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anothershittywritingblog · 5 years ago

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tips for choosing a Chinese name for your OC when you don’t know Chinese

This is a meta for gifset trade with @purple-fury! Maybe you would like to trade something with me? You can PM me if so!

Choosing a Chinese name, if you don’t know a Chinese language, is difficult, but here’s a secret for you: choosing a Chinese name, when you do know a Chinese language, is also difficult. So, my tip #1 is: Relax. Did you know that Actual Chinese People choose shitty names all the dang time? It’s true!!! Just as you, doubtless, have come across people in your daily life in your native language that you think “God, your parents must have been on SOME SHIT when they named you”, the same is true about Chinese people, now and throughout history. If you choose a shitty name, it’s not the end of the world! Your character’s parents now canonically suck at choosing a name. There, we fixed it!

However. Just because you should not drive yourself to the brink of the grave fretting over choosing a Chinese name for a character, neither does that mean you shouldn’t care at all. Especially, tip #2, Never just pick some syllables that vaguely sound Chinese and call it a day. That shit is awful and tbh it’s as inaccurate and racist as saying “ching chong” to mimic the Chinese language. Examples: Cho Chang from Harry Potter, Tenten from Naruto, and most notorious of all, Fu Manchu and his daughter Fah lo Suee (how the F/UCK did he come up with that one).

So where do you begin then? Well, first you need to pick your character’s surname. This is actually not too difficult, because Chinese actually doesn’t have that many surnames in common use. One hundred surnames cover over eighty percent of China’s population, and in local areas especially, certain surnames within that one hundred are absurdly common, like one out of every ten people you meet is surnamed Wang, for example. Also, if you’re making an OC for an established media franchise, you may already have the surname based on who you want your character related to. Finally, if you’re writing an ethnically Chinese character who was born and raised outside of China, you might only want their surname to be Chinese, and give them a given name from the language/culture of their native country; that’s very very common.

If you don’t have a surname in mind, check out the Wikipedia page for the list of common Chinese surnames, roughly the top one hundred. If you’re not going to pick one of the top one hundred surnames, you should have a good reason why. Now you need to choose a romanization system. You’ll note that the Wikipedia list contains variant spellings. If your character is a Chinese-American (or other non-Chinese country) whose ancestors emigrated before the 1950s (or whose ancestors did not come from mainland China), their name will not be spelled according to pinyin. It might be spelled according to Wade-Giles romanization, or according to the name’s pronunciation in other Chinese languages, or according to what the name sounds like in the language of the country they immigrated to. (The latter is where you get spellings like Lee, Young, Woo, and Law.) A huge proportion of emigration especially came from southern China, where people spoke Cantonese, Min, Hakka, and other non-Mandarin languages.

So, for example, if you want to make a Chinese-Canadian character whose paternal source of their surname immigrated to Canada in the 20s, don’t give them the surname Xie, spelled that way, because #1 that spelling didn’t exist when their first generation ancestor left China and #2 their first generation ancestor was unlikely to have come from a part of China where Mandarin was spoken anyway (although still could have! that’s up to you). Instead, name them Tse, Tze, Sia, Chia, or Hsieh.

If you’re working with a character who lives in, or who left or is descended from people who left mainland China in the 1960s or later; or if you’re working with a historical or mythological setting, then you are going to want to use the pinyin romanization. The reason I say that you should use pinyin for historical or mythological settings is because pinyin is now the official or de facto romanization system for international standards in academia, the United Nations, etc. So if you’re writing a story with characters from ancient China, or medieval China, use pinyin, even though not only pinyin, but the Mandarin pronunciations themselves didn’t exist back then. Just… just accept this. This is one of those quirks of having a non-alphabetic language.

(Here’s an “exceptions” paragraph: there are various well known Chinese names that are typically, even now, transliterated in a non-standard way: Confucius, Mencius, the Yangtze River, Sun Yat-sen, etc. Go ahead and use these if you want. And if you really consciously want to make a Cantonese or Hakka or whatever setting, more power to you, but in that case you better be far beyond needing this tutorial and I don’t know why you’re here. Get. Scoot!)

One last point about names that use the ü with the umlaut over it. The umlaut ü is actually pretty critical for the meaning because wherever the ü appears, the consonant preceding it also can be used with u: lu/lü, nu/nü, etc. However, de facto, lots of individual people, media franchises, etc, simply drop the umlaut and write u instead when writing a name in English, such as “Lu Bu” in the Dynasty Warriors franchise in English (it should be written Lü Bu). And to be fair, since tones are also typically dropped in Latin script and are just as critical to the meaning and pronunciation of the original, dropping the umlaut probably doesn’t make much difference. This is kind of a choice you have to make for yourself. Maybe you even want to play with it! Maybe everybody thinks your character’s surname is pronounced “loo as in loo roll” but SURPRISE MOFO it’s actually lü! You could Do Something with that. Also, in contexts where people want to distinguish between u and ü when typing but don’t have easy access to a keyboard method of making the ü, the typical shorthand is the letter v.

Alright! So you have your surname and you know how you want it spelled using the Latin alphabet. Great! What next?

Alright, so, now we get to the hard part: choosing the given name. No, don’t cry, I know baby I know. We can do this. I believe in you.

Here are some premises we’re going to be operating on, and I’m not entirely sure why I made this a numbered list:

Chinese people, generally, love their kids. (Obviously, like in every culture, there are some awful exceptions, and I’ll give one specific example of this later on.)

As part of loving their kids, they want to give them a Good name.

So what makes a name a Good name??? Well, in Chinese culture, the cultural values (which have changed over time) have tended to prioritize things like: education; clan and family; health and beauty; religious devotions of various religions (Buddhism, Taoism, folk religions, Christianity, other); philosophical beliefs (Buddhism, Confucianism, etc) (see also education); refinement and culture (see also education); moral rectitude; and of course many other things as the individual personally finds important. You’ll notice that education is a big one. If you can’t decide on where to start, something related to education, intelligence, wisdom, knowledge, etc, is a bet that can’t go wrong.

Unlike in English speaking cultures (and I’m going to limit myself to English because we’re writing English and good God look at how long this post is already), there is no canon of “names” in Chinese like there has traditionally been in English. No John, Mary, Susan, Jacob, Maxine, William, and other words that are names and only names and which, historically at least, almost everyone was named. Instead, in Chinese culture, you can basically choose any character you want. You can choose one character, or two characters. (More than two characters? No one can live at that speed. Seriously, do not give your character a given name with more than two characters. If you need this tutorial, you don’t know enough to try it.) Congratulations, it is now a name!!

But what this means is that Chinese names aggressively Mean Something in a way that most English names don’t. You know nature names like Rose and Pearl, and Puritan names like Wrestling, Makepeace, Prudence, Silence, Zeal, and Unity? I mean, yeah, you can technically look up that the name Mary comes from a etymological root meaning bitter, but Mary doesn’t mean bitter in the way that Silence means, well, silence. Chinese names are much much more like the latter, because even though there are some characters that are more common as names than as words, the meaning of the name is still far more upfront than English names.

So the meaning of the name is generally a much more direct expression of those Good Values mentioned before. But it gets more complicated!

Being too direct has, across many eras of Chinese history, been considered crude; the very opposite of the education you’re valuing in the first place. Therefore, rather than the Puritan slap you in the face approach where you just name your kid VIRTUE!, Chinese have typically favoured instead more indirect, related words about these virtues and values, or poetic allusions to same. What might seem like a very blunt, concrete name, such as Guan Yu’s “yu” (which means feather), is actually a poetic, referential name to all the things that feathers evoke: flight, freedom, intellectual broadmindness, protection…

So when you’re choosing a name, you start from the value you want to express, then see where looking up related words in a dictionary gets you until you find something that sounds “like a name”; you can also try researching Chinese art symbolism to get more concrete names. Then, here’s my favourite trick, try combining your fake name with several of the most common surnames: 王，李，陈. And Google that shit. If you find Actual Human Beings with that name: congratulations, at least if you did f/uck up, somebody else out there f/ucked up first and stuck a Human Being with it, so you’re still doing better than they are. High five!

You’re going to stick with the same romanization system (or lack thereof) as you’ve used for the surname. In the interests of time, I’m going to focus on pinyin only.

First let’s take a look at some real and actual Chinese names and talk about what they mean, why they might have been chosen, and also some fictional OC names that I’ve come up with that riff off of these actual Chinese names. And then we’ll go over some resources and also some pitfalls. Hopefully you can learn by example! Fun!!!

Let’s start with two great historical strategists: Zhuge Liang and Zhou Yu, and the names I picked for some (fictional) sons of theirs. Then I will be talking about Sun Shangxiang and Guan Yinping, two historical-legendary women of the same era, and what I named their fictional daughters. And finally I’ll be talking about historical Chinese pirate Gan Ning and what I named his fictional wife and fictional daughter. Uh, this could be considered spoilers for my novel Clouds and Rain and associated one-shots in that universe, so you probably want to go and read that work… and its prequels… and leave lots of comments and kudos first and then come back. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

(I’m just kidding you don’t need to know a thing about my work to find this useful.)

Keep reading

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anothershittywritingblog · 5 years ago

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Mollymauk Tealeaf & Original Character(s), Mollymauk Tealeaf, Original Characters, Mollymauk Tealeaf Lives, Genderfluid Mollymauk Tealeaf, Amnesiac Mollymauk Tealeaf, Mollymauk Tealeaf Comes Back

Summary

Spring is a time of new beginnings. It only makes sense his heart would start beating again now. (A Molly lives fic, I’m very late to the party I know).

#fanfic #fanfiction #critical role fan fiction #critical role fic #critical role fanfiction #critical role #critical role campaign 2 #critical role episode 26 #critical role mollymauk #cr mollymauk #cr2 #cr2e26 #mollymauk tealeaf #mollymauk the tiefling

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anothershittywritingblog · 5 years ago

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I love that half the characters I create would probably beat the shit out of me upon meeting me. Adds some spice to how I write them.

#writeblr

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anothershittywritingblog · 6 years ago

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@ankcoolosaurus Thanks so much for your comment! It means a lot that you like my work since it’s outside your usual preferences :)! I’m glad you love my ocs (I worked hard on them lol)!

#response #hey. this is fantastic #:D

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anothershittywritingblog · 6 years ago

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Mollymauk Tealeaf & Original Character(s), Mollymauk Tealeaf, Original Characters, Mollymauk Tealeaf Lives, Genderfluid Mollymauk Tealeaf, Amnesiac Mollymauk Tealeaf, Mollymauk Tealeaf Comes Back

Summary

Spring is a time of new beginnings. It only makes sense his heart would start beating again now. (A Molly lives fic, I'm very late to the party I know).

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anothershittywritingblog · 6 years ago

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Let’s talk titles

who here hates naming their goddamn chapters? I mean, isn’t it enough to have written the damn thing?

Honestly? I really like picking out titles. Because I have a method. Let’s go through a couple of ways to make picking out a title easier. If you happen to have a method not included (because I’m only doing three), add it in your reblog!

Keep reading

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anothershittywritingblog · 6 years ago

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Never mow the same grass twice — How to improve faster as a writer

One of the most important writing lessons I ever learned came, surprisingly, from my college trumpet instructor.

“Michael,” he’d say with a heavy sigh, pulling off his glasses and rubbing the lenses with the bottom of his shirt. “You know I hate to mow the same grass twice.”

It was a phrase he used a lot, in band and private lessons, whenever someone made a mistake he’d already told them to correct. Because in his mind, once he’d identified a mistake in your performance, you needed to do everything you could to keep it from happening again, for two reasons.

First, because as he said, he doesn’t like to mow the same grass twice. And second (and more importantly), because if you let yourself repeat a mistake, that mistake will start to become a habit.

A bad habit.

And the more you let yourself repeat that habit, the more deeply ingrained it becomes, making it increasingly difficult to fix and slowing your progress as a musician (or artist, or writer). So his suggestion was this: Identify what needs to change, and firmly commit to fixing it now.

Confession Time

So. I was a very average trumpet player. My instructor and I had a great rapport, but he had to tell me to mow the same grass twice, three times, and more often than he ever would have liked, because I just wasn’t focused or passionate enough about trumpet to fully commit to his advice.

But I was focused and passionate enough about fiction to commit to his advice when it came to writing. So I applied his mindset in my creative writing workshops, particularly when I started my MFA.

And I tell you what, everybody. It worked wonders — helping me improve enough in that first year alone to win our MFA program’s top fiction prize and to earn a teaching assistantship.

3 Steps to Quickly Improve Your Writing

With my trumpet instructor’s advice in mind, I put a 3-step process on loop throughout my time in the MFA:

Share a short story with your fellow writers. (A workshop is great, but online writing friends work too.)

Sift through everyone’s feedback to find one high-priority “bad habit” in your writing that they seem to be honing in on.

When you sit down to write your next story, commit to breaking that habit at any cost, even if it means making other mistakes because of it. (New mistakes are better than old mistakes.)

This is How it Went for Me

The first short story I shared in my MFA workshop had a clear issue: the narrator was passive and underdeveloped. One of my classmates called him a “window character,” someone through whom we could observe the other, more interesting characters who actually drove the plot. The rest of the workshop agreed, and looking back at some of my past stories, I realized that passive narrators had become a deeply ingrained habit of mine.

So the next time I wrote a story, I strictly committed myself to writing a more active narrator.

The Result?

A moderately active narrator. Not perfect, but better than I’d done in a long time. It was progress — me chipping away at the bad habit.

The next story I wrote showed much more progress. It had a highly active narrator, and so did the story after that. And that’s when a new, better habit formed: writing active narrators without even thinking about it. And that let me shift my focus to improve upon something else (such as making all my narrator’s actions stem from their core emotional struggle). And something new again after that (using more figurative language, loosening up my writing voice, etc.).

And that’s how you can improve, too. The goal, again, is to use peer feedback to identify habits in your writing you don’t like, and then to mentally commit to replacing them with habits you want, one by one.

It’s a slightly different way to approach feedback. We tend to primarily use feedback as a way to help us improve an individual story — but it’s also a fantastic opportunity to improve your future first drafts.

You’ll be surprised how quickly your writing improves when you do this.

The key, though, is to commit to tackling just one major habit at a time. Why? Because writing is hard, friends, and fiction is a complex tapestry of various techniques, all coming together at once. That means your attention is always inevitably split while writing, so if you try to fix multiple habits at once, you’ll likely spread your attention too thin to succeed.

So identify a single change you want to see in you writing. Make it happen the next time you write a story, no matter what. Then, before you sit down again to write the next story, find something new you want to change or improve.

You’ll love what happens to your writing when you commit to never mowing the same grass twice.

And when you do, far away, in a brightly-lit college band room in Minnesota, my old instructor will raise a hand to conduct a trumpet ensemble, pause — and smile.

— — —

For writing advice and tips on crafting theme, meaning, and character-driven plots, check out the rest of my blog.

And if you’re feeling discouraged, remember this: Every story has something wonderful inside it, including your own.

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anothershittywritingblog · 6 years ago

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Oh to figure out how to effectively introduce your characters and the personality they should have

#whatever their reaction is to the scene they walk in on sets the tone for teir character #*their

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anothershittywritingblog · 7 years ago

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Wind Chime Forest

The first time I saw the Wind Chime Forest will always be my most treasured memory. My mother held my hand as we walked the tree lined path. I kept asking here where we were going and she just smiled and said, somewhere very special. I was about to ask again when the trees that had surrounded us so closely the entire walk suddenly opened up into a grassy field. I stared in amazement as my little brother ran off to play in the tall grass. The field was dotted with strange trees bearing no leaves. They were a dull gunmetal colour and were adorned with hanging ornaments I would later learn were wind chimes. At that time they looked to me like homes for the Fae. Standing at the edge of the field with the breeze in my hair I could hear the most ethereal sound. It was as if there were hundreds of silvery voices singing in harmony. I asked my mother who was singing. She laughed and told me it was the trees. I slowly walked from tree to tree and took in each one’s unique sound. Scattered about the base of the trees there were colourful things. Wreaths, bouquets, ribbons, pictures, notecards and so much more. Curious, I asked my mother what they were for. They were gifts, she explained, to thank the trees for their music. I resolved to bring a gift for them myself the next time I visited. While I was there, a trio of trees quickly became my favourites. They stood close together and played a kind of concert just for you when you stood in their centre. I called them Snow, Lily, and Red. Snow sung about a quiet walk in nature, alone but not lonely. Lily sang of all the beauty you saw there. Red sang about a hidden tragedy you found there. I loved the tale their songs weaved. I found it beautiful and alluring. Eventually, it was time to go. I asked my mother if we could plant one of the Wind Chime Trees in our backyard. My mother shook her head. Nobody knows how they came to be, she told me, and nobody knows how to make more. It couldn’t hurt to ask them, though.

Ask who?

The trees, my darling.

I smiled. As a child, my mother’s words had made perfect sense. Next year, at the end of my visit, I asked the the trees if I could take their music home with me. I ended all my visits with that request. I am an old woman now, and I can no longer make the journey to the Wind Chime Forest every year to see Lily and Snow and Red. However, I can see a small, gunmetal tree growing in my backyard.

#forgot this existed #damn #original character #original writing #writeblr #writers on tumblr #writing #oc #this is so shitty forgive me

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anothershittywritingblog · 7 years ago

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Ryan’s Past Part 2

Ryan found the days stretched out longer with a hungry belly.

He did the same things to entertain himself they just didn’t hold his attention for as long. Besides, board games and television were no fun without someone to share them with and Ryan didn’t dare ask mommy to play. Ryan tried to avoid mommy now. Whenever he’d hear her stomping or walking in her clicky heels he’d hide in another room or in a small space mommy couldn’t get into. He found out the best place to hide was in the space under the television, in the cupboard between the cable box and the board games. It was small and Ryan could close the door and then mommy wouldn’t see him.

Ryan started to go to bed earlier and sleep longer. Less food made him more tired, it seemed. Ryan thought this made sense because food gave you energy. So if you had less food than you had less energy, right? Ryan wished he knew how to cook. Then he could make food. His daddy had been thinking about teaching him, but had decided Ryan was too young. Now daddy was gone… It seemed to Ryan that his daddy had taken all the good things with him when he died.

Today was a bad day for Ryan. He couldn’t get warm no matter how many blankets he piled on- though there weren’t very many in the house. He was all sweaty and his hair was stuck to the back of his neck, which made him feel incredibly gross. He was shivering too hard to do anything but curl up in his bed. He should sleep. Sleep would fix this.

Sleep didn’t end up helping. Ryan woke up even hungrier and more shivery. Slowly, he made the arduous journey down to the kitchen. Ryan had to sit and rest for several minutes before opening the fridge. It was empty. The food was gone. Ryan had forgotten that he’d run out days ago. He cried himself to sleep on the kitchen floor.

When Ryan woke up everything was dark. He could barely see the outlines of the kitchen table and fridge. Ryan made his way back to his room at a painfully slow pace. He was so, so tired.

After that, Ryan stopped being able to tell how much time had passed. He was trapped in the hazy twilight stage between awake and asleep, usually. Eventually, a voice crept into Ryan’s thoughts. What was that? What was the voice saying? It wanted him to wake up? No… no, Ryan didn’t want to wake up. When he was asleep he could still be with daddy. Ryan didn’t ever want to wake up. He slipped further asleep and the voice faded from his consciousness.

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#ryan #2 #oc #original writing #original character #tw starvation #writing #writeblr #writers on tumblr #writing is hard

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anothershittywritingblog · 7 years ago

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Uh, lesbians?

Quinn’s expressions always carried an air of mystery about them. So did her words, usually. It made you wonder what was inside her head. Was it a human mind? Or was it something more ethereal than that? Sometimes, Lily thought she was dating some sort of fae. And then there were moments like these. Lily was doubled over in helpless laughter at her poor girlfriend’s expense. Quinn’s face was scrunched up in a hilarious mixture of confusion and disgust. “I don’t understand,” she muttered forlornly, “yum plus yum doesn’t equal yuck.” Quinn turned a kicked puppy look on Lily. “Don’t laugh! This is a serious matter of culinary investigation!”

“What,” Lily gasped, trying to catch her breath, “what was even in that thing.” She gestured to the oddly coloured milkshake that had been the catalyst for this incident. “Uh, chocolate ice cream, chocolate, grilled cheese, Alfredo sauce, and the middle cream part of the Oreos. I was experimenting with my favorite dairy products.” Lily laughed harder. “Sugar, Oreos don’t have dairy.” Quinn pouted. “Dairy and dairy adjacent then.” Lily snorted and Quinn started to mumble to herself, “do we have any cream cheese? Maybe that’ll help...”

#just a short thing i wrote to make my friend laugh #lily #quinn #lesbians #wlw #original character #original writing #writing #writeblr #writers on tumblr #writing is hard

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anothershittywritingblog · 7 years ago

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Ryan, Part 1

Looking back, it was obvious to him that his mother had always hated him.

Ryan couldn’t understand why his mother would have a child only to despise them but that was what happened, apparently. The neglect had started soon after his dad had died- when he was pretty young. Being so young, Ryan had just assumed his mommy was too upset over his daddy’s death to care for him. After all, he was really sad too. His dad had been kind and gentle and loving towards him and Ryan had loved his daddy.

In those first few days, Ryan didn’t even see his mommy. He didn’t know where she had gone or what she was doing. It was okay though, he could take care of himself like a big kid! He knew how to use the microwave and everything! It was lucky that so many people thought food was an appropriate comfort for mourners. The fridge was stacked high with casseroles. It was probably what kept Ryan from starving, actually. He’d take a big pan from the fridge, cut himself a piece, and that would be his meal. He’d also cut a piece for his mommy. He’d put it on a plate and heat it up and leave it front of her door with a knock to let her know it was there. There was something about his mommy’s room that made Ryan hesitant to enter.

The only time he really saw his mommy was when Ryan cut himself on the knife he was using to slice the casserole. At first Ryan didn’t panic. He simply waited for his daddy to make the little concerned noise he did in the back of his throat and bandage Ryan’s hand up. He’d kiss everything better and then he’d teach Ryan how to be safe with knives. But he didn��t. Ryan’s daddy wasn’t there to be concerned and kiss Ryan’s booboos better and teach him things anymore. Ryan froze and then started to wail. “Mommy! Mommy!” Ryan started to calm a little when he heard feet stomping down the stairs. Really the stomping should’ve been his first clue that something was off. However at the time Ryan didn’t think anything of it. His dad had often stomped around unintentionally. He couldn’t hear the noise he made, after all. But this time the stomping was bad. Ryan’s mommy was angry. She appeared in the kitchen with her hair in a tangle. “What?!” Ryan pointed to his hand, still sniffling. “Use your words, girl,” Ryan’s mommy had snarled. Ryan was confused. Was girl a nickname? Ryan liked his name! He didn’t want a nickname. “Hur- hurts, mommy.” Ryan’s mom rolled her eyes. “Stupid child.” She yanked him over to the sink roughly and held his hand under freezing water. Ryan started to cry again. He tried to sign hurting me! as best as he could with only one hand but his mom’s only response was to yank Ryan’s arm harshly. “I said use your words!” Ryan didn’t understand. He was using words, wasn’t he? These were the words he used with daddy… Ryan stopped leaving meals at his mom’s door after that, too scared to approach.

After a while though, well wishers stopped coming to the door and people stopped calling to check on Ryan and his mom. Slowly, the supply of food in the fridge started to dwindle. The casseroles weren’t being replaced by the well wishers anymore and Ryan didn’t know how to cook. So Ryan started to skip lunch. When more food didn’t arrive Ryan decided to skip dinner as well. It was the first time he’d ever felt hungry.

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#ryan #1 #oc #original character #original writing #tw abuse #writing #writeblr #writers on tumblr #writing is hard

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