Titles

[queenlua]

There's a famous quip in compsciland: "There are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things."

The same thing totally applies to story-writing. (Well, the naming things part. Cache invalidation, not so much.) I think titles are hard, and I guess I'd like to blather about some of my title-ing adventures, and hear about how y'all do this sort of thing?

The story behind some of my fic titles

• Crush: The title came before the story. I was looking at the prompt "love" for fe-contest, playing around with it, thinking of all the synonyms and different interpretations there are for "love." "Crush," I thought, "that's an interesting word—it's used for infatuation, but also for destruction... and there's a likeness between those two things..." And then I thought destructive relationships, and Almedha, and the actual fic happened.



• Dog in the Vineyard: I wanted something that vaguely suggested that Volug was some ominous force, and I thought I vaguely recalled some Bible verse or another that featured dogs howling ominously in a vineyard. (In hindsight, I think I actually thinking of an old Aesop fable where a fox is stealing grapes? maybe?)
  
  I couldn't find any such verse, though, so I googled "dog" and "vineyard" and realized where I really must've gotten the vague recollection from: this pen-and-paper RPG called Dogs in the Vineyard, featuring gun-toting Mormons doing crusades in the wild west, or something. I'd read a review of it a month or two prior. I ended up downloading the game manual and discovered that, in the game, the "dogs" aren't the evildoers to be hunted down; they are the player characters, "God's watchdogs," who aim to do God's work and such. This delighted me—I'd interpreted it as an ominous force, but it was actually a force for good—mirroring Leonardo's understanding of Volug in the fic, and I had my title.



• Pyre: I wanted the last scene to make some vague allusion to a funeral, but I couldn't manage to do it without being really blatant about it—until I remembered, hey, I haven't titled this thing yet, let's use that to suggest something. So in the last sentence, the wind carries "the stinging scent of dead leaves and ashes," and the title is "Pyre," and har har de har look at my clever heavy-handed symbolism.



• White Like Bone: This title was a bit of a rush job—my story was done, but I couldn't think of a title, and I wanted to come up with one in time to enter it in fe-contest. I thought vaguely about how I wanted to highlight Nailah's physicality and Volug's attraction to her, and while I thought of these things, I wordvomited a bunch of random phrases into a text file. "White Like Bone" ended up being the one that worked for me. The white's intended to be a reference to Nailah's fur, but I imagine there are other interpretations.

And, a charming aside: I once read an interview with the creators of Dungeons & Dragons about how they came up with the game's name. He said he and his partner had been sitting around trying to come up with all these cool, pretentious nnames (think of the titles of awful fantasy trade paperbacks you see in the dollar store)... but it was actually his nine-year-old daughter who came up with "Dungeons & Dragons." Adults tend to overthink things, he said, and have too much stuff in their heads; kids have a knack for simplicity and elegance.

So yeah, titles. How do you guys come up with them? Do you normally think of them at the beginning/middle/end? Have any particularly interesting title-ing stories? etc