Does anyone have a better idea for describing a person or an animal separate from a group? I'm doing my nanowrite month book and I've got a collection of creatures, and a collection of scientists. Some of them have been given names but not all of them hence there can be a lot of - One of the scientists stepped forward or one of the creatures howled in torment. I can't name them all it wouldn't be practical. Should I just ignore the one of syndrome?
Give them a characteristic. If it's first person narrative the narrator can give them nicknames. If not, then characterizations can be more formal. The spokesperson for the scientists ... the blonde scientist ... the only female scientist stepped forward. The injured creature... the fatally injured creature, the smallest of the creatures....
In this novel I just finished one side character looked like a testicle with limbs attached to him, but the MC didn't know his name so he called him Testicle. It cracked me up for pages on end (yes, my sense of humor is not very refined), Testicle did this and that. So yeah, you could come up with nicknames -- as Ginger suggested, actually.
