Titles

If you haven't noticed, I'm not particularly good at titling things. Some people might try to defend their single word titles as being artsy in some way, but not me. I am just straight up lazy. I also don't have a lot to work with in these titles, given the stories are so short.

I have made some good titles. One I used recently was Towards Adventure. That was a sequel to a story I started writing a long time ago by the same title, and in the original it was a much more appropriate title, though for effectively the same reason. The story was in the format of a journal written by a man going on an adventure with no real goal. Because I was going for a word count, I decided to end every journal entry with the phrase "Towards adventure I set myself." It fit and it was some easy words. And after a while, trying to think of a title, it finally occurred to me how appropriate of a title that was.

I think that's probably part of the reason my titles on here are pretty poor. I don't really give myself time to think about what all there is to a piece. So I just pick a word or two that apply and throw them up there, saying it's good enough.

A lot of the time for me the title comes last. It doesn't feel right to throw up a title until I know what it's accompanying. But there are times, like tonight for instance, where the title comes first. Because in those rare instances, the title really tells me what I'm going to be writing about. Those kinds of days are generally the ones where I don't know what I'm going to be writing about. Where I'm just struggling to come up with anything, so I pick a word and just roll with it.

I don't know if there's anyway you can look at my writing and tell which way it was that it happened. Maybe it's the speed in which the title becomes apparent to what I've written, though in the aforementioned Towards Adventure, that title came first. Of course, that was also directly taken from another piece I had written, so that much is probably to be expected.

But there are also times that I've rewritten scenes that I have previously written, or I have made sequels to them, and I did not know what the title would be until I was nearly done writing, or well after I had finished. In those instances, the purpose of the new story was so vastly different from what it originally was that the old title simply wouldn't suffice. Or in some instances, the original never had a title to begin with because, of course, I was never able to come up with one that applied to it. These are just issues that I have.

Fortunately when I write a full story, I will have significantly more time to come up with a title. And hopefully, in those instances, I will be able to come up with a fitting title. Because, as someone who judges a book by its cover, I certainly wouldn't read something titled "Titles."