Shakespeare once famously asked if a rose by another other name would smell as sweet. My answer is no. If you just kept referring to the rose as a flower, people probably wouldn’t think quite as highly as it. 

This is a more tricky tip than some of the others. It has to do with naming. Not specifically your main character since that’s a whole other struggle and a half. No, this has to do with names for supporting characters. Your secondaries and tertiaries. The less important folks who get very little time on the page. Naturally, these people don’t have to be well rounded wholly defined entities. Not many people are going to think too much of the life and times of the apothecary who sells Romeo his poison. And not only is it not recommended but it certainly isn’t needed to make every individual that crosses the page a remarkable individual.

One of the sad truths of life is that there isn’t truly that much that makes any of us special. In the plays of other lives, most of us would counter ourselves lucky to be included in the nameless chorus. 

However, you probably should consider naming more characters than you currently are now. 

There’s no easy rule to follow here, naturally. Too many names in rapid succession can be confusing to the reader. A name, oftentimes, signals a person of enough import to be remembered. Otherwise they would be the unenviable apothecary. 

However, people are remarkably good at forgetting things that aren’t actually important. How many people can recall Benvolio’s name, afterall. And, at the end of the day, how many even care? For ease and clarity, you should heavily consider naming a character if they start having dialogue lines. The more lines they have, the more likely they should probably be named. I’ve gone through the horror of trying to read passages between a protagonist, Guard #1, Guard #2 and Captain of the Guard and it is not pleasant. Especially since a writer is apt to give them “temporary” names like “the tall one” and “the gruff one.”

Needing to read more than one line of dialogue from “the tall one” is probably a sure sign that you need to give a character a name. Course, this leads to another stumbling block where sometimes a writer may worry that using a name for a character which the source of the book’s point of view may not know would be jarring. And, certainly, it can. It’s a reasonable concern.

However, writers are basically gods and it’s pretty easy to contrive moments to blurt out a person’s name. Is it natural for the captain to name his two flunkies the moment he runs into the protagonist and their band of escapees? No but who cares? There’s probably flying dragons and sorcery in the world and your reader would rather a minor contrivance of a theatrical, “Stop them Bryce and Gertrude!” rather than meander through an awkward chapter of these names legged sentries arguing for several pages with your hero. 

Another point of consideration is whether the character is important to your protagonist. Maybe the tertiary individual is only in the story for a page or two but they happen to be the hero’s best friend. They could probably use a name. They are “important” in a character sense even if narratively they do little more than give the hero an encouraging pep talk once. 

Remember, no one’s ever complained about a character in a piece of work having a name. At least, I’ve never come across it. It would certainly be a new and strange complaint if they did. 

Finally, one last cheat is to simply use a character’s profession as a pseudo-name if they are basically there to fulfill the duties of their job and literally never show up again. I mean, I’m not about to fly over to the United Kingdom to lecture Shakespeare’s bones on whether the apothecary should really have been called Frank or not. 

Not that he’d care anyway.

So, when you’re writing supporting characters, especially small ones, asking yourself:

Does this character have more than a single line of dialogue? I should probably heavily consider giving them a name.

Does this character appear in multiple chapters/sections? I should probably heavily consider giving them a name.

Is this character very important to the protagonist? I should probably heavily consider giving them a name.