Being En-Title-d

[Jason Wolf]

So I thought I'd see about a fun little discussion on titles. Both of the book and of chapters.

I suppose the first real question is what do you try to accomplish with your title besides catching attention? Do you hide references and deeper information that you won't understand until you finish the book or will you just do for the coolest subtitle you can think of?

As for chapters do you title them? Do you try to theme them? Do you as I mentioned before hide things in them? I for one very much like to have some obvious explanations of what is going on, but I do adore when I have a good joke or pun for the title.

EX. the last chapter I wrote is called "Walk in the Park". One of the main settings of the story is in a state park (Letchworth look it up it is BEAUTIFUL), but it also is a phrase used to call something really easy, but I'm using it sarcastically as the chapter will have a rather difficult moment for the protagonist.

I'm just curious how you guys tend to do it.

 

[Miz en Scène]

I like writing titles that make people wonder what the story's about. If it has a deeper meaning then all the better, but my main focus, at least when it comes to titling, is always concerned with marketing the story rather than adding to it particularly.

 

[Aisu]

The title of this post is criiiinge - nah it's kind of funny. Well, my story titles are pretty literal, i.e. the story is about a bird that can't fly, I'll call it "flightless." Most of my stories don't have chapter titles, but when I do write them they're more likely to have a little fun wordplay. I do try to give an eye-catching title sometimes but mostly it falls flat so I'm just like :P

 

[The Mighty Trubbish]

Most of the time I come up with some edgy middleschool-esq title that kinda has relevance to the story in a stupid abstract way, like, I was writing this one story called "Restless" and the main character was an apathetic dude who hated his small town life. It was super stupid but kinda fitting. I find most of my titles end up like that.

 

[Bay]

When it comes to titles for my stories, I usually go for how it relates to the story. Lately I've been writing very short stories, and half of them I'll base off either like song lyrics or quotes if I can't think of anything.

Before I would title my chapters, but the last couple chaptered fics I did I didn't do that. I did two long fics that are a series of short scenes, though, and I titled each scene based what subject it is.

 

[Ice1]

I usually just take a literal element from the story and put that down as a title. Sometimes it's just character names, sometimes it's something mentioned in the first paragraph.

 

[Astinus]

Most of my titles are phrases that describe what the story is about. Like "The Bonds of Mass Misery" is a story about how a group of people who are just barely friends grow stronger together because of all the negative events that will be happening to them.

Only one of my stories has titled chapters, and that's because those were easy titles to come up with. Each chapter is titled with the name of a fallen angel, which makes sense for the story they're for.

 

[JamUsagi]

I usually try to have some reference or joke in my titles, or a hint of what's going to happen (It's embarrassing when I never get far enough for the title to make sense).

For example, I have a Harry Potter fanfic called Hermione's Wand and the Philosopher's Stone, because in that canon Harry's soul ends up stuck in Hermione's wand.

I also have Early Introduction, in which Ash battles Tobias with a different strategy, so Tobias ends up introducing Ash to Synchro-Evolution early - something which isn't mentioned in the synopsis.

My fanfiction.net profile is Flitty if you want to check them out.
[/Shameless Plug]

I also try to name chapters with some kind of theme, be that a certain format (two alliterative words with the first being a verb, for example), or actually thematic. That usually derails though.

 

[Auticorn]

I tend to struggle a lot with titles. For chapter titles, it's even harder. :c I guess I'm just not as creative as I want to be with them. However, I do try to think of the main idea or points of my different chapters. I used to just number them though. Like, an example was the first chapter being "one", the second one being "two, etc., but I realized that just made the chapters seem less appealing.