#gbu Prof. Cheney you stuck with me for life

[lurkinglurkerwholurks]

Oh oh I can tell you how I handle this!

First, I must acknowledge that epithets are hard. When writing in a specific character's POV, you have to be careful about describing another character only using descriptors that they would use or it'll feel awkward and weird. (I don't generally think about my sister's height relative to mine and therefore wouldn't refer to her as "the tall one" or even "the taller one", for example, unless it's relevant in the moment. Talking? Not relevant. Her hitting her head on a ledge that I missed? Relevant. That wouldn't be true of someone I just met. If you're tall[er than me] I'm probably noticing it and don't have other ways to differentiate you from other strangers.)

Luckily, I don't usually have to resort to epithets in writing, because readers can generally follow pronouns and support way more proper name uses than you might expect! Pronouns by definition are placeholders for proper names. Where writing gets confusing is when it feels like the pronouns are floating free and unmatched. Reconnecting the proper noun and the pronoun is all you need to reset.

Within a paragraph, use a proper noun enough to be clear. Vague, I know, but it really is an art instead of a science and largely comes down to personal taste. Refining your personal taste can help a ton, and one way to do that is to look at works by people who you feel write these kinds of scenes clearly and cogently. I'm going to use my own writing as an example, just to make it easy for myself.

Structuring your writing so the subject is fairly consistent will help a ton, as will "checking in" with a proper noun when it feels like you've checked in on the other person more recently.

[alt: The muscles in Bruce’s face, Jason realized, were good at going completely still when surprised. That was useful. He had said intervened like Jason had done it on purpose, throwing himself into this nightmare to save Bruce instead of acting like a petulant, stomping child. He had just a moment to wonder if the look from Bruce was meant as gratitude or as an apology when Bruce turned his attention back to the others. “It should reverse in a few days.”]

In the snippet above, because I'm moving tightly between two he/him characters, I use their names just enough to stick into place who's being reference at any given point. If I had wanted to be extra careful, I could have changed "He had just a moment to wonder" to "Jason had just a moment to wonder."

Over multiple paragraphs, when you're sticking with one person, reconnecting (or what I mentally refer to as "checking in") can happen once a paragraph and really shouldn't be needed more than that.

[alt: He really didn’t have much of note to say. Dick narrated his way through the canned goods and the dry goods, making jokes about Wally’s Skittles stash and the cans of Spaghetti-Os Roy demanded be kept on hand but no one else ever touched. He talked about a TV show he had been watching and made a joke that elicited a hrmm from Bruce that would have been a laugh from anyone else. And the more he talked, the more he remembered little stories from his week that he had tucked away with a mental note to tell Bruce.

At last, though, Dick had finished his final story and let the call lapse into a pause that stretched into silence. He bit his bottom lip and fidgeted with the rolls of gauze, stacking them into pyramids outside the gutted medical kit. He could never tell with Bruce whether the silences were contented or an interrogation technique, the patience of an investigator applying pressure to a reluctant witness. In the end, it didn’t much matter.]

But really, truly, the TL;DR of it all is you don't need as many epithets as you think; as long as you don't go crazy with your subject and object switches and check in on your connections regularly, you can lean on pronouns way more than you think; and readers can handle way more uses of names than you might suspect.

Me writing a scene with two or more people of the same gender and trying not to get the readers confused, while also trying not to overuse the characters' names or epithets