Titling Tips
Monday, January 13th, 2014 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizvogelI find myself with not one, but three stories in need of titles. My favorite way of doing titles, as the Writing Excuses folks say, is when they just come to me on their own. But then there's the rest of the time....
If a story deals with a particular field that has its own lingo, I'll sometimes browse jargon files, looking for something that rings true or has a potential double meaning. "Windy Van Hooten's Was Never Like This" came that way, and the more time passes the more I like it.
In theory, song lyrics should be a good source, but in practice I find that they depend too much on knowing the rest of the song. Or on having the same idiosyncratic interpretation of the song as I do, which, well, idiosyncratic.
Quote databases seem like they ought to be useful; I'm not sure how true this is in practice, but they're at least entertaining. I'm playing with http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 right now, which has the merit of offering groupings by theme.
Random title generators don't usually hit the mark, but sometimes they can inspire something else that proves useful. Here's a couple I've had fun with:
http://www.kitt.net/php/title.php
http://www.mcoorlim.com/random.html
How about you? Any tricks for coming up with titles? Any resources to share?
If a story deals with a particular field that has its own lingo, I'll sometimes browse jargon files, looking for something that rings true or has a potential double meaning. "Windy Van Hooten's Was Never Like This" came that way, and the more time passes the more I like it.
In theory, song lyrics should be a good source, but in practice I find that they depend too much on knowing the rest of the song. Or on having the same idiosyncratic interpretation of the song as I do, which, well, idiosyncratic.
Quote databases seem like they ought to be useful; I'm not sure how true this is in practice, but they're at least entertaining. I'm playing with http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 right now, which has the merit of offering groupings by theme.
Random title generators don't usually hit the mark, but sometimes they can inspire something else that proves useful. Here's a couple I've had fun with:
http://www.kitt.net/php/title.php
http://www.mcoorlim.com/random.html
How about you? Any tricks for coming up with titles? Any resources to share?
(no subject)
Date: 2014-Jan-14, Tuesday 02:35 pm (UTC)Pretty much the only times that hasn't worked, was when I needed more than one title for the same story.
For example, my "standard fantasy epic" of which I'm part way through book three, but know there will be five or six books, had a series title first: Song of Asolde. I came up with something awful for a working title for the first book, I thankfully can't quite remember what anymore, and then I hit on "Talking With Winds" , and said "Yes, that's it!" I started thinking about a "Verbing With Nouns" title for the second book, decided that the noun should have something to do with Fire, and only then realized that "Winds" and "Flames" were the first two suits in the card deck I had invented for this world. It has ::drum roll:: six suits, five normal and one special. That made the rest of the five or six book titles easy.
But then someone pointed out that the books were on the slender side and big thick books were more fashionable. I could try combining the first two books into a single volume, and market it that way...
My backbrain has refused, absolutely and positively refused, to come up a set of three titles for this thing. When I ask it for ideas, it goes off into a corner and sulks.
Also the first of my Brotherhood of the Black Flag stories, I always think of by the series name. Sort of Like Star Wars: A New Hope, which will always be Star Wars for me. But I decided I really needed a separate book title and so it has one, but it's never really felt as satisfying to me as the titles I've come up with for the other books I'm planning to do.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-Jan-14, Tuesday 11:29 pm (UTC)By far the preferred method, I agree! But I've got two stories that don't want to wait because they can't go out on submission until they have names. And it's really beginning to bother me that the novel currently in progress still doesn't have a title, even though it's ~2/3 done and has been in the works for, um, a long time. (I came up with its predecessor's, Highway of Mirrors, somewhere around chapter 3.) Frustratingly, the next several novels in the queue all have titles; one of them even has a spare!
It has ::drum roll:: six suits, five normal and one special.
Nice!
My backbrain has refused, absolutely and positively refused, to come up a set of three titles for this thing. When I ask it for ideas, it goes off into a corner and sulks.
YMMV, but when my brain does that, it's usually trying to stop me from doing something that would be a bad idea. It doesn't always *tell* me what the problem is, not until well after the fact, but it usually has a reason.