A concept that many authors overlook, but is never the less, very important, is the naming of characters. Now I don't mean this in a superficial manner: it doesn't matter very much whether your protagonist is named Jack, Henry, John or Bob (or Alice, or Jenny or Jane). This isn't what I mean by naming them, and as the title suggest, I want to talk about naming your characters twice.
Dialogue tags get very boring very fast if your character only has one name:
"Let’s go to the restaurant," Harry Said
"Sure," Said Ron
"What should we order?" Harry asked.
"I don't know," Said Ron
In this instance, and this is only a snippet of dialogue (that I made up), I am already getting fairly tired of hearing about Potter and Weasley: but that is exactly why they have names associated with them other than their first names. Later names include: the Boy Who Lived and the Chosen one for Harry, but even the fact that Snape refers to the children primarily by last names is an indication of a need for variety in dialogue tags on J.K. Rowling's part. It's an important necessity for creating variety, but it’s also important for adding depth to your narrative. The names a character has give us a quick indication of who they are and what we can expect of them, and explaining these nicknames helps develop characters that normally stand further to the outskirts of the narrative arc. My favourite author for nicknames is R.R. Martin: Greatjohn Umber, Jon 'The Bastard' Snow, and especially the Black Cloaks; known as crows, and each with a nickname: Sam 'Slayer' Tarly, the most cowardly of the crows and Giant a black cloak with a mean temper and short stature. My absolute favourite? Dolorous Ed, who reminds me unquenchably of Marvin, the Paranoid Android.
So: try it for yourself. Name your characters twice, and see if it doesn't spice up their personality, and your dialogue tags. Take my word for it, or the word of these examples I've come up with off the top of my head:
Neo/The Chosen One/Mr. Anderson
Voldemorte, Tom Marvolo Riddle
Snape/The Half Blood Prince
Tyrion/The Dwarf/The Hand
Frodo Baggins/The Ring Bearer
Aragorn/Strider/The Son of Arathorn
Roland/The Last Gunslinger
Moby Dick/The White Whale
It doesn't have to be complex, it just has to be different.
Sounds good to me, though I feel that when first introducing characters (and for a little while afterward), just one name per character is best so readers can grasp who is who. I've read a lot of stories where every character is being referred to by two or three names, and it's still the first five pages! =P
ReplyDelete- Cholisose
That is a danger, but I feel that if characters are properly introduced, then it shouldn't be a problem, even early on in the story: it really makes a difference whether the novel is filled with characters and side characters, or whether the introduction is more simplistic, or protagonist-driven. I do agree that this rule can work against you, but by the mid-section of a book, or even a few paragraphs in to a short story, it seems reasonable to vary the dialogue tags and develop the personality of the characters by attaching alternate names to important individuals.
ReplyDelete