Thirty Days of Fanfic - Day Seventeen
Jul. 14th, 2011 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elrhiarhodanI can't believe I am actually posting this meme two days in a row. Maybe I'm back on schedule. Doubt it.
17 – Titles – Are they the bane of your existence, or the easiest part of the fic? Also, if you do chaptered fic, do you give each chapter a title, or not?
I used to struggle over titles. Tried to be cute, tried to be clever. And I usually fell flat on my face. Then I discovered something that my fellow writers had know for a long, long time. Song lyrics can solve your problems.
Actually, it was my friend![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gyzym who pointed me in the right direction. I had been dabbling with song titles for a while, but not seriously. I was struggling with one for a long, angsty fic and she suggested lyrics. It didn’t take me ten seconds to hone in on Art Garfunkel’s “All I Know” for the title to Between the Darkness and the Dawn..
I haven’t looked back since. Mumford and Sons has provided a few titles, most notably Love Will Not Break Your Heart (it will dismiss your fears), Live Unbruised (we are friends).
Oysterband, Ani DiFranco, Annie Lennox are my go-tos for titles, but I’ve also branched out. REM has been generous and so has Dead Can Dance.
The oddest place I’ve gotten titles from is the Preamble Redux series - where I was inspired to take each of the clause of the Preable of the U.S. Constitution and write a fic for it. It was one of the rare cases where I have been inspired to write from a title, rather than searching for a title for a story that’s already begun.
With longer fics, I usually just start writing, get a few thousand words down and then look for a title. A current project “Close Your Eyes and Think of Me (call out my name)” got a title almost before I started writing. I was humming the James Taylor song for no good reason (and even odder - I had been listening to Ravel’s Bolero just before that), and it came to me as the perfect title for the story I was about to tell.
I’ve also had the embarrassing situation of using the same title for two completely different fics. Not once, but twice. Luckily, one time I caught it as a WIP and changed titles, but the other time it was a ficlet that never got cateloged onto my Masterlist. Only caught it when I was looking for something else.
As for chapters - the only time I’ve titled chapters in a complete fic (not a regularly published WIP like Danger’verse or Vampire World) was for the aforementioned Between the Darkness and the Dawn - where I used parts of the lyrics for each chapter. It worked marvelously well until I ran out of lyrics.
17 – Titles – Are they the bane of your existence, or the easiest part of the fic? Also, if you do chaptered fic, do you give each chapter a title, or not?
I used to struggle over titles. Tried to be cute, tried to be clever. And I usually fell flat on my face. Then I discovered something that my fellow writers had know for a long, long time. Song lyrics can solve your problems.
Actually, it was my friend
gyzym who pointed me in the right direction. I had been dabbling with song titles for a while, but not seriously. I was struggling with one for a long, angsty fic and she suggested lyrics. It didn’t take me ten seconds to hone in on Art Garfunkel’s “All I Know” for the title to Between the Darkness and the Dawn.. I haven’t looked back since. Mumford and Sons has provided a few titles, most notably Love Will Not Break Your Heart (it will dismiss your fears), Live Unbruised (we are friends).
Oysterband, Ani DiFranco, Annie Lennox are my go-tos for titles, but I’ve also branched out. REM has been generous and so has Dead Can Dance.
The oddest place I’ve gotten titles from is the Preamble Redux series - where I was inspired to take each of the clause of the Preable of the U.S. Constitution and write a fic for it. It was one of the rare cases where I have been inspired to write from a title, rather than searching for a title for a story that’s already begun.
With longer fics, I usually just start writing, get a few thousand words down and then look for a title. A current project “Close Your Eyes and Think of Me (call out my name)” got a title almost before I started writing. I was humming the James Taylor song for no good reason (and even odder - I had been listening to Ravel’s Bolero just before that), and it came to me as the perfect title for the story I was about to tell.
I’ve also had the embarrassing situation of using the same title for two completely different fics. Not once, but twice. Luckily, one time I caught it as a WIP and changed titles, but the other time it was a ficlet that never got cateloged onto my Masterlist. Only caught it when I was looking for something else.
As for chapters - the only time I’ve titled chapters in a complete fic (not a regularly published WIP like Danger’verse or Vampire World) was for the aforementioned Between the Darkness and the Dawn - where I used parts of the lyrics for each chapter. It worked marvelously well until I ran out of lyrics.
