: Characters with no names I've got a few short stories going, and I've foregone naming any of my characters. It started because I just didn't have any good names in my head and I was going
I've got a few short stories going, and I've foregone naming any of my characters. It started because I just didn't have any good names in my head and I was going to take care of it later, but now I'm considering leaving them all nameless. It's worked well for the first four stories, but I have between ten and twelve stories in mind for this collection, and I am wondering if I should just continue without naming anyone. Most of my stories have between two and four characters, and so far I've been able to get away with referring to them by one or two traits. For instance,
The man in the pink shirt
The woman in the Claims Department
The second boyfriend
I realize that these names are kind of generic, but it works. So far.
I would like to know if anyone has any feedback about the relative merits of an entire collection of stories (or at least about 10) without named characters.
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@Berumen699
I am young author writing a fantasy series, and I can say that I’ve DEFINITELY run into the same problem. For the characters in my world, their name needs to be more than something I just choose. For example, the elves in my story get their elements in other languages for names.
Zerua, sky elf, name means sky.
Lleaud, moon elf, name means moon.
Rana, sun elf, name means sun.
For my other characters however (humans, dwarfs, giants, dragons... etc.) Their names took a lot longer. For them, especially the dwarfs and giants, I developed their entire culture and city-state first. Then, based on their culture and their amount of intelligence and their character, personality, home life, friends, pretty much everything I know about them, I think for hours of their perfect name.
For human names, I scroll through hundreds of names online until I find one that fits the character’s personality perfectly. If the name is less then perfect for the character, I don’t even give it a second glance.
I have a feeling you don’t need to do all this for a few short stories, but for the other people viewing this question it might be helpful.
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@Samaraweera193
It can be simply a tool an author will use to keep the character autonymous. The character can be an "everyman." The experience of the character is a universal exoerience and therefore can be you or me or anyone......
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@Turnbaugh521
One thing i haven't seen on this site, and a main reason that most of the examples posted used this technique, is to add character without having to explain it.
For example, if you had "the mechanic' as a character, your mind automatically sees him or her as down-to-earth, black stained hands, straightforward thinker or something of the like. Or "the librarian", plain-clothed quiet woman with glasses. This technique isn't because the character is unimportant.
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@Shanna875
So just to be clear, you have named them. If you refer to him by it often enough (which may just be one or twice, depending on the context), that is their name. You just haven't giving them a proper name. This an important distinction that points to the fact that it probably doesn't matter. Like anything, it can be hard to pinpoint exactly which elements can turn your readers off, but if your naming scheme is that item, you probably have other problems as well.
It's mostly about how you handle it. If the only recognizable characteristic of "the man in the pink shirt" is the color of this clothing, you have a bigger problem. His name could be Bill Smith or Walla Walla Washington, he still won't grab the reader's attention.
Here are some very memorable characters with no "names":
The Doctor from Doctor Who
The cigarette smoking man from X-files
Everyone in Twelve Angry Men
The Time Traveller from The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
The Man in the Yellow Hat from Curious George
The Second Mrs. de Winter aka the narrator from Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
And the crown prince:
The Man with No Name from A Fistful of Dollars
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@Deb2945533
It adds a little difficulty to reading and thus a little chance to screwing up.
Although, especially in first-person stories it's a very common and quite nice literary tool to leave the protagonist both nameless and devoid of most physical traits that are not essential to the plot. This makes immersion easier: every reader can imagine themselves in place of the protagonist and fit in just fine. (and it's easier with 1st person perspective, "I" in narration is unambiguous.)
Still, make sure to give your characters easy to remember (and distinct! Avoid names with identical two first letters on somewhat similar characters!) whenever lack of names is confusing. If seven people in a room discuss, you'll have a hard time making the scene not suck without using at least a few names.
Too many names are bad. If a name appears once or twice per whole story it's poor style - it's much better to give the character some very memorable traits (not pink shirt, but rather a glass eye and chipped front tooth), if they are to reappear seven chapters apart, when the reader would long forget the name (and even more so the pink shirt). Do NOT depend on the reader remembering given name. If a character who is not very memorable returns, give a brief synopsis on when they were seen last, a reminder of where they are recurring from.
Episodic characters may be quite featureless and very generic - if you take time to give a precise description, you focus the reader's attention, they will try to remember the character, and will be pissed at you for wasted effort if the character never reappears.
In the end, the merits are either easier immersion in case of 1st person protagonist, or leaving the characters more impersonal, more distant and harder to relate with (e.g. in Grimm tales). Still, the "nameless character" is correctly executed if the reader asked about the character's name after reading the whole story goes "It's... oh wait, it wasn't mentioned even once, was it?" Essentially, if the lack of name becomes too apparent, you're doing it wrong.
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@Annie587
Without having read your stories, it's hard to say. There are lots of things one could do in a story that if done well can be clever, innovative, and effective, but if done poorly can come across as a gimmick, lame, and tiresome. In general I'd avoid doing something unusual just for the sake of doing something unusual. But as I say, if you do it well, it can be way cool.
Why do you want to not give the characters names? If you have a specific purpose, like you want to give the idea that the people around them don't know or care who they are, or you want to emphaisze their role over their personal identity, etc, this could be effective. If you're avoiding names to avoid preconceptions that a name might give, like you want to avoid giving the character a national identity or be vague about whether this person is male or female, maybe. But if you're just doing it because you think it's a clever gimmick, I think that would be hard to pull off for ten stories without it just becoming annoying to the reader.
If a character has a title or maybe some other handy "identification tag", this would be little different from a name in practice. I mean like, if you call a character "the mayor", "the sergeant", "the prisoner", etc., the reader might not even notice that you never give the character a name.
You could always use descriptive terms like those you mention, but I would think this could quickly sound like an affectation or a gimmick. If a character only appears briefly and is thus only referred to two or three times, this might again pass pretty much unnoticed. This is especially true if the character would be largely anonymous. Like, I know you said none of the characters in these stories have names, but if you had two or three main characters with names, and then you mention they go to a store and "the clerk" did this or that and then "the manager" said this, readers would probably take this as routine: we usually don't know or care about the names of store personnel, so calling a store clerk by name might be odder than just calling him "the clerk".
A long description could get tedious. If you call a character "the tall bearded man with the snakeskin boots", using that phrase over and over could be tiresome.
I'd be careful about having different descriptions of the same person. If here you call him "the accountant" and there you call him "the tall man", the reader may have trouble grasping that this is the same person. I recall a book I read recently where there was a character who was routinely called by name, but every now and then -- like once a chapter -- the author would suddenly refer to him as "the redhead". The first time he did this I was totally confused, as he had never before mentioned the color of the character's hair. I had to re-read a couple of paragraphs to figure out who he was talking about. Then when he did it again some time later, I knew who he was talking about, but it was distracting.
If you find yourself giving convoluted descriptions, like, "And then the second man -- not the man who had arrived in the bus that is, the other man -- said ...", I think you definitely need to back up and rethink.
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@Debbie451
I found that when I was reading a collection of Grimm's fairytales — just translated, not the bowdlerized Disney versions — a whole bunch of them have nameless characters. The King, The Queen, The Prince; the baker's daughter, the tailor's apprentice. Puss in Boots is the only character with a name in his story; the rest are the miller's son, the king, his daughter, and the ogre. (The Marquis is a title which Puss invents.) And all those have lasted for hundreds of years.
As long as the reader can keep the characters straight, I say go for it.
ETA I forgot that Larry Niven's Kzin race don't have names at birth; they have to earn them.
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