What's with the title?

danitasibert 2018-08-03 17:22:01 UTC #21

Well to be honest, I've named this series Maximum Chaos; because the characters all have bouncing personalities from one to another and the world these characters live in! ^_^
I have a chapter dedicated to explaining just one country of the world and its the opposite yet parody of our world for the time being.

KennDemon 2018-08-03 17:26:04 UTC #22

For Road to Lamark, Lamark is the name of the ultimate destination the three main characters are journeying to. The destination is named after a city in Greek Mythology where heroes could go to rest and recover, which is significant to the story.

kaiwang868 2018-08-04 00:50:59 UTC #23

I would say A LOT goes into title. I read before that there is a trend in the publishing industry for book titles that go something with "The Girl [Insert Something]" The Girl on the Train. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and so on.

Or there are titles with the just the name of the character, if that is unique enough. Like Harry Potter. Or something more abstract like 50 Shades (lol).

I went with the character name for my story and contest entry.

alliascompany 2018-08-04 01:55:07 UTC #24

I'm still not 100% sure if I'll keep the title but I decided to go with Flames and Flowers because one of the protags can control plants and is often represented by flowers while the other one uses a lot of fire magic.

erma 2018-08-04 02:33:31 UTC #25

I'm not very good at naming stories. I wrote a comic about 6th graders when I was in middle school. It was called '6th Grade.' :'D

Honestly? My comic's name came from a bad pun late at night in a group chat.

I guess I called it "The Flipside" because the main character's from a town where things are completely "perfect" and orderly, and is a big contrast to the cities outside it. It probably fits the Stepford Suburbia trope, and it will be revealed that her town is not at all as it appears to be. It used to be called "Distorted Reality" but I feared that was too edgy.

Zaboem 2018-08-04 03:24:10 UTC #26

I like Flames and Flowers. It has alliteration going on two sides (the fronts and backs of the words). I also chose a title with alliteration, Soulless Saint.

I knew that I wanted to work the word Soulless into the title for a couple of reasons. It describes the robotic name of my main character, but it's also a thing inside of the Breachworld RPG, a flaw which a character can have reflecting a lack of genuine emotions. I was browsing factions in the game, trying to decide who the robot would be pestering. The Holy stood out as the most unusual choice, and I have long thought that religious cults were a good literary tool for representing or presenting all sorts of corruption. I'm not actually down on religion as a whole; I am religious myself, but cults are an easy target for ridicule and-or parody.

The titles behind my Alien Fiction series is a whole other (and more interesting) ball of wax that I will address some other time.

TheNiceGuys 2018-08-07 15:00:40 UTC #27

My title, Broken Pieces, came from one of the harshest insults to my writing I've ever gotten. A creative writing professor that I really looked up to told me my writing was melodramatic and hardly a narrative, more just strewn together parts barely holding themselves together, a bunch of broken pieces. As a bit of a confidence exercise I created my story with that exact title, and created a slew of characters that fit exactly that description. Barely holding themselves together. (sappy i know right?) and here we are

Lady_DarkStar 2018-08-07 15:23:12 UTC #28

One of the books I am working on doesn't have a title yet, and the other one has the title it had when I thought it was just going to be another short story, it will have to be changed. As for my two published items on Tapas, both share the From 404 title with a dash and genre afterwards. They are short story collections, hence the genre. The From 404 actually refers to an internet error, page not found. I write short stories when I can't find the next bit in the book I am working on: page not found.

Wumbl 2018-08-07 15:41:21 UTC #29

Mine is pretty straight forward - the story starts to get interesting when the protagonist falls in love with an angel of death. It's meant to be an ironic nod to his reckless attitude as he constantly risks his life without thinking.

yozhikisblue 2018-08-07 15:42:22 UTC #30

This is an interesting topic. I've always liked novels and comics that have deceptively simple, straightforward names, only to end up having a double-meaning. "Pilgrim" by Timothy Findley- "Not Simple" by Natsume Ono- series titles like "Low", "Trees" and "Shutter" (I highly recommend all of these by the way, if you haven't tried them yet- they're great reads)

I chose "Kingdom of Sunlight" as a title for a few reasons. But mostly I just like the irony of an underground colony that worships a sun god (the setting of the comic). There's a kind of baffling, nightmarishly illogical quality there that's reflected in the frustrating, often deadly political and social landscape the story's characters are doomed to navigating.

Ayumi 2018-08-07 16:05:50 UTC #31

Well, for Furusato House, the title is the same with where the story is placed. Furusato is the family name of the lord of the House, and it's meaning is "home". The heroine (Mayu) has to deal with the problem, that maybe she will never be able to get back to her home, so Furusato House will be her new home.

I think for Dreamcatchers it's pretty obvious why I gave this title. We follow the story of Sohiru and Iko, who are about to catch Sohiru's nightmares instead of the broken Dreamcatcher.

I love giving titles and names, I think this is one of the best part of writing a story.

kyurenai 2018-08-07 16:43:57 UTC #32

My WIP debut is entitled Colors of Sin because hmm... Firstly because I thought it sounds pretty cool. The other reason is something I like the audience to interpret themselves.

catluckey 2018-08-07 21:21:51 UTC #33

My title means a lot...symbolically and literally, "The Watchman." It follows four main protagonists and two interesting villains. The Watchman is a title that was stolen by the oppressor race and thus this involves folks on planet Shatazar and reaches out to Earth. Also The Watchman is taken from a scripture the oppressed race believes.

RedMoonDragon 2018-08-08 08:27:20 UTC #34

It's titled the way it is because it's both an action (people actually jump universes in it) but also its a nickname of a major important character in the comic.

Lunius 2018-08-08 22:50:55 UTC #35

It was going to by 'Wit's end' because that's my standard state of being and my comic is nothing more than a muffled scream and a few pie crumbs taped together. It became 'Westend' eventually - that's the city where the characters live.

ratscout 2018-08-08 23:21:48 UTC #36

Mine's called Protective Layer. It takes place in a world where art is illegal and people put on literal and metaphorical masks to get along in love. The main character is a prostitute who loves art as a hobby which is where the title comes in. He puts on a protective layer of paint so he doesn't fall apart~!

joannekwan 2018-08-09 00:57:36 UTC #37

Demon House: self-explanatory
Heavy Horns: the protagonist has a pair of horns and they weigh heavily on him metaphorically. They define who he is but it's a struggle between liking them and wishing they were gone—your not so usual body image issues.
Sarota Springs: named it after the fictitious town the story takes place in.
Erie Waters: set at lake Erie, it's a play on words since ghosts are involved, Erie, eerie, you get the picture.
At Ease: military lingo, one of the characters is a soldier, but also he puts the other main character at ease with his presence.

Zaboem 2018-08-25 05:18:05 UTC #38

Demon House: not really that self-explanatory

joannekwan 2018-08-25 05:20:04 UTC #39

lol it's a house with demons in it

Zaboem 2018-08-25 05:58:50 UTC #40

Of the three series I've made, my favorite title is Alien Fiction: The Queen in Yellow. The first part, Alien Fiction, merely identifies the story as a spin-off of the uber-series which is Alien Fiction (novellas, art, roleplaying game, flamethrower, et cetera). That title is a story for another time.

The Queen in Yellow requires more explanation. Around the time that I started this story, I was listening to The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers in 1895. The YouTube channel Horror Babble has an outstanding audio book version. I borrow a lot from public domain materials through the Alien Fiction projects, so I decided to make a sort of tie-in to Chamber's book here. Actually explaining The King in Yellow would take too much space here, but basically it's a collection of unrelated short stories in different genres which may or may not be taking place in the same world with some cosmic horror hijinks happening in the background. Remember that this is published a generation before Lovecraft, so cosmic horror is not a familiar concept to just about anybody. It's a very fun book to analyze, and I like layered stories.

I changed King to Queen because my protagonist is a female. She's also a fashion icon who has previously appeared in white and in pink at different times. It was a natural transition to change her fur color and make her yellow in this story. She is also my imaginary friend, and she approved of the change, so that basically sealed the deal.

There is a secondary meaning though. The king in yellow is an actual character in my story. Some of the same metaphysical hijinks as in Chamber's anthology are happening in the background of my story, but none of that has come to the surface yet as of the end of this novella. My protagonist is visiting different planets which have already been touched by the king's influence. I honestly have not dropped enough clues yet that anyone reading could have reasonably deduced this yet.