: Re: How to deal with nameless characters? In the novel I'm planning the human characters that inhabit the world are all clones of each other. Man and woman. They aren't given names when born, instead

@Annie587

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If they have numbers, then the number is effectively a name. But human beings have a hard time remembering numbers. If your characters refer to each other as 1892463, 1984236, 3894361, and 4896324, the reader is going to have a hard time keeping track of them.

If it's hard to keep track in a story, that's probably because it would be hard to keep track in real life. Rather than ask, "How can I make this work in my story?", try asking, "How would this work in real life?" If your world was real, how would people refer to each other? If you can come up with something that would plausibly work in real life, it will probably work in the story.

I'd guess that in real life, people would give each other names of some sort. If not what we think of as names, they might call each other by job titles or relationships or physical descriptions. Just like we do today. ("Sarge", "Mom", "Shorty", etc.)

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