Why You Should Always Identify Characters Pronto

Note: I’m taking a break this week, so am posting this shortie instead of the usual post and podcast. Enjoy!

As the author of your story, you not only understand everything that’s going on, you’re also able to see behind the curtains. You understand even those intimate and intricate gears and switches that readers will never see. Possessing this inside knowledge is essential for crafting a deep and dimensional story. However, don’t lose sight of the gap between your own implicit knowledge and that of readers. Otherwise, you risk confusing them by assuming they know things they do not. This will destroy their suspension of disbelief and eventually risk the loss of their attention altogether.

For example, in a generational saga I once read, the author opened almost every scene with a pronoun. He apparently expected readers to instantly comprehend which character the pronoun referred to, so they could orientate themselves in the POV and the setting. But that isn’t quite the way it worked. Since the story featured half a dozen main characters and skipped through large chunks of time and space, readers were left grasping, skimming, and skipping ahead to figure out what was going and which character was being referenced

In your own story, you, as the author, may know exactly to which character each pronoun refers. But don’t make things unnecessarily difficult for readers for no good reason. Introducing characters by name—and even a brief description by way of reminder if necessary—is a simple courtesy that will ensure readers are never yanked from your narrative by the need to hunt down antecedents.

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