Blurred Line

The other day I was clicking around Duotrope's Digest in order to familiarize myself with a few new markets. The piece of writing advice I ignored the longest is something that appears in the submission guidelines of nearly every market - they tell you to read their magazine in order to get a taste of what they look for. Well, that seemed kind of labour intensive, so I never bothered with it much. Of course, as soon as I did start following that bit of advice, my stories seemed to fare a lot better in terms of acceptances and nice rejections. Anyway, I digress.

I was intrigued by one thing that I saw in one market's submission guidelines (can't remember which, for the life of me). It said something along the lines of "Please name your characters. If you don't, how can we be expected to care about them?". As some of you know, I have a propensity for writing in the first person. I also have a propensity for not naming my first person narrators. So, when I saw this, it raised my eyebrows.

It seems to me that, provided you're writing in first person, the lack of a name doesn't necessarily alienate the reader from the character. I can see how it might work if you're writing in third person, since you'd always have to refer to the character as "the man" or "the woman" or whatever. But, even then I'm pretty sure there are ways around that, if you have enough talent.

I think the problem is not really the lack of a name in itself, though. Perhaps some will disagree with me (and feel free to do so in the comments), but I think the fact that this market requires characters to be named indicates that they've received plenty of submissions where writers have extremely underdeveloped their unnamed characters. I suggest this because a lot of people will do anything they can do add suspense to a manuscript. And a good way to do this is to add a mysterious character to the mix. To achieve that, the writer might simply not tell the reader anything about the character (read: unnamed and underdeveloped). I'm stretching one particular example here to get my point across, but I think you get the gist of what I'm getting at.

It's not the lack of a name itself that makes a character hard for the reader to identify with, but the lack of a name that makes it easier for the writer not to give them a fully-realized personality (thus, reader can't identify, etc, etc, so on and so forth). Any other opinions?


Profile Editor. Writer. 9-5er. Lord of the Dance. Blurredline.com Apodis Publishing Fusion Fragment cterrill(at)blurredline.com Buy Goodbye, Darwin Amazon.com Amazon.ca Chapters.ca Barnes&Noble.com Read it free in PDF Format Buy Blurred Line Amazon.com Amazon.ca Chapters.ca Barnes&Noble.com Read it free in PDF Format The Short Stuff "Learning Magic From Mint" - published May 2007 in Atomjack "Between Eternities" - published October 2005 at Speculative.ca "Smoke and Mirrors" - published June 2005 in Byzarium Submissions Log Total Subs: 25 Acceptances: 3 Rejections: 17 Withdrawals: 3 Subs Out: 2 Quality Blogs Scalzi's Whatever Dave's Blogography Bookslut The Struggling Writer SF Signal the0phrastus Paperback Writer Scribe's Writing Desk Nathan Bransford Lyons Literary LLC The World in the Satin Bag Book In The Oven The Word Perhaps We Learned Something... Words, etc. Archives March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 Et Cetera Cavan @ Last.fm Cavan @ LibraryThing Feeds Atom Feed RSS Feed	Tuesday, June 13, 2006 - Naming Names The other day I was clicking around Duotrope's Digest in order to familiarize myself with a few new markets. The piece of writing advice I ignored the longest is something that appears in the submission guidelines of nearly every market - they tell you to read their magazine in order to get a taste of what they look for. Well, that seemed kind of labour intensive, so I never bothered with it much. Of course, as soon as I did start following that bit of advice, my stories seemed to fare a lot better in terms of acceptances and nice rejections. Anyway, I digress. I was intrigued by one thing that I saw in one market's submission guidelines (can't remember which, for the life of me). It said something along the lines of "Please name your characters. If you don't, how can we be expected to care about them?". As some of you know, I have a propensity for writing in the first person. I also have a propensity for not naming my first person narrators. So, when I saw this, it raised my eyebrows. It seems to me that, provided you're writing in first person, the lack of a name doesn't necessarily alienate the reader from the character. I can see how it might work if you're writing in third person, since you'd always have to refer to the character as "the man" or "the woman" or whatever. But, even then I'm pretty sure there are ways around that, if you have enough talent. I think the problem is not really the lack of a name in itself, though. Perhaps some will disagree with me (and feel free to do so in the comments), but I think the fact that this market requires characters to be named indicates that they've received plenty of submissions where writers have extremely underdeveloped their unnamed characters. I suggest this because a lot of people will do anything they can do add suspense to a manuscript. And a good way to do this is to add a mysterious character to the mix. To achieve that, the writer might simply not tell the reader anything about the character (read: unnamed and underdeveloped). I'm stretching one particular example here to get my point across, but I think you get the gist of what I'm getting at. It's not the lack of a name itself that makes a character hard for the reader to identify with, but the lack of a name that makes it easier for the writer not to give them a fully-realized personality (thus, reader can't identify, etc, etc, so on and so forth). Any other opinions? Cavan blogged at 4:45 PM \| 5 comments	Progress Zilch! 0/0 Listening A.J. Croce - "Maybe I'm Amazed" My Music Reading Bright Lights, Big City - Jay McInerney My Library Watching Black Book: B Sweet and Lowdown: C Breakfast on Pluto: B Wishlist Bridge of Sighs - Richard Russo Rachael Yamagata - Elephants...Teeth Sinking Into Heart