There was a start to an important discussion a few years ago at The Old Place
Switching between names and pronouns
Several people got some good thoughts in, prominent among them @Seven Crowns besides myself.
The topic bears revisitation and further discussion.
I was making the point, less explicitly than now, that using a character's name has several purposes for me. The first, obviously, is establishing him or her as a named character — though few things annoy me more than seeing every story begin with the name of the main character and an action verb. Howard Roark laughed. Okay, maybe it was new then. Or de rigueur. It's far more sophisticated IMO to begin with something else about the situation. And if beginning with a character, I'm immediately more engaged if they're at first an anonymous 'he' or 'she'. (I know there are groups that preach the exact opposite of what I'm saying, and well, they succeed in producing certain types of writers of mass-market fiction. So if that's your goal, maybe you shouldn't be listening to me.)
As evild4ve (I believe) pointed out over there, the choice is not merely between name and pronoun—its a choice among name, pronoun, and an alternate identifier like 'the old man'. I would add that the possibilities to bear in mind are first name, first-and-last name, honorific-plus-last-name, alternate identifier/descriptor, and pronoun. Each of these brings a different tone and often a different purpose to an instance of the name.
The second and third purposes for me to use or repeat a name, though I'm not sure in which order, are disambiguation and emphasis.
But once a character is named, I'm perfectly happy with repeating the name every page or every second page or so — UNLESS certain triggering circumstances come earlier. To me, if there's any science in name repetition, it resides in listing the circumstances requiring a repetition. It would seem that all through at least the last 50 years of the 1900s, everybody in the business knew the unwritten set of rules for name repetition. At least revered writers were remarkably consistent, and it's hard to know how much of that was their own knowledge and how much was their editors' influence. Hemingway struggled a bit with this early on, but he was writing in a different literary era than we do today, struggling in fact to create what was then the modern era. He made the stylistic choice to refer to Robert Jordan as Robert Jordan every damn time. It sort of adds to the primitive-mountain-living-among-partisans feeling, so it wasn't a bad decision, but Scott Fitzgerald was, I would say more at home with the stylistic implications in names.
The easiest way to learn the old established practice is to read masters of it. John Fowles is one. The Magus, although otherwise a heavy read for many, is a great place to see when and how he repeats a name versus using a pronoun or descriptor. (He's also a great place to learn dialogue.) Plus if you want to know where the postmodern literary era we're all part of came from, he and Lawrence Durrell are pretty much its trailblazers.
One trigger for repetition, the most obvious one, is the mention of another character of the same gender. Or sometimes not of the same gender. After that, it's obviously necessary to use Character A's name when you again refer to Character A. For one thing, 'he' or 'she' would naturally refer to the most recently named character of that gender. But it's more than that. Even if there were no ambiguity, it would feel flimsy or dismissive to use a pronoun.
Another use (more than a trigger) for repetition is similar to a section marker. I've seen writing that repeats a name like clockwork for the first mention in every new paragraph. That's way overboard, of course—clumsy, bizarre-sounding, heavy-handed, whatever you want to call it. But using a name is like a slightly fresh start on the subject, akin—many of my reference points for style in writing come from classical music — to referring briefly back to the A theme. Or consider it like another bang with a mallet on the wooden tent stake.
Another kind of emphasis is seen in something like "But Robert was nobody's fool" or "Robert Fisher wasn't having any of it." Attaching a little (or a lot) more formality to the name adds weight to the statement about the character.
For now, I'm going to break this here so that others can add their insights and refinements.
Switching between names and pronouns
Several people got some good thoughts in, prominent among them @Seven Crowns besides myself.
The topic bears revisitation and further discussion.
I was making the point, less explicitly than now, that using a character's name has several purposes for me. The first, obviously, is establishing him or her as a named character — though few things annoy me more than seeing every story begin with the name of the main character and an action verb. Howard Roark laughed. Okay, maybe it was new then. Or de rigueur. It's far more sophisticated IMO to begin with something else about the situation. And if beginning with a character, I'm immediately more engaged if they're at first an anonymous 'he' or 'she'. (I know there are groups that preach the exact opposite of what I'm saying, and well, they succeed in producing certain types of writers of mass-market fiction. So if that's your goal, maybe you shouldn't be listening to me.)
As evild4ve (I believe) pointed out over there, the choice is not merely between name and pronoun—its a choice among name, pronoun, and an alternate identifier like 'the old man'. I would add that the possibilities to bear in mind are first name, first-and-last name, honorific-plus-last-name, alternate identifier/descriptor, and pronoun. Each of these brings a different tone and often a different purpose to an instance of the name.
The second and third purposes for me to use or repeat a name, though I'm not sure in which order, are disambiguation and emphasis.
But once a character is named, I'm perfectly happy with repeating the name every page or every second page or so — UNLESS certain triggering circumstances come earlier. To me, if there's any science in name repetition, it resides in listing the circumstances requiring a repetition. It would seem that all through at least the last 50 years of the 1900s, everybody in the business knew the unwritten set of rules for name repetition. At least revered writers were remarkably consistent, and it's hard to know how much of that was their own knowledge and how much was their editors' influence. Hemingway struggled a bit with this early on, but he was writing in a different literary era than we do today, struggling in fact to create what was then the modern era. He made the stylistic choice to refer to Robert Jordan as Robert Jordan every damn time. It sort of adds to the primitive-mountain-living-among-partisans feeling, so it wasn't a bad decision, but Scott Fitzgerald was, I would say more at home with the stylistic implications in names.
The easiest way to learn the old established practice is to read masters of it. John Fowles is one. The Magus, although otherwise a heavy read for many, is a great place to see when and how he repeats a name versus using a pronoun or descriptor. (He's also a great place to learn dialogue.) Plus if you want to know where the postmodern literary era we're all part of came from, he and Lawrence Durrell are pretty much its trailblazers.
One trigger for repetition, the most obvious one, is the mention of another character of the same gender. Or sometimes not of the same gender. After that, it's obviously necessary to use Character A's name when you again refer to Character A. For one thing, 'he' or 'she' would naturally refer to the most recently named character of that gender. But it's more than that. Even if there were no ambiguity, it would feel flimsy or dismissive to use a pronoun.
Another use (more than a trigger) for repetition is similar to a section marker. I've seen writing that repeats a name like clockwork for the first mention in every new paragraph. That's way overboard, of course—clumsy, bizarre-sounding, heavy-handed, whatever you want to call it. But using a name is like a slightly fresh start on the subject, akin—many of my reference points for style in writing come from classical music — to referring briefly back to the A theme. Or consider it like another bang with a mallet on the wooden tent stake.
Another kind of emphasis is seen in something like "But Robert was nobody's fool" or "Robert Fisher wasn't having any of it." Attaching a little (or a lot) more formality to the name adds weight to the statement about the character.
For now, I'm going to break this here so that others can add their insights and refinements.
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