The Importance of Titles

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Image Credits:-
All images from Pixabay/Pexels unless otherwise stated with many created in Book Brush. Book cover images from Chapeltown Books and Bridge House Publishing. Screenshots taken by me, Allison Symes.
Hope you have had a good weekend. Not bad here. Lady enjoyed catching up with a pal over the weekend which she doesn’t usually get to do. I’m busy writing and editing, including on my third book, Seeing The Other Side. Hope to have more news on that before too long.

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Hope today has gone well. Weather changeable though it didn’t stop Lady from having a good time in the park. No pals today, hope to catch up with them later in the week and, before you ask, yes I am my dog’s social secretary! Most dog owners are!

Writing wise, I’ll be sharing Character Moments for Chandler’s Ford Today on Friday. Meantime I plough on with editing (client) and proofreading (my third book). Not short of things to do!

Also looking forward to the next meeting of the Association of Christian Writers Flash Fiction group later this month and thoroughly enjoyed the online writing group meeting I went to last night. You can still get about even if it is just by Zoom!

Hope your working week has got off to a good start. Changeable weather here though Lady still saw her Hungarian Vizler pal so all well there.

Writing wise, I’m looking forward to an online writing meeting this evening. Always good fun. Am making good progress with the editing of a client’s book and my own. I’ve been on both sides of the editing fence at the same time before. It’s always an interesting experience and you do learn a lot from it.

Was delighted to share another story of mine on my Substack account yesterday. To subscribe please head over to the following link – https://substack.com/@allisonsymeswriter1

Scroll down and you will find several flash pieces of mine on here now.

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Hope you’re enjoying a nice peaceful Sunday. Will be getting on with flash fiction Sunday afternoon shortly. Also have some interesting work to do regarding my forthcoming third flash fiction collection. Will share more later but am so pleased about this as you can imagine.

Did manage to submit my story for the competition I mentioned yesterday. Good to have that done. Did I find some final things to correct before submission? Oh yes – a minor adjustment needed – but this is why I put in a final, final check to look for things like this. It pays. After all, you want your story entry to have the best possible chance out there.

I get my first draft done, rest it, look at it again and it as this point I pick up the vast majority of errors and correct them. I rest the story again and when I come back to it this time, I am specifically looking for typos, grammatical errors, missing words etc. Just ahead of submission I double check I’ve laid the story out as the competition requires and things like word count are fine. I find all of this useful because you never do pick up everything on one sweep. Well, at least I don’t!

Looking for specific things on each sweep means you’re more likely to find them too.

Hope the weekend has got off to a good start for you. Windy but sunny here and Lady managed to meet up and play with Coco, the lovely Labradoodle today. We don’t usually see anyone we know at weekends so Lady has rightly taken that as a win.

Writing wise, I’ll be looking at Character Moments for Chandler’s Ford Today next week. Will be sharing useful tips and it is on a topic I love writing about – creating characters, the stars of our story shows.

Hope to submit a story for a competition over the weekend and then start working on another story which I’ve already got in draft form. Plus there will be flash fiction Sunday to look forward to as well. As for today, Saturday, it’s blogging and editing time! Now to crack on…

Facebook – From Light to Dark and Back Again

Hope at the weekend to pick a draft story to work on for another flash competition. Know I won’t get much chance before then. Am enjoying the process of proofreading my third book. Hope to share more news on that fairly soon.

I always look for impact in fiction, regardless of its length or whether I’m reading it or writing it. I need to care about the characters enough to want to find out what happens to them. This is what drives my belief that if you get the characters right, the plot will develop naturally from them.

I don’t really want a clever plot. I do want characters I want to root for and and then I’ll enjoy finding out just what they get up to and how much of a mess they make of things on the way to whatever the ending is going to be.

It’s another hectic Monday and, therefore, story time. Hope you like my latest on YouTube – Rebranding.

Times change even in Fairyland much to the disgust of the local wicked witch. Find out why she is disgruntled here – and what did happen to her wand?

 

I was talking over on my most recent Goodreads post about the importance of titles (see below) and, for flash fiction, they can help a writer convey mood without using up any of their precious word count allowance, given most places don’t include the title as part of that. (Do keep an eye out for this though – some places do include it. I always double check things like that to make sure I don’t get it wrong. I also allow about five words for a title when I have markets who include the title in the word count. I then know what I’ve got for the prose).

Inspiration for title ideas can come from proverbs and sayings and can also double up to be your theme. I find short is generally better. Short titles are easier to remember and if you share things on Twitter/X, you don’t use up so much of your character allowance either.

I also find having brainstorming sessions for possible titles not only useful but fun. I know I have things to come back to later to write up into potential tales. It is good to have that kind of back up and where notebooks/journals are brilliant. I’m old school enough to still like the thought of pen and paper coming into the process somewhere.

I read in my field of flash fiction as well as write in it, naturally. There are many wonderful flash fiction and short story anthologies out there but I am going to recommend Editor’s Choice – Friday Flash Fiction. I’ve just finished reading it and it has a superb collection of styles and moods, the one unifying factor being they are all at 100 words long. Pleased to see some great reviews coming in for the book too.

I have a few stories in there and it is great to recognize many familiar names in the book with me. Why not check it out? It is perfect for dipping in there and a great study of what flash fiction is and can be.

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Goodreads Author Blog – The Importance of Titles

Oscar Wilde may well have talked about it being Earnest who was important but, for any writer, titles are essential to get right. They are your first hook for potential readers.

Working in the short forms of fiction as I do, I will use titles to do some “heavy lifting” for me in that I can use them to set moods, give an indication of what is likely to follow and so on. I can do that without using up any of my word count allowance, especially for flash fiction, as most places exclude the title from their word count limits.

But when it comes to reading, does a good title draw you in? I know they do for me. I was intrigued by The ABC Murders (Agatha Christie) and had to read the book to find out the relevance of the title to the plot. It is a cracking Poirot story by the way.

Other titles which are more “open” such as Christie’s Nemesis (Miss Marple) make you wonder who/what the nemesis will be and who/what justifies facing that nemesis. Again, you have to read to find out.

Certainly when I’m buying books, if I already know the author then I have some idea of what I’m looking for but, for a writer new to me, it will often be the title which will lure me into looking at the cover and the blurb.

So titles matter. They can be tricky things to get right too.

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