Thoughts about writing: ordered lists of names

Since I started writing again a few months ago, after a half-decade break, I've been thinking on and off about aspects of the writing process, and what it is that makes writing fun. And, well, there are lots of things that make writing fun!

One thing I've really been enjoying is the intellectual stimulation of it. Writing fiction is sort of like solving a giant, multi-layered puzzle. There's the puzzle of how to make the overarching plot work. The puzzle of how to make each character's individual journey make sense. The challenge of keeping track of who knows what (and when), including the reader.

And then there's a bunch of fine-grained detail puzzles: such as how to avoid using the word "said" so often that it becomes jarring, while also not going into distracting contortions to avoid it. (One of my semi-pet peeves as a reader is when an author has a long dialog between two characters and, in order to avoid too much "A said, B said" repetition, the author just gives us the speech, with no narration. Which is fine unless the back-and-forth exchange lasts long enough that I lose track of who's saying what, and have to go back to the start of the dialog and start counting quotation marks. This happens to me even when reading professionally published fiction. Maybe other people aren't as bad at keeping track of who's talking as I am?)

Anyway, a fine-grained detail that I've been thinking about in my recent writing is how to handle the ordering of a list of names. This falls under "things that are fun about writing" because it's a decision that has to be made, and puzzling through decisions about writing is, like I said, fun.

The list-of-names issue comes up whenever either a character or the narration need to identify several characters by name, at once. So maybe the narration says "Spike and Xander got in the elevator". But would it be better to say "Xander and Spike got in the elevator"? A decision must be made!

I'm thinking about this a lot right now because I'm writing a series of fics which are built around a trio: Mac, Vic and Li Ann. Or Li Ann, Vic and Mac? Or Vic, Li Ann and Mac?

I'm a mathematician, so I can tell you with confidence: there are only two ways to order a list of two names, but there are six ways to order a list of three names.

So every time the three agents all must be referred to (if it's a moment when it makes sense to say their names, rather than simply "the three agents"), I have to decide what order to put them in.

If it's another character referring to them, then I think about how that character thinks about them, and how well they know each of them. In real life, I've noticed, folks have a tendency to put the person they're most familiar with first on the list. So you might refer to a couple as "Susan and Trish" if you've known Susan since forever and you met Trish through her; but Trish's brother calls them "Trish and Susan."

In a recent story, I had an original character who got to know Li Ann, Mac and Vic in that order, so he tended to refer to them in that order. Except, at a certain point in the story, he was spending a lot of time with Mac, so then he started thinking of them as Mac, Li Ann and Vic. A reader probably (hopefully?) wouldn't stop to notice that or think about it, but hopefully it provides a subtle clue about the development of the relationships between the characters.

But then there's another thing to keep in mind too, which is how each ordering flows. I would argue that in most contexts, "Spike and Xander" is a better order than "Xander and Spike", because of the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. "Spike and Xander" is a nice, neat trochaic dimeter, and it flows very naturally in spoken English. "Xander and Spike," stressed-unstressed-unstressed-stressed, slams into a wall at the end. (Though of course that's just looking at it in isolation; depending on the surrounding sentence, it could turn out to be perfectly fine!)

For my three secret agents, I really don't like putting Li Ann's name first, because I find the resulting pattern of unstressed-stressed-stressed-unstressed-stressed very stumbly. So in the above-mentioned case of the character who got to know Li Ann first, the ordering-by-rhythm came into conflict with ordering-by-familiarity. That's what really brought this whole issue to the front of my mind. And in that case, I decided that ordering-by-familiarity was more important, because of the characterization implications.

So in conclusion ... thinking deeply about things and making decisions about writing is fun! Gosh, I missed this.