How do you think of titles for things you write?

[lightningandsnow]

I'm so bad at writing titles. I'm totally stuck on one now for a short story I wrote.

When all else fails, I steal from song titles.

How do you think of yours?

(edited to fix overly dumb spelling error)

[Orrex]

1. I just steal other people's writings

Right now, for instance, I'm working on A Tale of Two Cities and The Brothers Karamazov. Makes it a lot easier to pick titles, I can tell you.

[TZ]

2. Nice post......

Joe Biden.....



:hide:

[Orrex]

3. Oooh! That's going to get you in trouble!

:rofl:

[TZ]

4. well....

Thats what happens when LynneSin prays to Jesus to beat me in Fantasy Football....
I told her I have Satan on my side....he makes me say evil stuff...:evilgrin:

[SacredCow]

5. It's usually a bolt out of the blue for me....

It could be something direct or obscure- just depends....

[pitohui]

6. well i must not do a very good job but for what it's worth

i have noticed that when i have a professional assignment, then the editor or publisher will invariably change the title -- for that matter, the title is often chosen before the assignment gets to me

when not writing for publication, i just go the unimaginative route of trying to pick a title that is either descriptive (example: trip report bellagio poker room october 2008) or that uses some clause or phrase in the piece (example: fucking tables too close together)


i think it's safe to say i won't be hired for a job writing jacket copy and dreaming up bestselling book titles any time soon!

there is a real horrid fad out there of trying to create titles that use stupid ass puns -- for instance, in our local news, things like "hurricane EYES new orleans" (get it, get it? nudge, nudge, get it yet?) or "escaped emu runs AFOWL of the law"

please don't do that, even a song title is better than any more freaking puns, i guess my dislike of puns is part of the reason i'll never be an editor

[mitchum]

7. Cribbing from Yeats' "The Second Coming" is a tried and true method

[DarkTirade]

8. There are a few methods

1) descriptive.
2) quote from what you're writing
3) reference to something that you're writing.

I tend to favor the third kind myself. For instance, I wrote a short story recently that was just a sequence of strange things going wrong one after another. The main character ended up having to defend himself againt a bunch of crazy protestors who attacked him as he walked out of a grocery store, who were protesting the wrong thing at the wrong place. In the end, he discovers what happened, I.E., they went to the wrong place to protest and he just got caught in the middle of it... but it turned out they were right. He actually was what they were protesting against, just by coincidence. So I named the story "Broken Clocks" Kind of a double reference... not only did he 'clean their clocks', as the old expression goes, but also they just happened to be right about one tiny detail even though they were wrong about everything else... a reference to the old expression, "A broken clock is right twice a day."

[Jamastiene]

9. I think about sex once every 5 seconds.

What I do is grab what words I can remember from those other 4 seconds, add one word from the 5th second, and put them all together in some way that resembles making sense in some way and go with it. :evilgrin:

[Rhythm]

10. Most of my writing is of an academic nature, so...

I take the premise of my thesis, and then find some witty angle in which to present it.

I rarely write other genres at present... That will change most likely next semester, when i start my creative writing class.

[MilesColtrane]

11. I write music.

A lot of the time the title comes first for me. They can be short descriptions of people or places I've experienced.
Many times they are just a simple play on words.

I carry a notebook around and write them down for later use.

For someone writing fiction, I would propose that you try and find a small moment in your story that turns the narrative.

It can be simple, like a phrase that comes to, or is spoken by a character. Or, it can be an analogy to the situation the antagonist faces like a historical event or a mechanical/natural process.

From my own experience, finding titles that work came easier with age.