Literally going insane over title selection |
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laritybug
NYC Midnight Addict Joined: 05 Oct 2019 Location: OR Status: Offline Points: 814 |
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Posted: 23 Nov 2019 at 9:19pm |
How do you choose a title? I’ve been through no less than six that I was SO SURE were the perfect ones, only to hate them shortly after. How do you pick one? Any tips on what the judges would like/expect?
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jbilyen
Newbie Joined: 14 Sep 2019 Location: Oakland Status: Offline Points: 12 |
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I know what you mean! I'm an English teacher, and I often tell my students that their essay titles should relate to their topics (duh). I tell them that an easy way to make sure of this is to use only words found in the essay itself. I think the same can be said for fiction writing. I like my titles to come from lines/phrases in the story.
I also tell my students to not sweat it too much. Whatever you do don't call it "Micro fiction round 2 story" :)
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ADave411
NYC Midnight Addict Joined: 14 Jul 2018 Location: Michigan Status: Offline Points: 697 |
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I searched for puns relating to my story's topic.
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ksarge
Newbie Joined: 07 Oct 2019 Location: Texas Status: Offline Points: 3 |
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I do that, too, along with searching for idioms.
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jennifer.quail
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 07 Feb 2018 Status: Offline Points: 7931 |
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I have been known to save the file with the name as a random noun in the story I happened to be looking at, and ended up keeping it. Book-length things I've been know to to swipe quotes from famous poems.
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Paul Bee
NYC Midnight Addict Joined: 08 Oct 2019 Location: Toronto Status: Offline Points: 935 |
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In a story this short, create a title that helps add clarity and also sounds cool as hell.
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Saidinotherwords
NYC Midnight Newbie Joined: 08 Oct 2019 Location: Philadelphia, P Status: Offline Points: 84 |
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I opted for a title that would prime the reader to the mindset of the target audience. "X and the Y" generally evokes YA fiction, so there's no expectation for a complicated psychological character study.
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angelagilbert
NYC Midnight Addict Joined: 21 Jan 2017 Location: Maine Status: Offline Points: 824 |
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I agree. There have been a few times where the title just came to me and felt perfect. This happened to be one of those times. But more often than not, it's a super struggle. I find titles to be either super easy or super difficult. There is no in between
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JamesMarkMiller
NYC Midnight Newbie Joined: 26 Nov 2019 Location: Sacramento Status: Offline Points: 22 |
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I just used the first thing that popped into my head after each story was done, it hadn't really occurred to me that the title might impact the judging.
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BarbaraFL
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 08 Jun 2006 Status: Offline Points: 3785 |
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I have to admit that I too used the absolute first title that popped into my head - and it shows, haha, I just had not a brain cell left at that point to come up with anything better! I kind of smirked as I chose it, because I knew I was making an iffy choice by using it. I mean, she did make an ill-fated choice. But it's not very clever as a title
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