Hatrack River Writers Workshop: Identifying same gender characters

This is topic Identifying same gender characters in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by Sara Genge (Member # 3468) on :

I have a problem every time I have to characters of the same gender interact in a scene since "him" or "her" only identify characters when the other person is of oppossite gender. If I say: "She kissed him", we all know "Susan kissed Rob" not the other way round.
How do you know who is doing what without repeating the characters' names a trillion times? This is becoming a handicap for me, to the point that I change characters' genders in a short story so as to be able to identify them with pronouns (and then, of course, the plot has to change)
Is there a trick I'm missing?

Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :

Mentioning a character's name often enough to keep it clear to the reader whom you mean is not wrong.

Some tricks you can try (if it really bugs you, though):

give the characters identifying traits, occupations, actions (the blonde, the doctor, smoking cigarette after cigarette) and refer to them when you refer to the character;

give the character more than one name (JRR Tolkien did this with Strider/Aragorn/Isildur's Heir/Elessar, Eowyn/The White Lady of Rohan/Shieldmaiden, Arwen/Evenstar, Elrond/Half-Elven, etc) and let the other character's choice in how they address each other be part of their own characterization (you have to be careful with this, though, because it can really confuse your readers);

give the character individual ways of speaking or moving or their own identifying concerns, and let those show which character is being referred to (doesn't use contractions, or says, "ya know" a lot; runs his hands through his hair or clears his throat continually; keeps bringing the conversation back to her single-minded concern or does things to show that's the only thing she's thinking about.

I hope this helps a little.

Posted by Survivor (Member # 213) on :

One little trick, assign a "speaker" character for each paragraph. Make that person the grammatical subject of any sentence that describes actions by either character. If a paragraph contains a line of dialog, then you should assign that character as speaker, otherwise just pick whoever has the most active role in that paragraph.

If you stick with that rule, the reader gets used to each paragraph being "about" a character assigned as the subject, and thus knows that the pronouns in the subject positions later in that paragraph are still referencing the active character. Use the names of inactive characters rather than pronouns, if none of them are the active character, using their names shouldn't be too burdensome.

Your chosen POV can have a pretty significant effect on this as well, and you don't need to give every character equal time as the active character. You also can start a new paragraph using the same active character without necessarily having to re-establish the pronoun reference. But once you're down to using the characters' names once or twice per paragraph, it's not really useful to cut back any further.

I'm okay with using alternate references, but you should use them selectively to add meaning. For instance, let's say Johan is a police officer, Mary's husband, and Greta's older brother. When Mary is the active character, Johan should probably be "her husband" or "Johan", not "the officer" or "Greta's brother". On the other hand, it might be that she is interacting with his role as a police officer or Greta's brother. Unusual, thus worth indicating.

Posted by BruceWayne1 (Member # 4604) on :

Sara, now you have him kissing him or is it her kissing her, because that would matter to me.

Posted by Sara Genge (Member # 3468) on :

Wow, that's a lot of helpfull advice. I just realized that this was bothering me more than I thought--another reason why I tend to choose 1st person or even 2nd person too often in order to distinguish the MC from everyone else.
BruceWayne1: sometimes even I don't know with my stories. But in this case, Rob is a man and Susan is a girl. So she's kissing him.