Dialogues with Unnamed Characters

When writing dialogues between unnamed character, especially for abstract characters with no titles and lacking descriptions of any significance, how does one deal with portraying those characters in conversation without sounding distractive or redundant with generic naming, such as "Young Man," or "Tall Fellow," particularly when it comes to drawn-out conversations?

 

I’ve done this recently. A tech was having a conversation with a group of execs, but he didn’t know their names. I picked a feature of the person he was talking to, and used that like a proper noun. In this instance, the guy was the only person whose suit was grey. Once I had had the character observe this (to show it to the reader), I referred to that man as “Grey Suit” any time I needed to use his name. I always capitalised both words as though they were his actual name to make it clear I was using the phrase to refer to a person.

 

Agreed with @mashers. It's actually a pretty common technique. A defining attribute that easily distinguishes the person becomes a placeholder name.

Grey Suit
Blondie
Mom (maybe she's the only one dragging kids around)
Sophomore (You know the college sophomore look. College beard, backpack, tee shirt with some historical political figure like Che or Lenin, sandals, smells like patchouli or armpit or both)

Things like that.

 

Ditto and ditto. Mastering dialogue includes imbuing each speaker with a distinctive voice. I don't mean like a raspy or melodious vocal character, but aspects that come through in the wording and speech rhythm. The better you become at this, the less you must depend on dialogue tags and beats to identify who is speaking at any particular moment,

Just as important is knowing when to use dialogue, and when to paraphrase (indirect dialogue) or to skip dialogue entirely. Dialogue can richly convey character, mood, hidden agendas, and other subtleties that straight exposition does poorly. Make every dialogue exchange purposeful for these aspects. Don't use dialogue to fill space or to deliver explanations, unless you can find no better way to do so. Such dialogue tires the reader and the writer alike, and adds to "tag fatigue." The reader who has to count paragraphs to figure out who said what should not have to do so if the dialogue provides no insight beyond the literal content.

Try to avoid tricks like a signature habitual word choice. It's never as subtle as you intended, and stands out like a throbbing, inflamed thumb. Like, the person who, like, uses like several times in every sentence, quickly becomes like annoying rather than like distinctive. Yes, I'm exaggerating, but even a less obvious example comes across as amateurish,

 

Thanks for the input. I'll keep that in mind as I draft my story.

One of the items I'm trying to present within my story is the sense of uniformity and lack of identity or individualism within these characters. This can be quite problematic to deal with when you are referring to characters who share similar physique and speech patterns, and even more so when said voices are the only things present. Say you were to observe a SWAT team for example and had to distinguish between each voice that spoke through a black bag around your head. Describing the distinct voices themselves is easy, but going back and forth between them can be a daunting task.

 

I do it all the time in my real-world job. I'm an interpreter and translator for the USDOJ. Transcriptions of covert audio recordings, which I then have to translate into English, are a normal part of my job. When it's a video, it's easier to know who's speaking. When it's audio only, much harder. Still, in my mind, I create personas for the people, and to some extent I can place them physically by how close (loud) or far (faint) they sound. If I'm lucky enough to get a stereo recording, it's easier to do. In my head they become things like Chief, Nazal, Sexy, Stutters, Woman, High Pitched Woman, Possibly Gay, Country-Fried (yes, there's a "country" accent in my region of Spanish), etc., etc.

 

Perhaps try to hear in your head how the characters’ voices sound, and then use those descriptors for the characters. Terms like “husky”, “gravelly”, “rough” etc could differentiate the characters according to their vocal characteristics. I think it would be interesting to read a POV character who could hear the voices but not see the speakers under the circumstances you describe. As with physical characteristics, turn the vocal descriptions into proper nouns and use them as though they are the characters’ names.

 

Can only echo what others have said. It's the usual method; Fat Man, Skinny Guy, etc.

I can only assume from this you're writing in third-person, otherwise you'd make a point of not knowing who's doing the talking (providing you're the guy with the bag on his head)

 

I think that he meant that the voices could be distinguished from one another. (So instead of Grey Suit, you might have Smoker's Cough, Harvard Man, and so on.)

 

Ah, I get you. So in this scenario we're talking about audible identification of unnamed characters as opposed to visual identification of unnamed characters.