How many characters do you name, and based on what?

[Ban]

This question is asked purely out of curiosity, as I don't believe there is a right or a wrong approach. It was prompted by an activity today, as I have sifted through my work-in-progress to decide which characters I ought to remove, unify or adapt. Part of this process entails the removal of names of those characters I deemed too inconsequential to burden my reader with. I based these decisions on a simple consideration. Namely, does the character feature in two or more chapters that aren't directly linked (for example, chapters 5 and 12, not 5 and 6), and are they physically present in those scenes? This culled family and friends of characters who otherwise had no role in the story, relegating them to "son of" or "wife of." I believe this cuts down on clutter, reducing the amount of mental juggling I ask from the audience. In regards to the second point, historical characters are of course partially excused, though even with them I prefer their presence to be physical in a sense (monuments, icons, armour, etc...). All in all, I wager I will be left with just over twenty named characters once this tale is complete (most being contemporary). So now I turn the question to you. What is your approach?

 

[pmmg]

Assigning names to characters does make them somewhat reusable, which can save on unnecessary description later, and many characters with names makes sense cause people know other people. I am pretty free to create characters when I think one would be there, and often they need names, such as a trusted advisor to the King. What are the chances everyone knows his name? Pretty high.

But, I also become aware that some characters are not adding anything and should not survive the rewrite, so in the rewrite, they may disappear, or get merged. I base this on the greater knowledge of the story I get form having finished the rough.

Many characters who get named; however, start to get attention, and in my tales, that is usually bad for them.... Many named characters start to incur difficulty and many dont make it. I am okay with that, cause if people get into fights, that is usually bad for those involved, and to have some that dont get to the end adds to the gravity of the tale.

Twenty is not as many as you might think. In my last book, I had 11 POV characters, and God only knows how many named ones. In book 4, I mean, there are five major courts involved, all with kings and queens, and sons and daughters, and advisors and guards and servants. A lot of names that can be floating around. And they are not even the main part of the tale.

I think the important thing is clarity. If they are going to be there, are they there with clarity, or do they just jumble and confuse. And how much effort is it to bring clarity vs just not having them? Something along those lines.

 

[Ban]

I don't consider twenty to be many at all, but I believe it is just the right amount for this story. I want this tale to be concise and personal, which benefits from fewer (but more frequently used) moving parts. Still, I do need enough people out and about to make the narrative work and the world feel alive. Twenty or so seems to suffice, but of course a sprawling court drama or an epic five book long fantasy would be diminished by a cast as small as mine. In addition to clarity I'd say the feel and setting of the story are important considerations as well. An urban fantasy set in a gargantuan metropolis would perhaps feel sparse if the cast was small, whereas a story about rugged folk braving the elements might feel crowded.

 

[Finchbearer]

This is something I’ve been very conscious of in my recent writing, and I have George RR Martin as my earworm telling me to name every single character, and so it’s just become habit to be at least making more conscious decisions when it comes to name / unnamed characters.

I think it also depends on scale and also POV writing. If we have a character who doesn’t learn someone’s name you are getting into omniscient storytelling which isn’t really my style. It’s also in my opinion good to be aware of unconscious bias, if that is possible, where you might end up keeping more female characters unnamed for example, or characters from a different territory / country unnamed, and asking yourself why the washerwoman or the stable boy or the fish seller don’t get names. If they’re relevant enough to make it into the story then I am asking myself what their role is to the plot. If they’re just background fodder then can I get rid of them altogether?

 

[pmmg]

I mean how often do you know the name of the person at the checkout counter? Some even wear name tags and i dont know their names.

 

[Finchbearer]

I mean how often do you know the name of the person at the checkout counter? Some even where name tags and i dont know their names.

I would be asking why you would write that as a character into a story. Do they ask a strange question? Do they wink at you? Etc

 

[Ban]

I would be asking why you would write that as a character into a story. Do they ask a strange question? Do they wink at you? Etc

Don't you have "characters" like a carriage driver, or a passerby, or a family member who is mentioned in passing in the sense of "I went to my cousin's last year", but who otherwise have no dialogue or importance to the story? Those are still characters, but they don't require a name.

 

[pmmg]

Cause they make sense to be there?


Bob ran out into the court where the men-at-arms were training.

"Hey," shouted one. "What are you going here, get out of here!"

Bob did not even look on him, he ran across the court and disappeared into a doorway on the other side.


I mean, i could name the character above, but why? He's a nobody.

 

[Finchbearer]

Don't you have "characters" like a carriage driver, or a passerby, or a family member who is mentioned in passing in the sense of "I went to my cousin's last year", but who otherwise have no dialogue or importance to the story? Those are still characters, but they don't require a name.

I don’t think I do now. I used to.

 

[Finchbearer]

Cause they make sense to be there?


Bob ran out into the court where the men-at-arms were training.

"Hey," shouted one. "What are you going here, get out of here!"

Bob did not even look on him, he ran across the court and disappeared into a doorway on the other side.


I mean, i could name the character above, but why? He's a nobody.

Bob sounds a bit skittish. I think the ‘nobody’ thing bothers me because I don’t like writing amorphous blobs of people. That in itself is superfluous to me, verging on shallow writing. Have you really explored the scene if you can’t really describe other people in it?

 

[Ban]

I don’t think I do now. I used to.

It's an interesting approach. A bit more extreme than what I do. At times I do find there is use in a nameless character, either to facilitate a named characterin a scene, or simply to showcase a part of the world. In a cyberpunk work I have on indefinite hold, I like to describe bystanders and what they wear and do. These people don't feature in the story to provide dialogue, but their presence gives me a chance to show the setting, its culture and its demographics. These could be made general by stating that "people" wear this and do that, but I like the specificity of saying something along the lines of: "A man walked by with a limp. One of his eyes was absent, whilst the other blinked blue; Ocular implant courtesy of Dalton-Höhn Limited. Its legal team had determined that a discount implant was the exact minimum amount of care necessary to prevent a lawsuit from being feasible in court."

I would agree that my penchant for writing omniscient makes such characters more natural. If I wrote first person, I would still include them I reckon, but in a lesser amount.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

All of them. You may not know their names, but we do. And we'll also pop up occasionally with either a previous character or a sneak peek at characters coming down the line. But they all have names, and they have to or else it's really easy to accidently call someone 'Bob,' and a book and a half later he's 'Jerry.'

It also helps to keep from having characters with close names popping up in the same scenes. I did that. I looked up one day, 3/4 of the way through drafting Beneath a Stone Sky, and I realized that today's chapter would feature a Bran and a Brian and boy was I in trouble. Whoops! Bran is now Colm, and the throwaway character in Act I named Colm got to be someone else.

The three of us have different processes, but for me, personally, it starts with a picture. I'm a highly visual person, I remember most things I read but be merciful when telling me your name in person. I can't keep spoken lists in my head. Never send me to the store. When I get the right picture the whole thing kind of takes on a life of its own. Who is this? Where are they? Where do they fit in? And that's when I go name hunting. Right now we have development going on both the Books of Binding and our next series which is an epic fantasy trilogy. On one hand, modern names do get used, but with all the immortals we have some folks with interesting histories and thoughts on the subject, so a name for Binding has to be accurate to period of time when they got this name, was it their first name, what does it mean? How much influence this has differs from character to character. I'm in position of a 'meaning' name, myself, and it has not only had no influence on me whatsoever, my parents didn't give it to me for that, either.

Sometimes, a name is just a name.

 

[pmmg]

I think you ask too much. The world is full of superfluous people. To not have them is to not capture the common experience of people in the world. To name every one who makes it on screen is a different type of shallow writing. To say, If I cant think of a reason to give them a name and make sure that the reader learns it, I may as well just remove them from the story, is to paint if different style of a world that shades the truth.

If they have names, and it comes up, I am sure it will be delivered.

 

[skip.knox]

It varies. I follow pretty much what you do, Ban. If it's a walk-on character or an indirect character, they won't usually get a name. If they're in more than one scene, or if they're in a scene where they have lines and directly affect events, then it's likely they will get a name.

All add some more nuance. I'm currently writing a series. So I've become aware that if I use a name in Book 1, I probably want to avoid that name in Book 5, if they are in fact two different characters. This tends to put a strain on my character lists. Sort of balancing that out is that my character group moves across multiple cultures, so what's a common name in Langobardia is not going to be the same up in Frisia. Elf names differ from dwarf names, and so on.

This extends, btw, to objects. If I start making up names for plants, animals, and so on, that now becomes a story-telling issue. Is the elf name for a walnut tree the same as the dwarf name for the same tree? Is it called the same in Albion as it is in Ungarn? It's easy to think, only if it matters, but the mattering part is up to me and it does tend to be on the the list entitled "Things That Distract Me From Writing".

 

[Penpilot]

For me, if it makes sense for a character's name to come up, then the name comes up. I don't concern myself with the number of names given out. I just try to make sure everything is clear about who characters are if they show up a second time.

In my WIP, I probably have well over a dozen or two named characters that show up only briefly and are never seen again. For example, I have a pawnshop owner that only shows up for one scene, but they're named because someone else in the scene knows them and calls them by name. In another scene a character is talking to the bartender in a tavern, and the bartender is interacting not only with the POV character, they're interacting with the patrons sitting at the bar. The patrons and the bartender know each other, so they call each other by name.

From my perspective, the world starts to feel really small when the only names you hear are for characters that play major roles in the story.

 

[Finchbearer]

I think you ask too much. The world is full of superfluous people. To not have them is to not capture the common experience of people in the world. To name every one who makes it on screen is a different type of shallow writing. To say, If I cant think of a reason to give them a name and make sure that the reader learns it, I may as well just remove them from the story, is to paint if different style of a world that shades the truth.

If they have names, and it comes up, I am sure it will be delivered.

I choose how to convey my fictional world, and that isn’t about asking too much. I’m not convinced that common experience is floating through life experiencing only vagueness. Plus, fiction is not real life - we can choose to say that there was a giant poplar that towered over a cluster of birch trees, and the crowd of men for the most part have names we can learn. Otherwise you have a main character running past trees and men - which one sounds more appealing to read? I’d rather read the first more descriptive version, cause that’s what we get to do with our writing.

 

[pmmg]

Well...what you would rather read, does not make another type of presentation shallow.

It could be, in fact the opposite, the world has become so full, there is not enough room to make sure everyones name makes it to the page.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

Plus, fiction is not real life -

Ooooh! Well, that makes some stuff make sense.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

Last time I counted, and it's been a while, we're currently standing at about 500 named characters. We keep everything in OneNote, which both makes us more organized and it also lets us do the development work together, in the same document, in real time. This is what it looks like, and its a monster file. If I tried to screenshot just the entire Character page from top to bottom, I'd be here all week.

 

[Prince of Spires]

There are a few reasons characters get names for me.

Main characters are obvious. If someone is in multiple chapters and interacts with the POV character, they get a name.

Recurring characters get named as well. I've got an emperor, who shows up in a few characters. He gets a name. Or that innkeeper in the protagonist's favorite inn who gets in a line here and tere. That sort of thing.

Then characters who are in a single chapter, but have more than a few lines of dialogue. I just find that it gets really akward to keep referring to a character multiple times without having a name. There are only so many ways in which you can adress "the tall guard with the bushy beard" before it gets weird. These characters can also evolve into recurring characters. That guard who had a discussion with the main character in chapter 2 can return again in chapter 6 when I need a guard to escort the main character into the palace. That sort of thing.

And lastly, there are the characters who get named because it's a natural thing to do. I have a character ask around for a bit of information at one point. He gets told "you need to talk to Hadassa. She was there when it happened." Hadassa only shows up for a brief discussion with the main character. However, it makes no sense here not to use her name.

This also goes for characters that don't show up at all. I've got a character complain about the local lord at some point. Everyone would know his name. So it makes sense to drop it in there, even though the reader never sees this lord.

fiction is not real life

indeed. Real life is a lot stranger...