[title of post]
Trying this again, because LJ seemed to enjoy fucking up my html the first time.
In a post on her lj, lily_lovely asked how do you come up with your titles? Which of course led to more thoughts than a comment could contain, which leads to a post here, lol.
First, let me say that I hate coming up with titles. I have no trouble coming up with them randomly, when there's no fic attached to it, and all I can do is add it to the list and say, "Cool, maybe I'll use that some day." But when I actually have a fic that I want to post? Finding the right title is usually like pulling teeth.
I probably (as with a lot of things) put pressure on myself to come up with the perfect title. Like lily_lovely, I think titles are important. A title should be clever and illuminate the theme and tell you something about the story and, most importantly, make you want to read the story. Which is hard.
Almost every time, I'm at least several chapters into writing a fic before I come up with a title. With one-shots, I'm usually finished the fic and driving myself crazy because I want to post it, but I can't post without a title.
My titles come from a variety of different sources:
Lines from the show:
The Hardest Thing in the World
Love's Bitch
Seeing Things
Turning a Corner in Istanbul
Song titles/lyrics:
Being Somebody Else
The Worst Day Since Yesterday
Silence Speaks
Beyond This Life
Shadows of a Brighter Day
clawofcat:
Accept No Substitutes
Knock on Wood
When in Rome
Cat and I also sometimes do "word association," where we throw out words and phrases that have to do with the story until something comes out that sounds like a title. I think that's where "Ebbing of the Tide" came from. I feel like there should be more examples of this one, but some of the word association led to choosing one of the titles above (like, she said something about silence, and I thought of "Silence Speaks," or she mentioned Xander as "the one who sees things" and I got "Seeing Things").
I like to steal titles from other things, including episodes of other TV shows (The Fire Within), books (Slay Bells - I saw it in the bookstore and just couldn't resist the pun), and McSweeney's lists (Other Things the Road to Hell is Paved With). The rest are all sort of self-explanatory - if they're not directly quoted in the fic (Closure, He Will Come For Me), then they're pretty obviously the theme of the piece.
I have a weird tic when it comes to drabbles - they all have to have really short, one or two word titles. Which I guess makes sense, because if your fic is only 100 words, you don't really want a title that's almost as long.
I also make things extra difficult for myself sometimes by titling chapters within fics. I've found it's easier to keep track of how many chapters you've read of a fic when the chapters have titles rather than just "chapter 1," but really I did it as an exercise in practicing my titling. The one that drove me craziest was "Slay Bells," because I decided that all the chapter titles had to be Christmas-themed song lyrics. Gah! Suffice to say that those are probably the most loosely related to the subject matter of all the titles I've ever done.
What's your favorite title? Man, I don't know. To be honest, I think the one I love the most is an unused McSweeney's title that is just begging for a fic - Now Playing at the Zombietown 12-Screen Cineplex. Oh, this is kind of obscure, but I actually love a couple of my chapter titles: Love's Bitch Chapter 14 - The Downside of Clarity, and Other Things Chapter 9 - Para in My Normal. What's your favorite of my titles?
Do you have titles that you wish were better, and just couldn't get right? You know, not really. When I posted some of them, I kind of felt like I was just settling, because I really wanted to post it. But looking over the list, I really can't see any I'm unhappy with. I might have changed some of the chapter titles, since I settled on a lot of those, but they're less important to me.
Have you ever changed a title after posting? No, I'm kind of a purist in that, once something is posted, I hate to make changes to it. I'll edit if I see a grammar or punctuation error that I missed, but I won't do rewrites or change anything too noticeable.
I do sometimes have a "working title" for a fic while I'm writing it, which gets changed once it's done. I recently (re)discovered, in a browse through some old emails, that "Being Somebody Else" was called "No Promises" for quite a while. (I think that may have been related to the JM song. It was right around the beginning of my fangirling.) "The Fire Within" was originally titled "Something to Sing About," until I realized at least three other people had used that title already. I think "Slay Bells" may have been named "Honesty" and possibly "Self-Inflicted Wounds," before I decided it would be a Christmas fic and titled it appropriately. (There is, btw, still a file in my WIP folder called "Honesty." It now contains all the leftover scenes from my alt s6 that I never found a use for.) "Nineteen Days" came from a fic originally called "Tomorrow," when it went from being a post-Chosen story about Buffy and Spike's future to a story about the nineteen days between Chosen and Just Rewards.
Unfortunately, "Closure" got stuck being called "s4 rape fic" until I could think of something better.
*The title of this post is a play on the Broadway musical [title of show].
In a post on her lj, lily_lovely asked how do you come up with your titles? Which of course led to more thoughts than a comment could contain, which leads to a post here, lol.
First, let me say that I hate coming up with titles. I have no trouble coming up with them randomly, when there's no fic attached to it, and all I can do is add it to the list and say, "Cool, maybe I'll use that some day." But when I actually have a fic that I want to post? Finding the right title is usually like pulling teeth.
I probably (as with a lot of things) put pressure on myself to come up with the perfect title. Like lily_lovely, I think titles are important. A title should be clever and illuminate the theme and tell you something about the story and, most importantly, make you want to read the story. Which is hard.
Almost every time, I'm at least several chapters into writing a fic before I come up with a title. With one-shots, I'm usually finished the fic and driving myself crazy because I want to post it, but I can't post without a title.
My titles come from a variety of different sources:
Lines from the show:
The Hardest Thing in the World
Love's Bitch
Seeing Things
Turning a Corner in Istanbul
Song titles/lyrics:
Being Somebody Else
The Worst Day Since Yesterday
Silence Speaks
Beyond This Life
Shadows of a Brighter Day
clawofcat:
Accept No Substitutes
Knock on Wood
When in Rome
Cat and I also sometimes do "word association," where we throw out words and phrases that have to do with the story until something comes out that sounds like a title. I think that's where "Ebbing of the Tide" came from. I feel like there should be more examples of this one, but some of the word association led to choosing one of the titles above (like, she said something about silence, and I thought of "Silence Speaks," or she mentioned Xander as "the one who sees things" and I got "Seeing Things").
I like to steal titles from other things, including episodes of other TV shows (The Fire Within), books (Slay Bells - I saw it in the bookstore and just couldn't resist the pun), and McSweeney's lists (Other Things the Road to Hell is Paved With). The rest are all sort of self-explanatory - if they're not directly quoted in the fic (Closure, He Will Come For Me), then they're pretty obviously the theme of the piece.
I have a weird tic when it comes to drabbles - they all have to have really short, one or two word titles. Which I guess makes sense, because if your fic is only 100 words, you don't really want a title that's almost as long.
I also make things extra difficult for myself sometimes by titling chapters within fics. I've found it's easier to keep track of how many chapters you've read of a fic when the chapters have titles rather than just "chapter 1," but really I did it as an exercise in practicing my titling. The one that drove me craziest was "Slay Bells," because I decided that all the chapter titles had to be Christmas-themed song lyrics. Gah! Suffice to say that those are probably the most loosely related to the subject matter of all the titles I've ever done.
What's your favorite title? Man, I don't know. To be honest, I think the one I love the most is an unused McSweeney's title that is just begging for a fic - Now Playing at the Zombietown 12-Screen Cineplex. Oh, this is kind of obscure, but I actually love a couple of my chapter titles: Love's Bitch Chapter 14 - The Downside of Clarity, and Other Things Chapter 9 - Para in My Normal. What's your favorite of my titles?
Do you have titles that you wish were better, and just couldn't get right? You know, not really. When I posted some of them, I kind of felt like I was just settling, because I really wanted to post it. But looking over the list, I really can't see any I'm unhappy with. I might have changed some of the chapter titles, since I settled on a lot of those, but they're less important to me.
Have you ever changed a title after posting? No, I'm kind of a purist in that, once something is posted, I hate to make changes to it. I'll edit if I see a grammar or punctuation error that I missed, but I won't do rewrites or change anything too noticeable.
I do sometimes have a "working title" for a fic while I'm writing it, which gets changed once it's done. I recently (re)discovered, in a browse through some old emails, that "Being Somebody Else" was called "No Promises" for quite a while. (I think that may have been related to the JM song. It was right around the beginning of my fangirling.) "The Fire Within" was originally titled "Something to Sing About," until I realized at least three other people had used that title already. I think "Slay Bells" may have been named "Honesty" and possibly "Self-Inflicted Wounds," before I decided it would be a Christmas fic and titled it appropriately. (There is, btw, still a file in my WIP folder called "Honesty." It now contains all the leftover scenes from my alt s6 that I never found a use for.) "Nineteen Days" came from a fic originally called "Tomorrow," when it went from being a post-Chosen story about Buffy and Spike's future to a story about the nineteen days between Chosen and Just Rewards.
Unfortunately, "Closure" got stuck being called "s4 rape fic" until I could think of something better.
*The title of this post is a play on the Broadway musical [title of show].