  If no, what were the obstacles/situations that affected your writerly pursuits?

For discussion:  How do you come up with titles for your stories?  Do you know the title before you begin, or not until after it's written?  Is it something you struggle with, or does it come easily for you?

Please share any pointers you have on how to find a title for your tale!

Comments

[linaewen]

I haven't written yet, but I am praying for a chance to do so today! Hopefully I will take the chance when it offers itself and not squander it doing something silly. ;-)

When writing a story, I often know what the title will be by the time I start writing it, since I've spent so much time researching it. Sometimes when it's a short piece, I don't know until later. I will assign a working title that describes the story, and then replace it with something more appropriate that comes along in the course of writing. I also assign titles to my chapters in a couple of my longer WIPs, and that's the hardest thing! I think perhaps the thing I tend to do to come up with a title is to use a quote from the chapter itself or from somewhere in the longer story that is broad enough to apply to the whole thing, or to rephrase a quote. If it's not a quote, then it's a phrase that describes the action or the topic that is the main event or a few words based on that phrase.

I found this online, maybe there will be some helpful hints here for making titles, as well:

http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/titles.shtml

[lullabymoon]

Thanks for the link!

[lielac]

I've written another 700ish words of my Bionicle/Doctor Who fic and have finally gotten to the 'Doctor Who' bit. Yay. Why did I choose Ten again? I don't even like him...

Titles... titles... titles. Hah. I'm lucky, I've been writing 'fics with easy themes (or a thing of three, hullo "Kolhii, Ice Carvings, and Two Shy Matoran"). And I can't be bothered to try for rolling-off-the-tongue because I'm a lazy clown who thinks them up on the spot as she's uploading to AO3.

Wait, wait, no, I've got BIONICLE: Kingdom of the Skrall and The Chronicler's Toa lined up on the back burner and they're both multipart epics, and those seem pretty snappy titles. And then I thought up "Extinction" on the spot for my Bionicle/Hero Factory grimdark epic that's also still in the works just so I could put it up on my profile without breaking my pattern of needing a name and summary before posting it on there, and I might keep that.

I just try to distill the theme or basic plot into something vaguely pithy. "Hotheaded, Despite Himself" is a decent example of this, seeing as it'll be a series of times Jaller did something impulsive and slightly stupid because he's a Ta-Matoran and forgot to think again.

[snowynight]

I wrote and posted a retelling of Rapunzel: Stark's House today.
I always only name my fic when posting. Initially I use one-word title to summarize my fic, like Mask or Shower. Now I used more and more lyrics to name my fic.

[lea_hazel]

Freshening up on canon, that's all.

[lullabymoon]

I added 2300 words to my big bang but didn't get the rough draft finished like I'd hoped. I felt strangely demotivated actually but I managed to get all but the last scene done in spite of that. I need to get that done tomorrow so I can fish for a beta.

I usually find titles that hardest aspect and usually they are the last thing to get done. I try and go for something that reflects the general theme of the fic, and I have ended up going down the route of googling song lyrics or poems.

[gramarye1971]

I'm another one who usually has the title in mind, or at least a vague notion of the title, before I start writing. On the few occasions where I have the whole story written and am still casting about for a title, I try to think about the nature of the story -- what it's trying to do, or to show -- and then craft a title around that. But I think that the titles that work best in my mind have more than one meaning: the obvious one, and then a deeper one that doesn't present itself until you've read the story in full. For example, for 'Sans Frontières', my Hetalia fic about the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross during World War I, I picked the title to convey the more modern idea of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), the ICRC's stated mission to cross borders and enemy lines in an effort to provide care for all those affected by the war, and the concept of the nations themselves going across their borders to look out for each other even in the midst of conflict. I don't know if all readers would get the multiple meanings, but I like to think that a well-chosen title helps to make the story more memorable.