# Giving your story a name.



## Zeitzbach (Nov 20, 2013)

Create a world? I love that
Name it? Okay, this one sticks.
Create many different characters, settings and give them all a name and characteristic? So much fun.
Create at least 12 land marks, name races, name towns, etc? Yup.
Create a whole system to try and balance the characters? So much fun.

Give the fic a name

....
....
DAMMIT
Just
HOW

So many names are taken now. Everything that used to feel new is now plain and boring. It's hard to come up with a name that clicks. 

*Tales of ???* : Nope. Monopolized.

*-Insert Char name here - or Adventure of ?? and ??* : I have too many main chars with almost equal screen time that this doesn't work.

*?? of darkness* : Really?

*The Last ??* : There really isn't a special snowflake "last of my kind" in it.

Now I'm just poking around with music lyric trying to find the part that fits and probably come up with a name from there.

How exactly did you end up with the name for your story anyway?


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## Spikey2k2 (Nov 20, 2013)

Turn of phrase, oddly assembled words. Some line that appears in the work. They don't even have to make vernacular sense, or can be one word.


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## Zeitzbach (Nov 21, 2013)

Spikey2k2 said:


> Turn of phrase, oddly assembled words. Some line that appears in the work. They don't even have to make vernacular sense, or can be one word.



Quotes are fun. sadly, most quotes I can easily recall are stuffs like the one in the sig. Diversity really make it hard.

Naming it like "*Jacob have I loved*" did would be so troll, choosing the phrase that only come up once throughout the whole book.

Welp, after poking around in the dictionary, the best I can come up with for now is "*Reverie*"


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## Spikey2k2 (Nov 21, 2013)

You could always just choose a working title and figure it out later. I don't really write anymore, so these are just suggestions. Reverie has a nice ring to it though.


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## Zeitzbach (Nov 21, 2013)

Scratch that name then. It's time to browse MMOs for names.


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## Alexxx-Returns (Nov 21, 2013)

The thing that really sucks is when you create the PERFECT name for the book, but find out there's already a book by the exact name... -_-

I had to rename the central country in my story for a similar reason.

Eventually, the name I chose was simply, the names of all three of the made-up countries my story takes place in.


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## Zeitzbach (Nov 21, 2013)

AlexxxLupo said:


> *The thing that really sucks is when you create the PERFECT name for the book, but find out there's already a book by the exact name...* -_-



^

Don't even have to be books. If the name is already taken by something that is popular, the name is pretty much unusable.


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## Dover (Nov 21, 2013)

Zeitzbach said:


> ^
> 
> Don't even have to be books. If the name is already taken by something that is popular, the name is pretty much unusable.



I feel the same way. I feel like it HAS to be unique. Ok uniqueness is easy to come up with. Now something unique that relates to the story. That is hard!

eventually I got advice that said to pick a small part of the text and make a title on something  based off that little itty bitty part. It worked out well for me.


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## ACraZ (Nov 24, 2013)

I think what works is just blowing all the other writing out of your mind. That's how you get unique, I think. You don't focus on clitches and how to avoid them, you just write what you are thinking of. If it happens to be clitche, who cares? You weren't writing it for that. If people judge it on that more than the actual content then you shouldn't care about those people.

Same thing goes for title. If you have an idea, use it! If its taken and the first person gives you problems, just change it a little. Above all, just go for it


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## Antronach (Nov 24, 2013)

Take the story as a whole and try to work out a powerful, evoactive phrase that represents the story without sounding too weird, generic or blunt. You also hold off on titling your book until you at least have an outline and the cast layed out.


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## Maolfunction (Nov 24, 2013)

Go to old literature, take a line from it. It's what novelists do all the time. Book's about famine, poverty, and death? _Please Sir, I Want Some More_


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## Dictator Lister (Nov 24, 2013)

I'd say pay close attention to what the focus of the story is on. Is it about a character? A nation? An overarching theme?

Then once you find the focus, try to encapsulate it with one word or phrase. That's how I've always done it and it's worked wonders.


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## Hooky (Jan 5, 2014)

Great Expectations gets its name from a recurring plot point throughout the book. The Catcher In The Rye gets its name from a line of dialogue spoken by the main character. (Incidentally, its a mutated version of a line from poetry.)


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## Blekarotva (Jan 5, 2014)

I put all of my (current) stories within the same universe, and all of them have a common thing, despite they all happen in different times, planets and galaxies. I named the first story "The Myth of the Abyss" (because it's literally a myth within the universe) and the stories that come after it are named "The Myth of the Abyss, pt. 1, pt. 2 , etc", this has saved me a bit of sanity, it also helps me to establish a much more obvious connection among the stories.


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## nekokoi (Feb 18, 2014)

It depends. You may want to imagine your story as picture and put words to that picture. If the story is focused on a single character you could perhaps name it after that character "The Portrait of Dorian Gray" "Alice's adventures in Wonderland" or you could take theme of the book "To Kill a Mockingbird" The father tells his children that shooting mockingbirds is wrong because all they do is a crime but it reaches to the central conflict of the book that the white jury will condemn an innocent black man for no reason. With certain works you could turn phrase. Perhaps if you're writing a vampire erotica piece you entitle it something like Death Blow. Honestly,I don't think the title is all that important.


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## Xioneer (Mar 8, 2014)

I'd laugh about this Topic if it wasn't such a head-scratchingly annoying point for some writers...

Personally, I usually start with a cool Title I like and develop the story around that. My current project is based off of a Title I suggested to someone else at least 4-5 years ago. It stuck with me and I ended up wanting to do a story to fit the exact theme it suggested. Honestly, the Title in question was too corny(ie. very suggestive of a movie series in the same Genre) to keep as is, so I made that just the Working Title. The Release Title is an adulteration of it. And I Googled it and it turns out someone released a book under the exact same title. Fortunately, that was a novel, and I'm doing a comic/graphic novel, so no problems...


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