: Re: Is there any limit on how long a story can progress without the reader knowing the name of the character introduced so far? So far, I've written about 10,000 words or so and have yet to

@Heady158

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There may be a good reason to do this. But in general I'd say, don't.

We normally identify people by their names. Sometimes we use a title or capsule description, like "the mayor" or "Sally's brother", if we don't know the person's name or if the description is important or is how the person is addressed. Referring to a person regularly without using a name or title is just ... odd.

It's perfectly good and valid to do something odd in a story. But only if the point is to highlight that it is odd. If your hero has amnesia and doesn't know his own name, or if the point is that he is living in total isolation and so there is no one to address him by name, not mentioning his name could certainly highlight this. I recall reading a story many years ago -- right now I don't recall anything about it but this one sentence -- where a man is stranded somewhere for many years, and when he is finally found someone calls him by name, and the writer says, "He slowly realized that this was his name. It had been so long since he had heard it."

But without a good dramatic reason, if you're just doing it because you think it's cool to be unconventional or you haven't needed it so far or something, I wouldn't.

It would be especially jarring to the reader if this character is just "I" and "me" for half the story and then suddenly others refer to him as "Mr Miller" or whatever. If done wrong, the reader might be asking, "Miller? Who's that? Who's this new character who has been introduced and where did he come from?"

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