Promptfest VI - Summertime Madness - Still Going On!

Promptfest VI - Summertime Madness is still going on (and will continue at least until the end of the month). It's opened to everyone, so come on and join the madness.

I will post an update tonight with links to all of the fantastic fills (there are close to 60 completely new stories so far!).

Even if you don't want to write, you should stop by and read and cheer on your favorite authors!

Thirty Days of Fanfic - Day Seventeen

I 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 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.

Thirty Days of Fanfic - Day Seventeen

I 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 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.