Noun Confusion with Background Characters

[Ankari]

Greetings all,

I'm stumbling upon a problem that comes up in my WIP quite often. I often find myself with numerous background characters interacting with the various MCs. This causes excessive noun confusion whenever I use the pronouns "he" or "she" or any variation of those words.

I've read authors such as Steven Erickson who will describe one or two features of each background character then turn that feature into a pronoun. Example would be:

"The thug on the left bore a scar from the temple to his chin. Scar swung his battered sword at Arthur."

So Scar has become the pronoun. Do you guys favor this method or do you have any other advice?

Thanks.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

This may be elementary and therefore not suit what you're looking for but you could try to mix in action tags where you feel there is pronoun confusion.

For example, instead of saying:

"Don't even think about drawing your sword," he said.

You could write:

Lucian stepped forward. His eyes gleamed over his long hook-like nose, giving him a predatory look. "Don't even think about drawing your sword."

Now that's just off the top of my head so it's an imperfect example but you get the gist. I like these sorts of dialogue tags because they are also a good way to give description while showing & not telling.

There are some writers that don't use dialogue tags at all. Often when there starts to be pronoun confusion you can solve this by using pronouns for one character and use no tags for others talking. If there are more than two talking though, I'd recommend using action tags like the above sprinkled in for clarity & effect.

Hope that helps.

 

[Ankari]

I use the action tags as you describe. The problem is with newly introduced background characters. The brigands attacking the MC who is a knight. While we may know the knight's name, we don't know the brigands. So showing what each three brigand is doing may be confusing because there is little information to go by besides the "brigand" tag.

The above stated example is almost exactly the problem I"m facing. The only difference is that the MC is not a knight and there is another background character involved.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

I think I know what you're getting at but it's hard to help specifically without seeing a snippet of the dialogue.

 

[Ankari]

Its not dialogue, its action sequences. Here is a snippet:

A kick landed against Danal’s bruised ribs. A punch found his kidney. He dove away and tucked into a roll. As he stood up, he saw both men rush him with glinting knives in hand.

“Don’t do it.” Danal stepped away from the two thugs, keeping out of reach of the knives.

“What happened to the hero?” Asked the shorter of the two in a hoarse voice.

Danal hesitated in recognition. The thug was called Raspy for the voice given to him after receiving a wound to his throat. Danal kept both thugs in sight as he circled away. “This will end bad.”

The two thugs laughed. The unknown man leapt to Danal’s left as Raspy circled his right. They both swung in unison, Raspy low and the other high. Danal stepped into the high strike and raised his arm. The blade cut Danal’s forearm but he ignored the pain. He reach across his body and secured the thug’s arm with his free hand. He then drove his head into the unknown face. Bones cracked and blood welled against Danal’s forehead.

Danal grabbed the bloodied man by the throat and shoved, following after the stumbling man to clear space from Raspy. A blade slithered across Danal’s ribcage and back. He moved his grip from the thug’s throat to the arm with the knife. With both hands Danal pulled the knife past his shoulder then wrenched the arm as he stepped behind. Using the attacker as a barrier, Danal heaved upward and kicked the man behind the knee. The arm popped and crunched as the arm separated from the thug’s shoulder at an awkward angle. Danal grabbed the falling knife from the shrieking assailant.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

Ok. So first off it reads fine. You might want to find a few other words for "thug" to mix in though.

Other than that, you're describing a fight scene blow by blow. Thats okay for visual media but in the written form its usually not as good.There is a market for that but it's never been my preference.

These are the basic principles I follow for a fight sequence:
1) Keep it relatively short unless there are 2 very skilled combatants squaring off
2) Use a high level of clarity, very concrete descriptors
3) Adopt one POV character's outlook throughout the fight and follow it exclusively

When writing fight scenes try to work the advantages that the written word has over visual media. What can an author do that TV & movies can't?
1) get into a character's thoughts, emotions, & senses from their POV 2) manipulation of pacing, meaning you can slow things down or speed them up without affecting the continuity of the fight sequence 3) no special effects budget to worry about.

I think the blow by blow fight scene is where the problems lies.....

 

[Ankari]

I'll have to think on that. These fight scenes are used to display the MC's brutal nature. He is a product of the streets and has developed a decisiveness that is lacking in most people. The scene is much longer that what you read. This only shows the death of 1 of the two thugs (Raspy being the next).

And you pointed out an issue I'm facing, the usage of the word "thug." That is exactly the problem I described. Should I have given a couple feature descriptions to the two other unknown thugs and use their feature as a pronoun?

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

You could try feature descriptions but that might come off sounding gimmicky.

My advice is to try and rewrite a scene by describing Donal's thoughts, emotions, and senses during the combat. Then only discuss major "moves" or actions in the combat sequence. See if you like it better. You might be surprised how quickly you can get his ruthless nature across. It may even make him seem more ruthless because you're in his head more as a reader.

It's not easy to do this well but it certainly will give your writing a higher level of show and less tell. Otherwise, doing the blow by blow of "He raised his arm.... This person kicked.... That thug blocked, it comes off sounding like a list and can get monotonous quickly.

 

[Ankari]

I think I will post this scene in the Showcase. I would appreciate it if you, and everyone else, judged it in its entirety. I am not afraid of heavy criticism, so please lay it on me. In fact, this scene has been heavily revised from feedback on Danal's intense brutality. I hope you'll give it a read.

 

[Chilari]

Going back to the original question about making unnamed characters distinct within a group: it's a tricky one, certainly. I guess you have to consider how you would think of random members of public in the street. Imagine you're sitting in a cafe and outside there's a minor car crash and various people - the drivers of the cars involved, maybe a passenger of two, a few by-standers, maybe a parking warden etc. How would you think about them and describe them if you were to later make a statement ot police? If any have brightly coloured clothes or clothes that stand out, like a Metallica t-shirt, for example, you might describe them like that; facial hair where only one person involved has it; hair colour; height; build etc - "The guy with the red shirt pushed the short guy with the moustache, then the fat woman swore at the blonde woman in pink."

That's how your character would think too. I wouldn't personally give the characters stand-in names - Red, Moustache, etc - because in the heat of the moment you certianly don't think like that, and after the fact you probably wouldn't either. But using descriptors like "the tall man" and "the bearded thug" would work. I personally wouldn't use a character's voice as their descriptor, unless they have an unusual accent, do a lot of talking and have features in common with other characters involved such that you'd have to describe multiple physical features if you didn't have a voice aspect.

If there are two of them and one is considerably taller than the other, I'd just go with "the taller man" and "the shorter man" initially then drop the "-er" after that. Putting too much description into the action part would slow the pace down, so I'd take the hit on the repetitiveness of using the same descriptors repeatedly for each character unless the point of view character has enough time before the action starts to examine the other people involved long enough that you could put in two or three descriptors - "There were three of them. The one in the middle was tall and thin, with a close-shaven head and leather armour. The one on the left was a little shorter, with bare muscled shoulders, a crooked nose that looked like it had been recently broken and dark hair scraped back in a ponytail. The one on the right was rounder than his companions, but better dressed, with a neatly trimmed beard, small dark eyes and a feathered cap." This passage would allow you to use terms like the tall one, the thin one, and the bald one for the first guy alone.

 

[Lawfire]

Personally, I enjoy a well written fight scene, as long as the story/novel is not flooded with them. Like any other scene, if it advances the story it is worth including, in my opinion.


I agree that using a short description works better than turning a descriptor into a proper name, and Chilari laid it out very well, here:

If there are two of them and one is considerably taller than the other, I'd just go with "the taller man" and "the shorter man" initially then drop the "-er" after that. Putting too much description into the action part would slow the pace down, so I'd take the hit on the repetitiveness of using the same descriptors repeatedly for each character unless the point of view character has enough time before the action starts to examine the other people involved long enough that you could put in two or three descriptors - "There were three of them. The one in the middle was tall and thin, with a close-shaven head and leather armour. The one on the left was a little shorter, with bare muscled shoulders, a crooked nose that looked like it had been recently broken and dark hair scraped back in a ponytail. The one on the right was rounder than his companions, but better dressed, with a neatly trimmed beard, small dark eyes and a feathered cap." This passage would allow you to use terms like the tall one, the thin one, and the bald one for the first guy alone.

 

[coolstoneman]

I agree that it can be handy to use a descriptor, but not necessarily using it as a name. What works best for me is, I limit how much "jumping around" occurs. It could be tricky in a fight scene, for sure, but if you can focus on each baddie at a time, and don't jump around to the others too much, you could make it work well.

 

[Caged Maiden]

I think this goes back to our discussion of surnames, actually. There are things to be said about human nature, and one of those things is that we are simple creatures with simple minds when it comes to describing and differentiating one thing from another.

Here's some links on comments I made regarding naming things:

http://mythicscribes.com/forums/world-building/3697-translation-names.html

http://mythicscribes.com/forums/writing-questions/2798-how-important-surnames.html


People notice things like hair color, skin color, height, build. But they also secondarily notice features. Now I wouldn't necessarily notice eye color or something small like that, but if someone smelled bad or they walked with a limp or had a scar on their face or smiled with rotting or missing teeth...

Simple is often best, but unique scores bonus points in my book!

Hope some of that helps.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

One other thing to keep in mind is that prose is not a movie. You don't need to describe a fight as if you're giving stage directions for a play or a film. Yes, it still should be a micro-story (beginning, middle, end), but it's not necessarily important to thoroughly describe every motion of every person in the fight. As long as we understand how the protagonist is doing--he's winning! ooh, he took a hit! oh no, he's doomed! no, wait, he won! yay!--it's fine.