When u write your story….?

how do u come up with the title? do u finsh the story and then think of a title?

I am not good with titling–it’s a skill some people have, but I don’t have it for my own stuff. (For some reason, I have no problem coming up with titles for others’ work.)

As a result, I generally grab a title from a quote or a song line that I like–my fantasy novel in college was titled ‘A Thousand Bayonets,’ because it was about a muckraking journalist in a 1700s French/Italian society, and there’s a quote by Napoleon that says “Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.” (Yes, it is on fictionpress, because I’m not publishing it. Haha.)

If there is something unusual in a piece that I am writing, a collection of words that strikes me as different than the rest, then I use that: A Sapphic-verse poem I wrote in college was about the Irish Civil War and this guy with an insane sister who wanted to grow lemons in their potato fields. So the title of that became ‘The Lemon Garden.’

Occasionally, words will strike me too. For the same class as ‘The Lemon Garden,’ we were supposed to write a poem about “the substance of poetry.” So, even though I did not use the word in the poem, I titled it ‘Substantiation,’ which both reminds the reader of substance (since it means ‘to prove the substance of something’) and is also a process, because poems gain substance both through the process of writing and through the process of analysis.

I rarely if ever title my stuff beforehand–for my current pieces of writing, the files are ‘argentine novel-june.doc’ and ‘hawaii novella.doc’.

Dunno if that helps, but that’s my process, so there you go!

——–

I find the best was to sum up choosing a title is this:

Try not to choose your title before you write your story, but once you’ve finished. This way, you’re not bending the story and all the possibly plots around a few simple words, but you’re bending the title to fit those ideas and those plots.

So, choose it once you’ve done. It’s usually really hard to find a suitable title, but when it comes, you’ll know. It just stands out.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Arts And Humanities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.