How to differentiate between two people with the same name in a story?
I am writing a story in which at some point two characters with the same name interact each other. I can't use their last name to differentiate because it's necessary for them to have no last name. There will also be no mention of the physical appearance of those characters, so, I can't use terms such as "Tall John" and "Short John". Only thing in the story is that one of the character will be in the first part of the story and disappear in the middle. Another character with the same name will take the center stage when the character disappears. Later they both meet and interact. So, to address each during that interaction, will it be right to say "New John" and "Old John" ?
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In a written medium, your readers can only identify your characters by what you give them. We cannot "see" your characters. So, if at any point in the story there's a John, and then again there's a John, they're the same John, unless you give us something else to distinguish the two Johns.
"Something else" might be a surname. It might be a nickname. It might be that one is called John, while the other is Johnny. It might be that one is called, for instance, Long John, all the time. That's important - he isn't just Long John in that one scene with the other John - Long John is his "name" all the time. You need to maintain the distinction between the two characters all the time, not just in the one scene they are together.
Calling a character "New John" because he appears later in the story is meta - it's a nickname related to a story feature, it doesn't make sense inside the story. It's something you can only do if the narrator is also very much a character. By using a meta element, you're drawing attention away from the story, and to the act of storytelling. Thus it only makes sense if that's the effect you're deliberately trying to achieve.
Otherwise you'd have to consider giving the two characters some sort of nickname or pet name or similar, that makes sense within the story. Then use that consistently as the character's name.
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Any time you get two or more people in a group (or a family) with the same name, they are almost immediately given a nickname or some extra appellation so everyone knows who is being talked about.
As an example which I used in a different answer:
Take an Italian neighborhood with five friends all named Joseph. One will go by Joey D (for his last name). The second is Joe the Hammer, because he's a carpenter. The third is called Joey Goombatz because he picked up the nickname in second grade and nobody has ever called him anything else. Number four is called Joe Kings after some ridiculous incident at the old Kings Plaza mall, and when the fifth Joseph moved into the neighborhood the guys heard his father calling him Jo-Jo, and it stuck.
In a family with five cousins/uncles/brothers named Joseph, you might have Pepe, Pippino, Zio Pippino, Pippo, and Giuseppe.
"John" in and of itself is so common a name that it's almost inevitable that one John will run into another, and they will have to use some distinguisher. I have known a Tall John and Short John, a Gimpy John to separate him from Tattooed John and Curly John (his hair), and John Jay.
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Try choosing something that reflects the attitude of the narrative voice and establish a difference as soon as it's needed. For example:
Slutty Susan took a long vape hit and Susi queen bee just rolled her eyes and shut the door. From then on, Susi-q kept the upper hand.
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John specifically has a wide array of cross-cultural appeal, originating from Hebrew and having a variant in just about every European and Near Easter language family. It's super easy to solve your problem:
They aren't spelled the same way
John in English has a varient spelling of Jon, most famously used by the owner of Garfield in the comic and various spin off media. One of your John's could be "Jon" and thus Jon and John are meeting. The name Jon is pronounced the same way in English as the name John.
You don't know Jack
Today, it's now it's own name, but back in the day, a common pet name for a John was "Jack". So your character of John Smith can prefer to be addressed as John, but your character of John Jones would prefer to go by "Jack" and would be fully written as John "Jack" Jones.
A John by any other Name
Especially true in American Culture, but it's not unheard of for foreign immigrants to go by Anglicized versions of their names, especially when trying to blend in. This is especially common if their name is indicative of a society that in the U.S. or other local might not be in vogue at the moment. For example, a Johan or Jean (German and French respectively) would perhaps go by John. In the case of the former, this happened often during both world wars. In the later's case, Jean is seen as feminine name in English, but is Masculine in French. In fact the French proncunciation sounds like John (JI-on) while the English pronunciation sounds like a type of pants (using a long e sound). The hero of Star Trek: TNG, Jean-Luc (pronounced John-Luke) was once mispronounced as John-luck by a character feigning ignorance of the correct pronunciation, as a person who never heard the name might do. Another character with a different name, Piort Rasputin, aka X-men's Colossus, would frequently go by Peter, an anglicized version of his name, especially during the years he was introduced, when his native Russia was in a cold war with the X-men's home nation of the United States and Colossus was firmly a hero to the Americans. The end of the cold war saw him return to using the name Piotr more frequently. These behaviors are common among immigrants, or second generation immigrants with more traditional names (your parents came to the U.S. gave you a goofy cultural name, and you want to identify with your All American friends). This is not as in vogue today, but there are still names that come up. For example the Spanish name Giancarlo is fairly common, and frequently shortened to Gian which is pronounce close to John as well (the full name is often pronounced John-Carlo, though I've also heard a Jean-Carlo pronunciation. I attribute the difference to accents from their native region.).
So it's entirely possible for two characters to go by "John" but spell it wildly different.
Here's Johnny
And finally, you can always refer to one as Johnny (usually the more funny of the two) and the other as John. Just make sure you always call John Smith "Johnny" and never call John Jones by that name.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47677. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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