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

[Finchbearer]

Real life is indeed stranger than fiction.

It was more a response to pmmg saying ‘The world is full of superfluous people.’

In fiction we get to curate and create the readers viewpoint to any greater or lesser extent. In a city, unless there is a zombie apocalypse, we as the reader are going to assume there are other people there, but as writers we get to choose how much we describe that, and to what extent characters become characters at all.

 

[Karlin]

The waiter serving you a drink doesn't require a name. Though in real life I will likely ask him/her for their name. As usual, I can't helpp but mention some Chinese side to this:

Romance of the Three Kingdoms is acclaimed as one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature; it has a total of 800,000 words and nearly a thousand dramatic characters (mostly historical) in 120 chapters.[1] The novel is among the most beloved works of literature in East Asia,[2] and its literary influence in the region has been compared to that of the works of Shakespeare on English literature

The 1,000 characters might be easier to handle if you know Chinese...

 

[Ban]

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".

There is some worldbuilding potential for overlapping words in the sense of loanwords or doublets, but restricting specific words to specific (con-)languages seems to be the simplest approach. For my current work I only use one conlang, which finds its expression exclusively through place names and words that have been retained in the dialect these people speak. The conlang informing that dialect would in the real-world be deemed critically endangered, so it does not feature in the story as a fully-fledged thing. The few folks speaking it are simply described as speaking it, without the words themselves being shown.

Straying off-topic, I wonder in regards to "Ungarn" if that German name has become the common word for Hungary in your setting? I presume the Hungarians themselves still refer to their country as Magyarország, but names shift and are adopted in often strange patterns. The myriad names of Germany can attest to this.

 

[Ban]

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.

That's a fair approach. The concern regarding the amount of names started for me because I am trying to constrain the story and its world to something that is short, standalone, but re-readable. I feel that the more characters and plot-lines there are (especially unresolved), the more an audience might expect more of the world to be shown in future installments. For me, this tale should become something concise, but which can be read a second time to gain a new perspective on its relatively simply narrative. One way I hope to achieve this is by making each character that appears be in some greater or smaller capacity meaningful to the main characters, so that each of their brief appearances add to the experience. I think that the longer and more sprawling a story is, the less need there is for such a tight cast.

 

[Mad Swede]

Any character who interacts with one of my protagonists or one of my antagonists has a name. The name may not get mentioned in the story, but they have a name. This allows me to re-use these characters as well as giving the setting and the story a bit more depth. To me it is important, in that in real life everyone you meet has a name, a life and some sort of aims in life. You may not know them, but these things are what make them people - and people matter.

 

[JBCrowson]

I tend to come up with names for most characters, even if I don't use them in the text, as I find they make a searchable list easier.
My guide to using the name in the text for non central characters is roughly "if the POV character has need to use it, ask it or tell it to someone else then I'll put it in at the point that use / asking, telling happens."