A Question about my writing strategy.

As with so many ideas, it's all in the execution.

My first instinct says that would be extremely hard to pull off effectively, but that doesn't mean it's not possible. I like to think outside the box too, so I think the idea itself is pretty neat. What point of view are you writing from? What you're talking about will be easier or harder depending on the point of view. For example, Bright Lights, Big City was written in 2nd person and the narrator is unnamed through the entire novel and it works. Not my favorite book or anything, but it definitely worked. Likewise, in first person you wouldn't necessarily have to refer to yourself or your description, so waiting for a while might feel more natural to a reader. Third person may be harder to pull off.

As I said, I think it's a daunting task for any writer, but if done effectively it could be pretty cool. If you try it out, you can always test drive your efforts here!

The only book that this brings to mind for me is Rebecca, which is of course in a completely different genre. I always took du Maurier's reason for that being to show how overshadowed the second Mrs de Winter was by the first, etc.

What I think might be quite interesting is to give the MC a name that could apply to either gender, and never specify whether they're a he or a she - or perhaps only at the end. But it could be tricky to do this without appearing awkward, and it might annoy some readers (I don't think it would annoy me personally - I'd find it interesting to work out afterwards how long it took me to spot, and whether I made an assumption of their gender early on).

I remember having an idea for a contemporary novel that would involve this general concept, being about a secret society of people trying to eradicate gender discrimination... kind of... but in my case I had no real plot to back it up. Anyway, I digress.

I don't think you need to worry about it if the reason is to allow the reader to envision themselves as the MC - I don't think this would hinder or help the reader either way; either they will or they won't identify with the MC, depending on their approach to reading.

Ultimately, I think it's worth a try - it wouldn't be too hard to change later if you decide it doesn't work, as it should involve cosmetic changes rather than affecting the plot. Hope that helps!

I'm going to take a quick guess and say you're writing in 1st person.


The reader doesn't watch the story through the character, they watch the character from the outside. So description isn't needed, but it shouldn't be held back from the reader. To not describe, is fine, the reader will make up their own picture, but it becomes increasingly hard to change their minds of the character's looks later on. All of this works on 3rd too. But 2nd person is the kicker, there's weird things come into play there.

For the name business, for 1st person, it's fine. If none of the characters they meet, nor the narrator doesn't speak directly to himself, his name will never be said. The reader doesn't care much about this in 1st person. One of my favorite authors has a book series, where the MC's name is never spoken, in fact, no one actually says her name, and it works fine.
For 3rd, it can be debilitating, unless done well, or with a title. My WIP #1's first chapters is done through a nameless character, and I had to shorten it to 400 words because of "the man" started almost each sentence.


And, as always, it's in the execution.

Cajun!

You are using main character and narrator as if they are one in the same, and often they are not, especially in an omniscient point of view. Narrators can be major or minor characters.

It really is all in the execution, but you want the reader to somehow identify with your main character, to be on their side. In your work in progress, how will you do this without a name? What is you purpose for not using a name?

Personally, for me I like names for the main characters. However, I've read novels where minor characters have not had a name, depending on their purpose in the story.

WillSauger said:

I'm going to take a quick guess and say you're writing in 1st person.

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Didn't see this post until after I composed my response. I didn't even think about it being written in first person.

I wrote a series of fantasy novellas with the MC unnamed. First person was the only way I could make it work. We don't normally think of ourselves by name, but there has to be some compelling reason that no one else uses their name. (In my case no one knows his real name and his history is a mystery, so the lack of name plays to that).

Even so, I think the novelty gets old after a while. I gave my guy some aliases so that conversations would be a little easier on the reader.

I would say this, what would you do if AW didn't exist? (And you couldn't get all this free advice?)

You'd prob. write the book the way you are currently writing it, right? (hehe, what a bad sentence that was!)

So do it.

I was at a writing conference this past weekend, and they had an "Idol"-style competition where the first page of submitted manuscripts were read out and a panel of literary agents would then say at what point they would have stopped reading (if at all.)

After about fifteen or so opening pages had been read, of which maybe five or six had nameless protagonists, the agents spent a few minutes grouching about how they wanted writers to just &%$!! put the character's name in there already.

In other words, this is a common tactic tried by writers, and it didn't go over well with the agents on that particular panel.

Names, you can get away with not using, if you have a good reason for it. But gender? I would get seriously annoyed if I read a book where I couldn't tell whether the MC was male or female. The mind makes assumptions based on what little evidence there is, but if you make the wrong assumption, there's a lot of annoyance when you find out you've been envisioning the character wrong the whole time. It would be like reading the Lord of the Rings, only to find out in the final chapter that Frodo is actually a girl hobbit. Puts a whole new spin on things, yes? But it would bother you greatly, because you've invested yourself in this novel, in building up an image of how you saw Frodo. And now suddenly everything you know is wrong! You'd feel duped, wouldn't you? I certainly would.

(Just my personal opinion, anyway.)

CajunWriter said:

Strategy
I need to know what your thoughts are about not giving my MC/narrator a name or description off the bat. Slowly I give little bits about the description but never do I give a name. It's not until chapter 7 do I mention, in conversation, that the MC is a "he". I'm thinking about changing that to go along with my strategy.



Reason
Epic fantasy genre. I would have guessed that the reader would be able to envision themselves as the MC in doing this.

What are your thoughts about reading something that's like this? Easily turned off?

Bad Idea?

TIA!

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You can do either, I suppose, but the part in bold is, imho, a flawed premise for pursuing either one. This isn't a pick-a-path, I assume, and you have a MC, not the reader. So, there's books like A Lower Deep where we never get the MC's name, and there's books where the first graph is a sketch right off the bat, and everything in between, but I do not believe it has anything to do with allowing the reader to insert themselves, and I'm not even sure how one would do this with any level of accuracy. Or why they'd want to--I may relate to a character, but I want to hear about their shitstorm, not be the guy with his feet to the fire

Third person? If so, I'm going to say it's next to impossible to pull off without it being cumbersome.

Even for first person, I probably wouldn't do it.

A while back, there was a big news story here about a couple who had chosen not to reveal the gender of their baby--not even to the grandparents!--because boys and girls are treated differently, and they wanted to minimize the impact of gender stereotyping on the child. Or something like that. The national newspaper put it this way: If you keep the sex of a child secret, you are making it the most important thing about that child, not the least.

Maybe not exactly the same, but I think what you are doing is drawing attention to your character's namelessness (and potentially genderless-ness if you decide not to use 'he'), not making the reader identify more strongly with the MC. In fact, it might create more distance. If I were reading a story in third person that constantly referred to "the man" or "the girl" or "the person"...it would feel detached, and would make it very difficult to discuss your book.

Also: readers will develop an image of the character in their minds, and so a physical description of the character should come sooner rather than later.

Never say never. But I'm going to say...probably not.

Corussa said:

The only book that this brings to mind for me is Rebecca, which is of course in a completely different genre. I always took du Maurier's reason for that being to show how overshadowed the second Mrs de Winter was by the first, etc.

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I'd always assumed it was just because it was first person, and the MC knew what she looked like, so she didn't need to go into detail on it to tell the story of her cold and withdrawn husband and crazy, hostile caretaker. That or she was the anti-Anita Blake--that bitch can't STOP telling us what she looks like.

WHY are you doing it, besides believing it would be a nifty technique? How does it make the story BETTER for the reader?

Reading is not a one-way street. Readers will fill in blanks, based on their own preferences and assumptions. So, if you don't give the reader any kind of image to go with the character (and a name and gender is at least something to start with), and assuming the reader doesn't toss the book aside in frustration/boredom, because you're making the reader create the story instead of creating it for the reader, then the reader's going to fill in the blanks. What's that reader going to do when, in chapter 7, it's revealed that this Amazon-sized female character the reader's been imagining and really bonding with is actually a puny little male? Throwing the book against the wall is the least negative of the likely reactions. Staking the book through its heart and then burning it -- and author's effigy and reputation by way of reviews -- is an equally likely reaction.

It's one thing to be vague about the details, to let the reader fill in the eye color and hair color, but to intentionally withhold the name and gender and some visual cue, is very, very, very seldom going to benefit the reading experience. It's fine to say that what's inside matters, but the fact is, we need something external too.

As an aside, if this is written in first person, the conventional wisdom is that a reader will absorb that like a role-playing adventure, putting herself into the "I." Personally, I doubt it. It's certainly not the way I absorb first person. If anything, the "I" pronoun is a constant reminder that the character/narrator is NOT me. In real life, we're used to hearing people say "I" when they're talking to us; that "I" is NOT me, and I know it. That "I" used by someone else is still "other." To the extent I'm going to conflate my own experiences with those of a narrator, it's more likely to happen with "she," because in real life, other people (authors) are talking about me, they're using "she." I'm much more likely to identify with "she" (or even "he") than with an "I" that's spoken/written by someone else.

On top of that, it's not entirely clear that readers insert themselves into the action. It's equally likely that readers are viewing the main character as their best friend, rather than as themselves. There's a lot of stuff we read about that we enjoy experiencing second-hand, but wouldn't really want to be experiencing it first-hand.

Personally, I wouldn't do it. But if you can make it work, feel free. Get some beta readers to see if it's annoying. You might want to tell them up front that that's what you're doing, though.

You shouldn't really have a nameless protagonist unless it relates to the story or theme of the book, AND you have the skills to carry it off. I don't think making the MC nameless/faceless helps the reader to identify with them, but rather makes it seem as though there's a hollow space in the centre of the story.

My MC is unnamed in the 1st ch of my novel, but that's because I wanted to initially show her from a stranger's point of view, and to make her mysterious. She gets called by her name pretty soon into the 2nd ch.

Vaulted said:

I don't think making the MC nameless/faceless helps the reader to identify with them, but rather makes it seem as though there's a hollow space in the centre of the story.

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I concur - I identify with well drawn, vivid characters, not because they have a name or not. Which works both ways - if your character is vivid enough it probably won't bother me (if done well enough), but it might - especially if I don't know whether they are male, female, alien, whatever. With nothing for my imagination to work on, I'd probably imagine them as some amorphous blob, blobbing about the story. Which wouldn't help with me identifying with them or inserting myself.

Thing is, the reason 'I want my reader to insert/identify' probably isn't a good reason to do this, because readers are so varied and what they identify with is personal, and you may find that the opposite happens - they can't identify with them at all (or don't want to be inserted into a blob ). It also feels gimmicky to me.

However if you had a good story reason to do it, then I think it could work.

An unnamed main character (coupled with a strong narrative voice) can work well in 1st person for story reasons. See Fight Club.

But I don't think it helps the reader relate to the character. I've only even seen that work in video games (and even then, I personally don't like the 'silent main character' thing -- I relate to chatty game characters much more).

In books, I relate to the character through their thoughts and decisions -- and since I hope your character is still making tricky decisions, I'll use that to form my opinions, not their name or gender.

CajunWriter said:

I need to know what your thoughts are about not giving my MC/narrator a name or description off the bat.

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You mean like those unknown books that start off with "Call me Ishmael?"

Jeff

I say try it out to see if it works or not. I have always said that there is never a bad idea if done correctly in a book.
thanks
the iron man

CajunWriter said:

Strategy
I need to know what your thoughts are about not giving my MC/narrator a name or description off the bat. Slowly I give little bits about the description but never do I give a name. It's not until chapter 7 do I mention, in conversation, that the MC is a "he". I'm thinking about changing that to go along with my strategy.



Reason
Epic fantasy genre. I would have guessed that the reader would be able to envision themselves as the MC in doing this.

What are your thoughts about reading something that's like this? Easily turned off?

Bad Idea?

TIA!

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Seriously bad idea.

Novels are about fictional people. They're not about us pretending to be a character.