Titles

[splinteredstar]

How do you figure them out? It's not something that comes naturally to me. Like, most of my stories, if I have to explain them to others, are referred to by "that thing with (____)" or "character x's story". I generally don't use them inside of my head - I know which is which, after all.

All of this means that I have a whole bunch of major ideas, only one of which has a title. (And that one was from three drafts ago and doesn't reflect the current story at all.)

So. Titles. Do they matter? What makes a good one? How do you pick them?

Comments

[inkdust]

I'm pretty terrible with titles. I might come up with a candidate while I'm writing, but other times I have no idea. But I haven't actually finished much, so I haven't been forced to go beyond a working title most of the time. I do give some thought to genre, though, like I intend for my story that's in editing to fit into general/literary fiction and so the title I'm considering for it fits the common The Adjective Noun format. My next story is probably going to be this medieval political fantasy idea, and I imagine whatever title I scrounge up for it down the line will not be that format. Of course I'm having trouble even finding a working title for saving documents for that one - I finally resorted to Character A | Character B.

[splinteredstar]

Yeah, there's that - half my working titles are like "immortality thing" or "fish thing" or "vampire thing"

Yeah, genre matters. I haven't put much thought into that for my titles, maybe I should. Hm.