Avoid overusing character names?

Hey guys, can anyone help me to get out of the habit of using my character's names so much?! My main character is called Evita and I swear I use her name about 4 or 5 times in a single page. What can I use instead? Any tips on how to avoid this?

Thanks in advance!

4 or 5 times isn't all that many. Personally I use my MC's name 8 or 9 times per page. The rest of the time I simply say 'he did this, he said that' But even that can become overused. What to do then is characterize. Say things like 'The little girl, the short brunette, the fiery woman'. Hope this helps.

You're not. The name should appear once per paragraph (if she is mentioned at all) or more often if you have another character of the same gender and the paragraph switches focus between the two of them. Avoiding the name by substituting epithets like "the red-haired woman" gets annoying very fast.

What to do then is characterize. Say things like 'The little girl, the short brunette, the fiery woman'. Hope this helps.

This is sometimes good and sometimes dangerous - there were a number of aspects of The Cleric Quintet that I enjoyed, but if the Token Evil Teammate got referred to as 'the angular man' one more time I was going to start crying blood.

In my case, if someone's got an easy reference, I'll use it as well (the queen, the general, the mime) but if there are only two characters in a scene and they're both soldiers, they're either [name] or their appropriate pronoun. I'd only default to a literal description like 'the little girl' or 'the burnt man' if the character was a total mystery to everyone present and they had no idea what else to call them.

There's nothing wrong with using the character's names. It should show up a lot. In fact, I find it's a lot less confusing than not using a character's name. When you need to replace it with something, use a pronoun.

I think just using the character's names and 'he' and 'she' is fine. Personally, I find it really annoying when writers refer to characters as stuff like "the brunette" or "the tall man" or whatever. The only time that's acceptable is if we don't actually know the character's name yet. But otherwise, I think just calling by their name is absolutely fine.

My characters usually have one, and just one, synonym to switch to when I don't want to overuse their names. Other paraphrases can be used at specific times, to emphasise some situations (I usually don't refer to Jébert as "the heir" but the title does come back a few times over the novel, when it sounds relevant).
So Sey is "the mirror-crosser", Iolanthe is "the baroness".
And in most cases, using their names is just fine.

Thanks for all of the comments! It's great to hear all the different opinions :) I'll stick with using the name for now then, unless theres any other suggestions...?

The thing is, you definitely notice their names popping up a lot, but most readers won't. Using characterizations can get old really fast as somebody else said, especially if you use way too many for one person. Usually the name and appropriate pronouns (assuming they are the only person or another character has a different pronoun) should suffice. I have a lot of female characters who identify with "she" so sometimes a character's name will show up 4-5 in a paragraph to keep things clear (which, in the end, is what the reader cares the most about in this case - clarity.)

While I mostly agree with the "don't use 'the insert-descriptor-here'" advice, I have to wonder at when it would be appropriate.

For me, that's almost the only time the characters are described; maybe what a character looks like isn't important enough to describe right from the start, but I kind of want to sprinkle that description in somewhere....
On the other hand, I'd try to limit that, anyway; it isn't like I need to say what somebody looks like every chapter he shows up in.

Character names is like the word "said." No reader ever complained about overuse, but nevertheless some writers feel they have to remove it and replace it with other things. You're solving a problem that doesn't exist. The thing to remember is that if you start writing "She buttoned the red-headed girl's coat" instead of "She buttoned Natalie's coat," then it'll feel like you're saying "Look! See how I didn't use Natalie's name?" It's way easier to overuse character descriptions than names.

When you're writing a scene, you're neccessarily either writing omniscient (which has not been in favour since Holmes stopped being "thriller" and started being "historical fiction") or filtering it through someone's eyes.

Using that as your starting point, look at someone in the room now. Are you looking at "Jane", or the "slightly-plump, yet ravishing red-haired buxom beauty with the green eyes and crooked smile"?

Right.

I ussually allow one, sometimes two uses per paragraph. I figure that after you have mentioned one person in a paragraph it's easy enough for the reader to tel who it is you are talking about in the rest of the paragraph.

I personally always get confused when characters are refered to by the way they look.
For example: Gavin is a mage, so I occaisonally wrote 'the mage' when I didn't want to use his name yet again. I had nothing like this for the Sparrow, so I had to write 'the Sparrow' all the time (with the 'the' because that's part of his name). I only had to do that though to clear up who does what or who says this and that.
I guess all's fair as long as you don't confuse (or annoy) your readers or use something awful to refer to your characters. Then again, I could be wrong. Beats me.

Referring to Steve the Wizard as "the gangly old man" to avoid using his name is indeed annoying, but in my humble opinion, alternating between "Steve" and "The Wizard" could be just as annoying. I think that if a character is important enough and familiar to the MC he/she should only be referred to as either by the name or a title but never anything more because it's just comes off as amateuristic (if that's a word, lol irony) and desperate.

Maybe there are some cases where it's ok (read: wouldn't annoy me), perhaps one being the girlfriend example used earlier in this thread. Perhaps whenever it doesn't have the word "The" before, it's ok and less annoying. So that would mean that to me it would be perfectly ok to write, when little Jim passes the salt to the wizard Steve: "Jim passed the salt to his mentor", where as "Jim passed the salt to the wizard" would be more annoying. Does any of this make sense or am I just being nit-picky?

This might help; it helped me. :)

http://fandom-grammar.livejournal.com/77093.html