The story I am currently working on is a murder mystery drama and will feature a "mysterious figure." The issue I'm running into is writing this character into the story without revealing the gender. Right now, I am just saying "the figure." Is their a better way to do it or should I just bite the bullet and reveal the gender?
I guess it depends on how much the person is mentioned, in what context and by what character. "The figure" doesn't sound too tempting to me, though.
Well this figure is supposed to be unknown to the characters in the story. And since it's a murder mystery, I can't reveal too much about them.
You know, it might get tedious just referring to a gender-neutral character all the time. Maybe, if it fits with your structure, have various people refer to The Figure as 'him' or 'her' throughout (usually, we assume our own gender as the default until we learn otherwise).
Perhaps you could refer to them by their profession / role ("the representative", "the bodyguard"), or something distinctive about them that other characters do notice ("the giant", "the limper"), etc?
You can use "them", "they" without mention of gender. I find "the figure" a bit unnatural, because it's apt to eventually turn to The Figure at some point, but it depends on how you've written the scenes and how often that character pops up. Then you can use other words to refer to them: person, opponent, companion, etc, depending on the situation. A thesaurus might help. If you were to meet somebody often, say, a person who commutes with you on a train, would't you give him some sort of a designation? If one of your characters is meeting that Figure often, maybe they'll also assign some sort of a name to them, such as The Figure, or The Man In The Black Coat, or even Blackie, or Joe. Journalists or police would often invent names like The Night Stalker for an unknown offender. A "mysterious figure" sounds a bit like satire, or something old-fashioned from the times of good ole Holmes. In any case, repetition is a killer, so it's good to mind that.
You could have the narrator just assume the figure is a man or a woman and go with that. Have'em be wrong for extra funsies. I like other folks' suggestions of giving the figure a temp name like Red Hat.
Just name them something neutral as a nickname. As others have already said, you could eigher do this by picking some sort of noticable trait or the role of the character. Otherwise you could just have the characters pick a pronoun or use 'they'.
When describing the mysterious character, use somber or dark adjectives to describe their figure (dull rounded shoulders, seemingly empty eyes, etc).
