I'm not much enamoured of rules in writing and will from time to time vent my spleen on the subject here. You encounter so many... never use adverbs... never do this, never do that. They seem to me entirely interior invocations, ideas restricted to writers and writers alone which never percolate into the consciousness of the people who matter most, readers.

We have odd notions sometimes. Take, for instance, the habit of being at a literary festival and propping your current book in front of you as you speak. Sometimes that happens. Sometimes people who do it are viewed as the grasping spawn of Satan trying to steal sales from everyone else.

Curious to know how others see this I've asked people in the audience which they'd prefer -- authors with their books or authors without. To a man and woman they always say 'with books' because they can look at the titles while people are speaking and think... 'Oh, that's what the person who created that looks like'. But most places seem to frown on books on the podium anyway so I never even take a book along these days.

Oh well. I digress. Let's talk about another rule you'll meet from time to time. It's to do with sex. Should you treat female characters differently to male ones when it comes to describing them in the third person? Do you automatically refer to male characters by their surnames and female ones by their first names. Example...
<blockquote>Costa crossed the room and opened the filing cabinet. Teresa followed him.</blockquote>
<!--more-->

Believe it or not there are people who think that writing a sentence like that is sexist. The reasoning I can see. Why should men and women be treated differently? Isn't it condescending? Akin to referring to grown women as 'girls'? Or, as pop songs invariably do, 'babe', a word I've never actually heard anyone use in that context in real life?

I wish there were an easy answer but as far as I'm concerned there isn't. The honest response is... it depends. Yes, it would be entirely possible to write a book using these conventions that is highly condescending to the story's female characters. But I also think you can slip between first and second names over gender with good reason. In fact I hope I do that myself. My character Teresa Lupo is referred to as Teresa mostly. Costa is usually Costa, though at times he's Nic too. What's the difference? What's going on here?

It all comes down to point of view. I try to have a very well-established single character point of view in my work. Technically this is known as '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_limited" target="_blank">third person limited narrative</a>'. In every scene I want the reader to feel they're sitting on the shoulder of one particular character, hearing their thoughts, seeing through their eyes. This is quite unlike the '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_person_limited_omniscient" target="_blank">third person omniscient</a>' style in which scenes are viewed from the perspective of multiple characters or some remote, godlike viewer. In the limited style the reader becomes to some extent the person through whom the action takes place. If you do that the question of names comes down to how your character views the people around him, not the distanced, impartial perspective of a separate third party.

Take Falcone. He's the boss, a police inspector, a cold, diffident individual. He likes Nic and Peroni. They're his friends. But when he's wearing his work hat they're his employees. He thinks of them by their second names. So in a scene in which the point of view is his they will be referred to in the third person by their surnames because that scene is viewed from Falcone's perspective.

How does he deal with Teresa? She's not an employee. She's a friend and a colleague. She's a woman too and Falcone, being a gentleman and somewhat old-fashioned, wouldn’t think of her by her surname. She's either Doctor Lupo or Teresa. Usually the latter.

The same method works for Costa and Peroni. When it's their point of view she's Teresa <em>because that is how they think of her. </em> That seems to me the best excuse for using surnames for male characters and first names for female ones. If the characters themselves think of people that way wouldn't it be artificial to insist on some kind of forced equality by referring to everyone by their last name?

It gets even more complicated when the POV is Teresa's. She's a bright, amiable individual who either likes people or loathes them. The loathed ones she thinks of by their surnames. Falcone and Costa she thinks of as Leo and Nic, which is how they're usually referenced in scenes where the POV is hers (in later books anyway -- it took me a while to work all this out). One more complication: Peroni is her partner but she first met him when he was just another cop, called Peroni by everyone. So even though they now live together she still thinks of him as Peroni in the third person (though calls him Gianni to his face).

Make sense? Maybe not. But it makes sense to me. If you try to write a rule to cover this logic I think you'd fail. But the real test is: does it work in terms of the book? Does the reader feel, in each scene, he or she is sitting on the shoulder of the POV character and viewing what's happening through their eyes, not as some distanced, anonymous observer? Most importantly of all does this allow the book to be read without prompting those 'hang on?' moments that disturb the rhythm and force your audience to ponder unnaturally over some stylistic device?

I think that would happen if I referred to Teresa as Lupo throughout. It just doesn't sound right in the context of my work and its insistence on a strong individual point of view for each scene.

If I were writing in the third person omniscient mode it would be different. Perhaps I'll try that one day. But for now this seems to work. That's my rationale anyway. What's yours?