bITS 'N CHUNKS
My template for titling thing probably comes from cryptic anime OVA titles from the late-80s/early-90s and industrial music. Not lurid because a lot of them were pretty self-explanatory (although yes some look like straight giallo titles), but some of the more "poetic" translations of titles not easily rendered into English. Nowadays when it's like that, we just call them by their Japanese title. But back then, boy did we try it. Come on, how many of y'all thought that man's name was actually Tenchi Muyo?
Manga and video games got this a lot too. I didn’t really get the art of titling even when I started writing my own things, I kind of got that they had to be descriptive of what was going on in the story but I had no template for it. I wasn't sure how to render it. When I looked at the writers I loved, especially in the fantasy genre, I wasn't sure how as to pick their minds on why they came up with The Hellbound Heart and not Hellraiser for example. So I had a lot of pedestrian and cliché story titles that weren't really evocative of what was going on. When I started reading doujinshi I kind of got a template. Now, mind you most of the doujinshi I read was pornographic in nature so the titles were an indicator of what kind of porn you were getting into. Some were Japanese, some were translated to English or another language I could reasonably understand. But I got it. Titles like Lascivious Mother told you exactly what was going on, who the main character was, and something about them. It reminded me of the quaint old timey titles you'd see on 15th-18th century literature which basically told you the whole story on two lines. So I started doing that in so many words. I also learned about parody titles and as I wrote mostly comedy at the time, that worked out fantastic. I got cryptic sometimes too. I learned how to use SEO and clickbait to ensure my stories never made it to general search but at least a handful of people would read them. Titling didn't finally click for me until I was writing and reading essays in high school. I learned how to summarize my own subject matter and describe it in so many words so that it looked inviting but kind of standard to protocol. Nothing too wild. I was introduced to the concept of using a quote from yourself or another author that invoked the subject at hand. My favorite part of the story is the reveal of the title - what it really meant this whole time, what it related to. Blogging also helped a lot. People don't have a lot of time to spare and blogging will make you frank. As I'm often inspired by movies and music, one thing I did to differentiate my professional writing from my fannish stuff was use movie quotes and snippets of song lyrics. I tried not to be terribly obvious about it. I still do this to an extent I just don't rely on it as hardcore as a I used to. I got a lot of hits with Duran Duran… When I switched over to short stories permanently (seemingly), my titles got about as abbreviated as the content. Usually now it's reduced to the antagonist, a main character, whatever is at stake, a location, or something just plain ol' cryptic for the sake of being cryptic and interesting. That’s where I draw my titling inspiration from these days. I've been trying to broaden myself out lately because titling is still one of those things that is innate for me, so I've been checking out this, this, and this. (PDF)
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So I've started becoming more sensitive about where I take inspiration from and why. I've admitted several times out loud, to myself, workshop guests, my cats my writing is a little overly theatrical sometimes. Like I'm just begging for a movie adaptation one of these days. It sucks because it makes things hard to transcribe from a very lucid visual point to a very literary point. Simply put, you're not going to see exactly what I see nor am I interested in you having the exact same interpretation. Now, there's things we have to agree on. When I say a character is a black female, she is. When I say someone has red hair, they do unless I forget continuity and suddenly they don't. What I'm saying is this… In my fiction class in college one year, I introduced myself with stating I'm a film student and I hadn't read a book in a long time. That was pretentious but it was correct -- up to that point I hadn't really read any books, much of my college course material was books I'd already read and did not need/want to read again, and I'd taken more to watching a lot of Japanese cyberpunk and New Wave. I think what happened was I needed a new template. At some point literally all I did was read, read two to three books at a time to the point where I was literally getting behind on my coursework because I was too busy doing other things (this became a thread of my life). When I decided to write, until I figured out my own style I realized I needed a template. The books I was reading served as that template, but it was a weird time because I was reading a mix of Victorian literature, Russian modernism, and the young adult assignments I had to read in class. So looking back, of course I was finding my way but I don't really feel like I was writing as a real person. I was inhabiting various historical figures and writing as they would. A myna bird, basically. Then what happened was I got mighty pretentious about it. I was shy in real life but on the internet I definitely got the big head. At this point I was writing almost exclusively fanfiction and people were praising my work and I was getting massive views. It was hear I learned to…monitor my activity. That's right folks, writing fanfiction will teach you a few things. While keeping my dashed together "style" I also started catering to my audience. But instead of making connections I was snickering at other people's writing because I didn't think they were as good as me. Look, I'm classically trained! These other punks sounded like amateurs. I got humbled when I started branching out to original fiction and I realized nobody was really following me there. I was reading other people's works and wondering why they were so much more successful. Well, there's a few reasons young me -- being able to put together a cohesive story, good dialogue, character development, plotting and pacing…I had to sit down and figure it out. It wasn't just enough to copy Alexandre Dumas but the point was to learn from him. At some point in my wayward youth, I drifted into something pretty hardcore: the underground movie scene. Now, I've been watching b-movies my whole damn life but I didn't realize there was an actual internet community for them until I was like maybe thirteen or fourteen. Then I was obsessed. I was in a place where biker babes were good and you said "feelm" with as much irony or gusto as you dared. Also, the people were funny and had a similar sense of humor. At that point I was Misfits horrorpunk trash. I read a ton of reviews and I wanted to write my own, too. In doing this, I made new friends, gained some damn people skills, and more importantly found a new template. Yes, I started copying schlock movies. Except better this time because now I understood the principles of writing. As I watched more underground movies, that became my template for writing. It kind of worked for a while because at least I was new and fresh again, but it got a little stale and I started struggling again. I couldn't figure out what was wrong. Recently, I did a little comparison on myself. I compared what was essentially a songfic to something I'd written channeling a movie more or less. The songfic flowed so much easier without revealing it's obvious influences, it was subtle and dare I say kind of good. The other piece…well, it was trying but it was too wordy. Too emotive. I had a hard time getting to the point. You know what that means… I need to get out of my own head and stop overanalyzing. I was originally going to talk/lament about my most favorite of fanfic derivatives, the songfic. What they mean to me, why they're so nostalgic, et cetera. While I was looking up the anatomy of a songfic, I came across this curious quote on Wikipedia:
In an essay in Music, Sound, and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, University of Sydney professor Catherine Driscoll commented that the genre was "one of the least distinguished modes of fan production" and that "within fan fiction excessive attachment to or foregrounding of popular music is itself dismissed as immature and derivative". Well, first off that hurt my feelings a little bit even though it's an old quote. I love music and often find myself inspired by it, but most importantly I look for music recs. Yes, I discovered a lot of new music (mostly J-pop and nu-metal) by reading songfics in my youth. It brought a tighter sense of community knowing you shared something in common with someone besides a love of smut and crackshipping. In my original fiction, I find myself inspired by a combination of music and movie scenes. I love a lot of lavish imagery and I love invoking some of my favorite film/art movements -- New Wave is a great example. Likewise, music conjures up certain moods. Maybe even internally creating a soundtrack. Stuff like that is fun and vital. And when I do music, in addition to looking for recs I like to share recs. That, to me, creates a sense of community with my readers. There's even the time honored tradition of using song lyrics as story titles. Everything is a damn songfic. Of course, I still do fanfic too (pretty regularly). Do I think songfics show immaturity? I think it depends. I think your writing is going to show maturity or not. It's possible song choice will date you whether intentional or nah. Most of my characters are my age if not older so I end up with a lot of 90s-70s music. Movies use period specific soundtracks for aesthetic, right? I like to do that too. Also, weirdly enough, with cars. More on that later. What's a songfic look like? That changes a lot. The purpose, like a movie soundtrack, is always to pick a song to reflect the mood of the story. But one could insert fitting lyrics in like poetry, epithet style, or even write about the song itself. In rare cases, you would get a story with absolutely no relation to the song at all. Back in the day, you could find whole lyric pages inside a single story even if it breaks up the flow of the narrative. Good authors credited their sources, but as it turns out song lyrics are a copyright issue so unless you just don't give a damn gone are the days of learning the words to your jam. If you only use a couple lines, is it still a true songfic? Sure. Now, I think we treat songfics like AMVs -- action laid on top of a song that happens to be playing in a background. I like to sneak in a secret boombox or an MP3 player when it's appropriate so lyrics aren't just hovering over the page. Sometimes I'll just rearrange a line from a verse as a title and hope someone savvy will pick up on it as an inside joke. Songfics are not original music, by the way. That's why they're kind of contentious. That, friends, is called a musical which is ALSO a dying art. Man, nothing makes me long for the good ol' days like seeing a paragraph of lyrics smack dab in the middle of a camp fire scene because songfic popularity seems so rooted to a particular timeline. I wanna bring it back but I'm thinking maybe it should stay there. Leave the memories alone, you know? |
Ia! If you've come this far, you're either looking for weird or you know you've found it... TRESPASSING
September 2018
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