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Showing posts with label untitled. Show all posts
Showing posts with label untitled. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Untitled (Except It Is)

What kind of titles do you like?

As some of you know, I've been toying with the title of The Long and Winding Road. Since the original-fiction version doesn't have the love interest as such a big Beatles fan, the title doesn't seem as relevant. At the same time, I don't know what the alternative could be. I tried just The Winding Road, but it didn't seem to fit, and I really have no other ideas.

I'm not good at with chapter titles, either. I do my best to come up with them for fanfiction.net, and I've carried some of them over to the repost on deviantArt, but I don't know about using them in actual stories. I don't feel like they're necessary, beyond a number. At fanfiction.net, it's nice to remember where you last read, which is difficult with only numbered chapters. In published books, though, there are bookmarks, either physical or digital. Given I'm not brilliant at chapter titles (I either steal them from song lyrics, a word from within the chapter, or just something that may or may not fit well), I don't want to try them unless I have reason to think they're necessary.

I feel like my title ideas are terribly unoriginal. Granted, the fewer the words used, the more often they're used—that's just a matter of statistics. I just want to feel like my titles jump out at people, somehow. How much does that sort of thing vary between readers?

Also, my titles tend to be extremely short, on top of generic. Run a Google search for "Brutal" and you're probably never going to find the fan fiction. The same goes for The Rules, even if it's a lot more popular. Are there any sorts of resources for title generation, or is it just something I have to practise until it works?