30 Days of Fandom Meme: Day 17

[osprey_archer]

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?

Bane of my existence, oh my God. Probably the nicest thing I ever did for myself was giving most of the fics in Reciprocity one-word titles, because that simplifies the whole coming up with titles thing immensely. The Reciprocity fics with longer titles - Give Me Your Hand, Lay Your Armor Down - are the fics where I had unexpected title inspiration, and this is pretty much representative of how often I have inspiration for titles generally. When I'm writing for prompts, like hc_bingo, I often end up using the prompt itself as the title. Bruises! That pretty much sums up the fic, right?

Actually, looking over my fics, I have an awful lot of fics with one or two word titles that are basically meant to sum up the theme: Covetous, Pieta, Fidelity, Caritas, Cages. There are more. This is just a sampling.

Despite this difficulty with titles, I think all my chaptered fic has chapter titles. Yes, I've just checked: all of it. Every single one. Maybe I'm a glutton for punishment.

Comments

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

I've been flat-out told that I suck at titles. But how does one not suck at titles? That's what I'll never understand.

Summaries are worse, though. I don't think I could write a decent summary if you paid me.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Summaries are the absolute worst. With titles, occasionally lightning strikes and I'll come up with one I really like; summaries are always a slog. No matter how exciting I think the story is, somehow I always make it sound super boring in summary.