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

Comments

Spoilers for all my fics

[amielleon]

a visitor at any hour - I came up with this before I had even begun the fic. The phrase is meant to describe death. Also happens to be a phrase used in hospitals referring to immediate family, which I suppose is a nice connotation regarding Ike too.

There Are Three Ways to be Out in Dodgeball - A title devised after the fic was written. Aside from being a cute roundabout way to introduce the subject of the fic, I feel like it hints toward the conclusion.

In Questioning Ghosts - I struggled with finding a title for this one. Ultimately I think I came up with this title by mucking around with vague puzzle pieces. I kinda wanted it to have an over-the-course-of-doing-x vibe, and I also wanted it to focus on doubt, and I played with "In Questioning Spirits" and so on before I settled with "ghosts," in relationship to phrases like ghosts of the past.

New World - This title occurred to me very early in the ficwriting process though I forget exactly when. It was supposed to be a double-meaning, seeming to be about Latona's revolution, while it actually? also refers to Magvel being Ashera's new creation.

Coin in Palm - This was kind of a lazy title after I'd finished the fic, I think. It could be better. It's sort of a play on the idiom of having coin in your palm or something like that, to have wealth. But I suppose I also find the significance in the symbolic roles of hands. Hands do things. They help, they grasp, they give, they take.

Ghost Stories - I had been contemplating the title all throughout the course of writing this. I'd finished the story some 15 minutes before the contest deadline and was flailing about trying to come up with the title when traincat suggested this one. I like it a lot. On the surface it might refer to the bardic story Levin tells to Julia, but more deeply the tale itself is a bit of a ghost story in the sense that it's about a dead man haunting about the world with unresolved business. And considering that I'd originally introduced the bit about ghosts to draw parallels between Levin and ghosts, I like that the title reinforces that too.

lucius listens to the rain - It was a phrase that popped into my head roughly when I just knew how to approach this drabble, and so this became the working title/name of the odt. When it came time to actually title the story, I was much too attached to this title, and besides, I thought it was a terribly aesthetically pleasing one, aside from the silliness of using a character name in the title. (I just feel inherently silly about that, unless it's the name alone and the story is a portrait.)

[raphiael]

Ahh I like the way you think of things.
I've... actually thought of doing a title post a couple times in the past, so maybe I'll do that rather than teal deer all over your post here. :x

[mark_asphodel]

Titles! I like titles. Ideally, the title and the 'fic concept come together at the outset as an organic whole. 'Fics that have me stumbling for a title after the thing's already written end to leave me less satisfied with the work as a whole.

Examples...

Well, there's about 100 'fics to choose from, so let me follow Raphi's lead and not TL;DR over everything.

[amielleon]

Now I feel bad for vomiting over Lua's posts all the time. :P

[queenlua]

shhh, no, i love your vomits

[myaru]

Ah. I'd do this, but I have such a shit hand at titles that the good ones only come about by accident. But to answer your questions:

- I attempt to come up with something symbolic or, at the very least, something that contributes to the understanding of my story. When that inevitably fails, I default to pulling lines or phrases from the story that seem significant, or I search for quotes from vaguely relevant people/works/songs that might not sound like cop-outs. In the rare event I'm using a real theme (for example, one of Milton's works in my FE6 fic "A Masque for Dreaming") I will pull from the inspiration, and usually find something interesting.

- I start thinking about what my title is going to be while I'm still in the outline/word-vomit stage. Usually there's a list of likely candidates in the notes at the end of my text files.