July Goal the Sixth

As mentioned in one of my retrospectives from last month, I need to work on my story titles.  This goal is to go through at least 5 stories -- probably the ones I think have the most potential -- and do some renaming exercises for them.

Story-A-Day Retrospective: Names and Titles

On character names: if you had seen the first couple of stories I wrote, you might have seen names like Bran SelfPossessednamehere or even Sir Eugene McNamehere.  I wasn't taking the time to find good names, and it was showing all over the place.  After a couple days of this, I decided I was tired of this and that, while the names could always be changed later, I wanted to have real names involved.  Thus, I took refuge in Scrivener's suggested names list.  I had already set it up to provide a decent variety of mostly English-ish names, and I would just scan the list for a name I liked.  If I was particularly taken by a first name but didn't like the last, or vice versa, I'd take the one and combine it with another on the list.  If I didn't see any I liked, a new list of 30 was a button-click away.

Surprisingly, this allowed me to connect with my characters more than I thought I would.  Having a name for them that I didn't come up with directly out of my head (even if I chose it from a list), gave them a bit more identity in my brain, I think.  I would usually come up with one or two traits about the character that I didn't have before, just from free-associating with the sound of the name.  It was a fascinating process, and one I think I'll keep around.

I also named every story I wrote, but many of them had very business-like working names; names like "The Test" or "The Slayer" or "The Choice" (ugh) or "The Quarry".  Many of those were either put on right away when I figured out what the story was going to be about, or at the very end when I needed to name it and wanted to be done with the story so I could go to bed.

On the other hand, many of the titles I really like came to me as I was writing the story.  Somewhere in the middle, I would have an idea for a title, and if it stuck around for a paragraph or two, I'd stop for a bit to officially name the story before continuing.  Of those titles, the ones I like the most are "The Sharp Edge of Opportunity", "Mary Brune as Cheetah", "Angels, Multiplying", and most of all, "The Stone Weight of the Survivor".

To pick out a couple of others, I came up with the name "Elephantine vs. The Stoat" first, but I had an idea that I wanted to do a superhero/supervillain story, and so first chose appropriate hero/villain names before filling in the title, and then writing it.  The title does well enough for the story.  "The Neo-Cheo Hunt" and "A Catgirl Adrift", "Birth of the Engineer", and "Ruby and the Dragon Slayer" fit in the passable-but-not-great category.

I may have to add to my goals going through some of the stories that I like but don't really go for the title, and making a list of possible titles for the story.  Hopefully I can come up with some better ones that way.  I may also want to study the ones I like to see if there's something about them in particular that I like and that I could then emulate for the others.

In conclusion on the titles, however, I have to say that sometimes an inspired title strikes me, and sometimes none does.  I need to practice if I'm going to get better at naming, and I know from my reading experience that a good name can really help pique interest in a story.