Which usually comes first? The title or the plot of the fic?
I can name the number of times I’ve come up with a title first on one hand. *pauses* Actually.... Three times, Splicing (a DoctorxQuantum Leap crossover), Mockingbird (ML, except I haven’t...written much of it yet), and Down the Rabbit Hole (if you count that when I didn’t have to come up with the title myself).
This is why a lot of my titles are terrible; I’m at the point where I want to post a thing, but I need a title for that thing in order to post it outside of tumblr--and, since I started my masterpost, to keep track of it on tumblr. It’s also why, in my earlier fics especially, the titles were words/phrases used either a lot or in a key place in the fic--because I’d written either all of it or most of it before I’d decided what to call it. Mirrored is the first fic I’d posted before finishing it. (Now I’m bad and go chapter by chapter.)
Most of my stories start with a few idea paragraphs or some lines of dialogue or a partial scene. I might not decide upon a title until five seconds before I post it, when I absolutely need one. (By this point, I’ve probably been looking in a thesaurus for words that mean certain concepts/whatever else I’m using in my fic if no words/phrases from said fic jump out to me.) I am terrible at titles. I mean, take my DPxML crossover. I’ve got it under Le Fantôme on my fic masterpost because I need it under something, but the document it’s in is still just DPxML. And I haven’t cross-posted Being Watched yet because it’s currently just listed under the prompt I was given, and I’d like it to have a (slightly) better title when I put it up on FF/AO3 (although I’ll probably leave it as Being Watched on here since it’s been that for so long). Heck, I didn’t title The Trouble with Ghosts until I had actually made my fic masterpost on here and was forced to title it something besides ‘DP Lancer fic’. So...yeah. Plot. Definitely plot. Almost always plot.