Writing is 50% reading, and that reading should be broad and all-inclusive. Reading within a single genre or a narrow slice of stuff you’re naturally interested in might make you a bit of an expert in what’s selling in that genre, but it won’t make you a better writer—for that you need to challenge yourself and read stuff you don’t immediately connect with.
For example, I started reading Milkman by Anna Burns, which recently won the Booker Prize. It certainly wasn’t a book I’d naturally pick up and start reading in the bookstore, but sometimes it’s good to just read a book just because it won a prize. If you’ve heard Milkman, it might be because of it’s one gonzo literary stunt: There are no proper names in the whole book. It’s told from a first-person point-of-view without using anyone’s actual names. The first line is “The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died” and that’s how the rest of the book goes—characters are referred to by relation (Ma, Third Brother-in-Law, the Real Milkman, etc) but nobody and no place receives a real name.
And, frankly, it’s exhausting.
McSomebodying
Look, I’ve tried this myself. I’ll bet a lot of writers have—the unnamed protagonist, at least, smothered in mystery and soooo psychologically ripe. It’s probably something every writer at least flirts with, that Clint Eastwood archetype of the unnamed character. Burns takes it to an extreme, and it’s an effective trick, to be honest, though I found it to have diminishing returns. At first it was interesting and intriguing, but over time it got to be a little much trying to remember how many Brothers-in-Law there were, and trying to care about characters that appeared for a few pages, were never named, and then shuffled off into literary oblivion.
But, and this is the whole point, at least Burns had a purpose here. Her choice to eschew names was purposeful, and that’s the key. When my own unnamed protagonists failed it was usually because I made that choice for no particular reason, just because it felt cool in the moment, or because I’d neglected to name the character at first and didn’t feel like fixing it. Purpose is the key—if you choose to do something kind of gonzo like an unnamed character, have a reason before you start.
On the flip side, writing a story without naming any of the characters can be a great way to measure your ability to actually craft characters; if you don’t name them, you’re going to have to rely entirely on your ability to make your characters deep and detailed. When there are no names to differentiate who’s doing or saying what, it quickly becomes apparent if all of your characters are essentially the same flat empty space. This can be a great exercise to force you to think harder about how you create interesting people to populate your stories.
Of course, I haven’t won any Booker Prizes, so feel free to ignore me <pours himself a drink, stares sullenly out window).