How do you come up with titles?

Inquiring minds want to know. (Every once in a while I manage something original like Less Than a God, but I usually wind up with something like The Swarm.)

edited 18th Jun '11 4:59:04 PM by feotakahari

You know, I try to go for something deep or some arc words only to realize I'm trying too hard. So it then just becomes something like "The Knight And The Doctor".

Many titles seem to come directly from various stock phrases within a given profession. There was a harrison ford movie called Presumed Innocent, which is about a trial.

I think of the most clichéd thing EVER. :D

Well, at first I just came up with Stuck at the Galleria as a result of my lack of creativity toward the name.

But when I decided to make the stories all one book, I decided to shorten it to "Stuck".

Usually I think up something quirky. For example, Manifestation Files doesn't really have a file (Finn just keeps track of the Manifestations he destroys), but it has a good ring. Legacea is a cross between "legacy" and "sea", Kira Is Justice is a sort of play on words, Rift County just sounds good...Yep, I like titles with sharp sounds.

I write a lot of things down. Interesting words and expressions, technical jargon, literary quotations, even things people say to me in conversation. I don't use half of them, of course, but it's a good source of titles, for chapters, poems and stories that I can refer to when stuck.

Also, puns. I like puns.

The title is often the thing I come up with last, once everything else is written. In the meantime, I usually come up with a working title, not always a very creative one.

i gave up on titles years ago. i just name them after the main/focus character.

like "Adele's story" and "Arianne's story" and "Céleste's story"

they're not actual titles, but they work just fine during the development stage. ive always considered titles the very last part of the process

Hey, me too. I have "Taren's story", "Milo's story", and "The one with the [plot important thing]".

I have no titles for any of my stories so far.

I also come up with titles last.

I've noticed that my titles tend more towards Genius Bonuses than anything else, and tend to represent something that the characters are striving towards or consider important.

Find something that sounds cool. Like the names of chapters of the Koran, or Gratuitous German, or Touhou spell card names.

No, I'm serious - I have stories called "The Cave", "Spukhafte Fernwirkung" and "Firefly Phenomenon". Spell cards are excellent for this kind of thing.

edited 18th Jun '11 6:35:40 PM by RiotousRascal

I basically just think about whatever sounds cool.

It's nice if you can find something with multiple interpretations—my current major original project is tentatively titled 'Rogue Power', which is both a class of people within the story who have unpredictable magic powers (as opposed to the very hereditary psychic powers that are more common) and a reference to some later political happenings.

I suck at titles; they're always single words like "Familiar" or "Aurora."

Although my short story "Loplop Introduces the World" was clever on a few levels, I thought.

For Remus, I went to mythology. Here's the explanation: Romulus and Remus were twin brothers, cast out by their father and raised by wolves (which is where Remus Lupin gets his first name.) To me, that's the boring part. The interesting part comes several years later, when they're both grown up. Somehow they get the bright idea to found a city. Romulus wants it in one place, and Remus wants it in another. Romulus promptly murders his brother to get his pesky objections out of the way. Given that the series is a Dystopia and that roughly half the characters (Jason Baxter = Jason, Bill C. Cullan = Cu Chulain, Seth Williams = Set, etc.) are named after mythological figures whose traits roughly correspond with theirs (Jason is the leader of a Badass Army and really likes the color yellow, Bill is The Big Guy and kills a guy with his bare hands the first time we see him fight, Seth is the Big Bad and The Faceless (nobody can agree on what animal Set looks like, and the reader has no idea what Seth looks like) I figured this was appropriate.

Obviously, this doesn't work for everything, but depending on the details of your story and your knowledge of mythology you might be able to find something that fits.

edited 18th Jun '11 8:17:09 PM by KyleJacobs

Personally I'd just put up any old thing as a title, just so it is called something. Maybe it is related to the plot, maybe it isn't, or maybe it is "P0011111NNWMFaH.V".

Once it is finished then I name it something more meaningful, because now I know the story. Plus I think it could be a good idea to get help from people learning how to market books, since they probably know what would be a catchy title to get your work to sell.

edited 18th Jun '11 8:31:00 PM by EldritchBlueRose

My titles are pretty simple and straightforward:

• Project One Fifty Four — About a man born in a project called one fifty four.
• Beowulf Ecgtheowing — About a young man named Beowulf Ecgtheowing.
• Red — About a young woman nicknamed Red.
• Metallon: The Iron Skateboarder — About a metal-controlling skateboarder who goes by the alias of Metallon.
• The Exile of Borghild Brynwulfing — About the exile of Borghild Brynwulfing.

I've never seen any need to go fancy with my titles—I often start with a plain, straightforward "working" title, then I find that said title sounds fine the way it is and keep it.

It's only act titles and chapter titles where I actually get a little fancy.

• Boy Aurus - He is a boy. His name is Aurus. I'm so clever </sarcasm>
• The Object of War - taken from a Patton quote "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his." after the previous working title Under One Sky was decidedly too kumbayah for a war story that isn't anti-war or something.
• Cured - A bedridden girl becomes a vampire, though whether she counts as "cured" is debatable. Though the idea of curing problems is a sort of arc word when I remember it. >_> Been re-writing the darned thing for years.
• Greetings from Magical Los Angeles - It's set in Los Angeles... with magic.

@_@' I do some pretty bad titles. I tend to go for statement of the obvious unless that sounds too stupid ((Well, I was highly tempted to call The Object of War "DRAGONS VS PLANES YEAH" one late night after it occurred to me that I called Leviathan "Flying Whale vs. Steampunk mecha" more often than its actual title in casual conversation)) and then I try to pretend I know how to write a tight theme to my story.

edited 18th Jun '11 10:51:03 PM by Kaxen

My titles fall into two categories: awesome titles that I think up, that I then have enormous trouble finding a story to fit; and stories that I've written that I then have a hard time thinking up a title.

Usually, I take a title from a quote or a literary allusion, so I've ended up with "The Queen of Night," "The Two-Handed Engine," "brighter than a spoon," and "The Ripeness is All."

Let's see... of all of my works:

• Help Wanted: Named because the main character (Hinata Hyuuga) wanted help.
  • Help Needed: The sequel.
• Harry Potter and the Thousand Master: A Harry Potter/Mahou Sensei Negima crossover... title just kinda made sense.
• Splattered Ink: Fighting tournament run by Calypso of Twisted Metal.
• Currently Untitled Na No Wri Mo project: Exactly What It Says on the Tin. I have no idea what to name this thing right now.

edited 19th Jun '11 2:26:45 AM by animemetalhead

I don't.

Seriously, my current works that I've put any information on here about are currently known as "Untitled Comics", "Untitled High Fantasy Setting", "Untitled Hard Science Fiction Series (far-future)" and "Untitled Hard Science Fiction Series (near-future)". I can't remember the last time I named a work, or how I did it. Since I've never published anything nor do I plan to (anything fictional, anyway) this isn't that big a deal.

edited 19th Jun '11 2:47:50 AM by nrjxll

Same with nrjxll, I just can't find a good title for any of my stories. That's why my main projects have names like qqq4 and CBS.

Where's inspiration when you need it?

generally making the title at the end is teh best thing once its always polished up. you will have a bigger picture of it and all. titles work best when made last.

The working title for an introduction story to Bjorn Westlander, Agent Retriever is "Genesis", but I'll change it to "Grave Wurm" when I'm done. From the creature that the hero has to fight.

Before, when I hit writer's block, I come up with a title and base an entire story around the title. It had some positive feedback from my editor-friend.

That said, I think of catchy things from stuff I recently watched or followed and try to relate it to the story. It sounds bad, but I think it worked for me.

I'm horrible at coming up with titles. Forgotten Lore was for ages called LHP or LHP-Arkham (LHP stands for Life of Howard and Phil) before I could finally think a proper name. Zaran il Legio comes from when I did some doodles starring Zaran, and since I hadn't started doing Forgotten Lore then (or now, for that matter) I decided to make them semi-standalone and give them their own name. It was originally going to be "Zaran of the Legion" , but when I started doing the actual Zaran spinoff/prequel/whatever comic it had mutated to "Zaran il Legio" (which is the same name in "demonic" aswell as a contraction of Zaran's full name and title, romankhisasa Zarangora il Legio Ered'nash).