Zoom In, Don’t Glaze Over: How to Describe Appearance Without Losing the Plot
You’ve met her before. The girl with “flowing ebony hair,” “emerald eyes,” and “lips like rose petals.” Or him, with “chiseled jawlines,” “stormy gray eyes,” and “shoulders like a Greek statue.”
We don’t know them.
We’ve just met their tropes.
Describing physical appearance is one of the trickiest — and most overdone — parts of character writing. It’s tempting to reach for shorthand: hair color, eye color, maybe a quick body scan. But if we want a reader to see someone — to feel the charge in the air when they enter a room — we need to stop writing mannequins and start writing people.
So let’s get granular. Here’s how to write physical appearance in a way that’s textured, meaningful, and deeply character-driven.
1. Hair: It’s About Story, Texture, and Care
Hair says a lot — not just about genetics, but about choices. Does your character tame it? Let it run wild? Is it dyed, greying, braided, buzzed, or piled on top of her head in a hurry?
Good hair description considers:
Texture (fine, coiled, wiry, limp, soft)
Context (windblown, sweat-damp, scorched by bleach)
Emotion (does she twist it when nervous? Is he ashamed of losing it?)
Flat: “Her long brown hair framed her face.”
Better: “Her ponytail was too tight, the kind that whispered of control issues and caffeine-fueled 4 a.m. library shifts.”
You don’t need to romanticise it. You need to make it feel real.
2. Eyes: Less Color, More Connection
We get it: her eyes are violet. Cool. But that doesn’t tell us much.
Instead of focusing solely on eye color, think about:
What the eyes do (do they dart, linger, harden?)
What others feel under them (seen, judged, safe?)
The surrounding features (dark circles, crow’s feet, smudged mascara)
Flat: “His piercing blue eyes locked on hers.”
Better: “His gaze was the kind that looked through you — like it had already weighed your worth and moved on.”
You’re not describing a passport photo. You’re describing what it feels like to be seen by them.
3. Facial Features: Use Contrast and Texture
Faces are not symmetrical ovals with random features. They’re full of tension, softness, age, emotion, and life.
Things to look for:
Asymmetry and character (a crooked nose, a scar)
Expression patterns (smiling without the eyes, habitual frowns)
Evidence of lifestyle (laugh lines, sun spots, stress acne)
Flat: “She had a delicate face.”
Better: “There was something unfinished about her face — as if her cheekbones hadn’t quite agreed on where to settle, and her mouth always seemed on the verge of disagreement.”
Let the face be a map of experience.
4. Bodies: Movement > Measurement
Forget dress sizes and six packs. Think about how bodies occupy space. How do they move? What are they hiding or showing? How do they wear their clothes — or how do the clothes wear them?
Ask:
What do others notice first? (a presence, a posture, a sound?)
How does their body express emotion? (do they go rigid, fold inwards, puff up?)
Flat: “He was tall and muscular.”
Better: “He had the kind of height that made ceilings nervous — but he moved like he was trying not to take up too much space.”
Describing someone’s body isn’t about cataloguing. It’s about showing how they exist in the world.
5. Let Emotion Tint the Lens
Who’s doing the describing? A lover? An enemy? A tired narrator? The emotional lens will shape what’s noticed and how it’s described.
In love: The chipped tooth becomes charming.
In rivalry: The smirk becomes smug.
In mourning: The face becomes blurred with memory.
Same person. Different lens. Different description.
6. Specificity is Your Superpower
Generic description = generic character. One well-chosen detail creates intimacy. Let us feel the scratch of their scarf, the clink of her earrings, the smudge of ink on their fingertips.
Examples:
“He had a habit of adjusting his collar when he lied — always clockwise, always twice.”
“Her nail polish was always chipped, but never accidentally.”
Make the reader feel like they’re the only one close enough to notice.
Describing appearance isn’t just about what your character looks like. It’s about what their appearance says — about how they move through the world, how others see them, and how they see themselves.
Zoom in on the details that matter. Skip the clichés. Let each description carry weight, story, and emotion. Because you’re not building paper dolls. You’re building people.
🍖 How to Build a Culture Without Just Inventing Spices and Necklaces
(a worldbuilding roast. with love.)
So. You’re building a fantasy world, and you’ve just invented:
→ Three types of ceremonial jewelry
→ A spice that tastes like cinnamon if it were bitter and cursed
→ A holiday where everyone wears gold and screams at dawn
Cute. But that’s not culture. That’s aesthetics.
And if your worldbuilding is all outfits, dances, and spice blends with vaguely mystical names, your story’s probably going to feel like a cosplay convention held inside a Pinterest board.
Here’s how to fix that—aka: how to build a real, functioning culture that shapes your story, not just its vibes.
─────── ✦ ───────
🔗 Culture Is Built on Power, Not Just Style
Ask yourself:
→ Who’s in charge, and why?
→ Who has land? Who doesn’t?
→ What’s considered taboo, sacred, or punishable by death?
Culture is shaped by who gets to make the rules and who gets crushed by them. That’s where things like religion, family structure, class divisions, gender roles, and social expectations actually come from.
Start there. Not at the embroidery.
─────── ✦ ───────
2.🪓 Culture Comes From Conflict
Did this society evolve peacefully? Was it colonized? Did it colonize? Was it rebuilt after a war? Is it still in one?
→ What was destroyed and mythologized?
→ What do the survivors still whisper about?
→ What do children get taught in school that’s… suspiciously sanitized?
No culture is neutral. Every tradition has a history, and that history should taste like blood, loss, or propaganda.
─────── ✦ ───────
3.🧠 Belief Systems > Customs Lists
Sure, rituals and holidays are cool. But what do people believe about:
→ Death?
→ Love?
→ Time?
→ The natural world?
→ Justice?
Example: A society that believes time is cyclical vs. one that sees time as linear will approach everything—from prison sentences to grief—completely differently.
You don’t need to invent 80 gods. You need to know what those gods mean to the people who pray to them.
─────── ✦ ───────
4.🫀 Culture Controls Behavior (Quietly)
Culture shows up in:
→ What people apologize for
→ What insults cut deepest
→ What people are embarrassed about
→ What’s praised publicly vs. what’s hidden privately
For instance:
→ A culture obsessed with stoicism won’t say “I love you.” They’ll say “Have you eaten?”
→ A culture built on legacy might prioritize ancestor veneration, archival writing, name inheritance.
This stuff? Way more immersive than giving everyone matching earrings.
─────── ✦ ───────
5. 🏠 Culture = Daily Life, Not Just Festivals
Sure, your MC might attend a funeral where people paint their faces blue. But what about:
→ Breakfast routines?
→ How people greet each other on the street?
→ Who cooks, and who eats first?
→ What’s considered “clean” or “proper”?
→ How is parenting handled? Divorce?
Culture is what happens between plot points. It should shape your character’s assumptions, language, fears, and habits—whether or not a festival is going on.
─────── ✦ ───────
6. 💬 Let Your Characters Disagree With Their Own Culture
A culture isn’t a monolith.
Even in deeply traditional societies, people:
→ Rebel
→ Question
→ Break rules
→ Misinterpret laws
→ Mock sacred things
→ Act hypocritically
→ Weaponize or resist what’s expected
Let your characters wrestle with the culture around them. That’s where realism (and tension) lives.
─────── ✦ ───────
7.🧼 Beware the “Pretty = Good” Trap
Worldbuilding gets boring fast when:
→ The protagonist’s homeland is beautiful and pure
→ The enemy’s culture is dark and “barbaric”
→ Every detail just reinforces who the reader should like
You can—and should—challenge the aesthetic hierarchy.
→ Let ugly things be beloved.
→ Let beautiful things be corrupt.
→ Let your MC romanticize their culture and then get disillusioned by it later.
─────── ✦ ───────
📍 TL;DR (but like, spicy):
→ Culture is not food and jewelry.
→ Culture is power, fear, memory, contradiction.
→ Stop inventing spices until you know who starved last winter.
→ Let your world feel lived in, not curated.
The best cultural worldbuilding doesn’t look like a list.
It feels like a system. A pressure. A presence your characters can’t escape—even if they try.
Now go. Build something real. (You can add spices later.)
—rin t.
// writing advice for worldbuilders with rage and range
// thewriteadviceforwriters
Sometimes the problem isn’t your plot. It’s your first 5 pages. Fix it here → 🖤 Free eBook: 5 Opening Pages Mistakes to Stop Making:
✦ A free (and actually helpful) guide to leveling up your first 10 pages ✦If you're unsure whether your opening is ✨doing enough✨ to hook re
🕯️ download the pack & write something cursed:
A gothic prompt pack for writers who love cursed universities, secret societies, and scholarly rot.✎ Write the Darkness ✎A 75-prompt horror
*horniest voice you've ever heard* what if i was a wolf and i gently put a big paw on your chest and stared into your eyes and you intuitively understood that i wasn't going to hurt you. and we were both girls about it
Oh my gosh. I just found this website that walks you though creating a believable society. It breaks each facet down into individual questions and makes it so simple! It seems really helpful for worldbuilding!
Heads up that this is a very extensive questionnaire and might be daunting to a lot of writers (myself included). That being said, it is also an amazing questionnaire and I will definitely be using it (or at the very least, some of it).
Do you have any advice for absolute beginners who are writing-curious? My education was cobbled together and I didn’t have to write much there. I’m in a professional field where I do very technical and structured writing, but self-directed writing feels like a stranger. Writing basics/advice seems like it’s either for someone who has way more practice than I do, condescending, or written by someone who is convinced that writing is pain. Sometimes all three…
I definitely agree that a lot of writing advice (especially the sort you find on the internet, written by people with dubious qualifications to be giving advice) is... less than helpful. Even a lot of the published books on writing are not very helpful. However, I have some recommendations!
Wonderbook by Jeff Vandermeer. If you buy only one book, let it be this one. It's fantastic.
Steering the Craft by Ursula K Le Guin.
The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth. More about the flowers of rhetoric (that is, tools like metaphor, alliteration, metonymy, synecdoche, parataxis, etc) than WRITING, but it is genuinely one of my favorites.
There are also a buttload of amazing articles on writing from people who legitimately do know what they're talking about on the SFWA blog! (Example: Key Conditions for Suspense)
But honestly, if you are an absolute total beginner, my advice would be to ignore everything I just said. You don't need writing books or articles. Just give yourself permission to play. Read some of your favorite books and practice noticing things about how the writer did things. Every time you go, "Oh, I love this scene," or you notice your heart racing, or tears coming to your eyes, or WHATEVER -- pause and read it again and try to figure out where the magic trick is happening. You could even try transcribing a scene, either by hand or by typing -- this is an OLLLLLD apprentice-writer's trick to help trick your brain into thinking that IT is doing the writing itself so it can get used to what the movements of the dance are.
Another old, old apprentice-writer's trick is to make a list of all the stuff you really love in books. Character archetypes, tropes, themes, topics, vibrant sensory details, mental images that speak to you, whatever. Mine has things like: wizards, dragons, enemies-to-lovers, only one bed, etc. Then you can use that list (I call it a "Magpie Hoard" but people have a million different names, I did not invent this tool) to cobble together ideas -- and because the ideas are made up of raw material that you love, you are going to love the ideas too! You can even represent the genesis of an idea mathematically. The Idea Formula (and this one I DID invent) is:
Idea = ❤️ + ❤️ (+ ❤️...) + "what if"
Where ❤️ stands for "thing from your Magpie Hoard". So for example:
Cozy fantasy + badass lady soldier + the smell of baked bread + murder mystery + "what if"... = "What if a grizzled lady sellsword retired from mercenary life, rented a room above a bakery in a quiet village, and immediately got caught up in investigating a murder?"
You can do this all day long, just generating story ideas based on all the stuff you love in books.
And then... y'know, just get out there and play! Make some messes. If you don't like what you made, nobody ever has to see it, and it's EXTREMELY easy to hide the evidence. :)
please please please please reblog if you’re a writer and have at some point felt like your writing is getting worse. I need to know if I’m the only one who’s struggling with these thoughts
Hey I have good news for you!!! Actually two pieces of news, because this symptom could be indicating one of three potential diagnoses. (Preface: I am a professional fantasy author and I have been published more than a dozen times. I have also taught creative writing at the university level and am REALLY good at it. I know my shit and I have seen your problem a thousand times.)
FIRST POSSIBLE DIAGNOSIS:
This one happens to me all the time. If you feel like your writing is getting worse, that might mean you're at a "plateau" stage in your development of technique execution, but you're in a "growth" stage in your development of your technique perception! Because they alternate!
When you're in the phase you're in now, you have all the "omg my writing is garbage" thoughts, but those are not true. Your writing is the same as it was last week. However, your ability to see it and analyze it is getting better -- and that keener perception is why it SEEMS to be worse. It isn't, I swear.
When it's the other way around and your execution is in a growth stage and your perception is on a plateau stage, that's when you have all your "omg I'm a supergenius? Omg *I* wrote that? fuck yeah im a god of writing" moments (and if you haven't had them yet, that's ok, they'll come, be patient with yourself).
Either way, this is a normal part of the growth process. It's like the ache of sore muscles after you've gone to the gym for the first time in a while, that's all. Your muscles will hurt less as you get stronger, and then you'll add more weight or more reps to your exercise routine, and you'll be sore again until your body catches up. It's just that when that's happening in your brain, it's a lot harder to set the "muscle ache" aside, because your brain's only way of expressing discomfort is to gnaw miserably on itself and make you have sad thoughts.
Prescription: Have a cup of tea or whatever small treat you like best, and be gentle and patient with yourself. It's gonna be ok. Try to consciously notice and appreciate some of the things you've measurably gotten better at and give yourself a deliberate, intentional, conscious pat on the back for it. (I have ADHD, so my brain doesn't want to give me the reward chemicals automatically; I have to trigger it manually by saying aloud "I'm really proud that I accomplished this." YMMV.)
SECOND POSSIBLE DIAGNOSIS:
This one also happens to me all the time. Oftentimes when I have the "my writing is getting worse" feeling, it is a signal from my subconscious that the story is going in the wrong direction -- that is, a direction which doesn't satisfying to me, or that I'm not interested in, or that leads the characters in a direction that I don't like, or that leaves a glaring plot hole that I haven't noticed consciously yet... All manner of small, fixable problems. This usually happens after I have ignored the earlier warning signs, which start with feeling a bit bored of the story but trying to push through, and then go to a vague dissatisfaction that I ignore. The end result of this is frequently outright burnout or writer's block, so the better you get at noticing those early warning signs, the faster you can address them and nip the problems in the bud. Problem is, being able to do this and use your feelings as a useful tool to flag burgeoning story problems only comes with practice.
Prescription: Do the practice. When you start having those fidgety, restless feelings, try to notice what you're feeling before it gets to the "this is garbage and I hate it" stage, and then sit with that feeling. Instead of flinching away from it and hiding from the scary feeling, turn towards it with compassion and curiosity. Ask it questions like, "Hmmm, what SPECIFICALLY is garbage about it? What would make it more fun and appealing? Is there anything I'm missing here?" Your brain may initially try to continue the tantrum of "No, it's bad, it's just all bad, there's nothing good about this, it's horrible, and therefore I'M horrible" but you're gonna need to address this with all the kindness and patience that you would give a cranky toddler. Let it wriggle and cry, and just continue being curious and trying to get it to use its words to express what the problem is. Eventually you'll stumble on SOME kind of answer, and then YAY THAT IS A THING THAT CAN BE FIXED. Oftentimes when it happens to me, I have a reaction that's sort of like, "Oh! Duh! I forgot [XYZ thing]! That was a silly mistake, haha, no wonder I'm grumpy about it. Glad i noticed it now." The answers you stumble on might be things like, "I don't like mystery novels but I seem to be accidentally leading myself into writing one, whoops" or "It is so out of character for this person to be reacting that way, I need to rewrite this scene" or "I'm feeling bored, I would have put the book down by now if I were a reader; how can I jazz it up?"
THIRD POSSIBLE DIAGNOSIS: (kind of a really specific subset of the Second Possible Diagnosis, but it is SO COMMON for both experienced writers and apprentice writers that it gets its own section)
Your book might be having problems with tension.
Tension issues account for 99% of all book problems. It's like sewing machines?? You know how all sewing machines have the devil in them, and if you try to sew and your thread gets tangled and fucked up on the bottom, that's because the tension has gone weird, so you have to try rethreading the machine and wiggling the tension knob a bit to make it stop? Like that.
Prescription: If you are having the "this shit sucks" reaction, stop immediately and check your story tension. Are there stakes? Do they MATTER DEEPLY to the protagonist? Can they be raised? Can they be endangered? Does a new problem need to be introduced, or an existing one made worse? TENSION TENSION TENSION TENSION. There are a thousand ways of raising tension, and I cannot list them all here. When my tension is right, I almost never have the "this sucks" reaction, because I am in that document doing my job with ruthless efficiency. The SECOND it goes wonky, I have a crisis of confidence and a small tantrum and I sink into my Desponds. Every single time. It has gotten to the point where I have trained my closest friends to say, when I slide into their DMs to complain about my book: "Oh, this part. Past!Alex told us to give you a message. [checks notes] Message reads, 'bitch, is it a tension problem'" whereupon I subside, chastened, and say, "....yeah probably."
CHECK YOUR TENSION, IT IS PROBABLY FUCKED UP. How do I know? Bc tension wants very badly to fuck itself up if you're not keeping an eye on it. Same as sewing machines having the devil in them.
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.)
I had to remove the links from the main post in order for it to show up in tag search, so here are the links to dictionaries and resources as a reblog!
MDBG an open source dictionary - start here
Wiktionary don’t knock it til you try it
iCIBA (they recently changed their user interface and it’s much less English-speaker friendly now but it’s still a great dictionary)
Pleco (an iOS app, maybe also Android???) contains same open source dictionary as MDBG and also its own proprietary dictionary
Choosing your own style name was widely considered to be crass. I absolutely think that Gan Ning chose his own style name; he was that kind of a guy. And the name he chose! Xingba 興霸/兴霸! I’ve never seen another style name like it. It means, basically, “thriving dominator”! Brand new official adult Gan Ning treats his style name like he’s picking his Xbox gamer tag and he picks BadassBoss69_420, that’s what this style name is like to me. Except, you know, he had almost certainly killed many hundreds of people by the time he was nineteen, so, uh, it wouldn’t be a wise idea to make fun of his name to his face.
Hello NK Jemisin! I'm a huge fan of yours, and I wanted to thank you for writing all of the books you've written, and doing all that you do. You're really awesome and you are doing important work! :)
I had a long question, if you have time to answer! What's your commentary on creating fantasy cultures, using real ones as inspiration? You've done this before in your stories, and I wanted to know if you had any guidance on doing it well. I'm writing my first novel right now (fantasy!) and am dealing with a surprising amount of guilt regarding using real cultures as a basis for my fake ones. On one hand, I want to create a really unique fantasy world, not the bog-standard European stuff. It's not only more interesting to me, but I also admittedly want to use my story to help introduce people to concepts that might be helpful in the real world, help readers understand what these real people go through and perhaps inspire change. On the OTHER hand, I don't know if it's 'my place' to do so (I'm Black btw, but I'm not just writing about Black-coded fantasy characters). And I'm worried about representing people in a harmful way, even if it's by accident. I'm even hung up about names! Should I use names from real languages related to the cultures I'm inspired by, or should I just make them up to emphasize that, while yes these people are clearly inspired by real cultures, they are ultimately *their own* thing.
I'm really conflicted on this and am hoping you can offer some feedback and/or commentary. Sorry for the long ask. Either way, have a great day and I look forward to whatever work you do next!
If I can rephrase what you're saying here, it sounds like you're concerned about cultural appropriation -- specifically, which cultures you get to "borrow from" and "remix," how much remixing you can do before you've done damage, how to depict people from cultural backgrounds other than your own, etc.
If that's what you're asking, then there are whole schools of thought on how to "appropriate appropriately." A lot of thinking on this has evolved in the past few years, for good and for ill; Own Voices, for example. (The short version: the Own Voices hashtag movement started as a grassroots attempt to get marginalized voices telling the stories of their own cultures, because there's been a nasty trend of only white/Western/Anglophone/etc. authors publishing books about those cultures. The problem? Some publishers and readers started acting as if marginalized writers weren't allowed to do anything but stories in their own cultures -- a restriction, instead of an inclusion/correction. Worse, publishers, etc started using it as a marketing shorthand, in ways that were just... not good. They made it weird, basically.) But I'm still fond of the approach that's in Writing the Other, by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward. It's centered on ethnicity/race, but a lot of its approach can be extrapolated to culture. There's too much good stuff in this book to summarize it easily, but you should read it instead of a summary anyway -- it's short.
I don't see the point of guilt, when it comes to something like this. Guilt is what you feel when you've done something wrong, and admiring another culture enough to want to tell a story featuring it isn't wrong. However, there are things you need to do -- research, conversations, considerations of power dynamics -- to reduce the harm you might end up doing by telling that story as an outsider. And note that no matter what you do, though, you might still end up doing harm. (Even people writing about their own culture can end up doing that.) If you fuck up, apologize, figure out what went wrong, and try to do better next time. That's really all you can do.
And then write whatever the hell you want. There's a persistent pressure on Black writers to only cover certain subjects, certain settings; nah. We get to have range, too. You've just got to put in the work to do it well.
Shapeshifter characters are so inherently tragic and i eat that shit up every time. I fucking LOVE when a character's sense of identity hinges upon being anyone but themself. Like yesssss babygirl struggle with your identity as an individual person and not just a reflection of others youre so sexy haha
I love villains that are the reverse of the idea that the absence of love makes you evil. Villains that love to the point of paranoia and obsession. Villains whose love for someone corrupts them. Love being used for awful, evil things. Using love to justify horrific actions. Anything that breaks down the toxic idea that people who don’t feel love are monsters and those who feel love are always pure and heroic and morally right.
a lot of being a werewolf is about carrying shame from the transformation & therefore desire to instead become a good monster because to survive is to control how one holds space as a dangerous animal. this post is sponsored by john silver of black sails fame.
I've had this little idea in my head for a while now, so I decided to sit down and plot it out.
Disclaimer: This isn't meant to be some sort of One-Worksheet-Fits-All situation. This is meant to be a visual representation of some type of story planning you could be doing in order to develop a plot!
Lay down groundwork! (Backstory integral to the beginning of your story.) Build hinges. (Events that hinge on other events and fall down like dominoes) Suspend structures. (Withhold just enough information to make the reader curious, and keep them guessing.)
And hey, is this helps... maybe sit down and write a story! :)
Anyone who talks to me knows that when I start talking about writing, they have about point five seconds before I start shilling for obsidian.md. I made a post about why I use and love it here, and in it I mentioned plugins, which a few people were interested in.
There are so many plugins, an absolute plethora (I have about 40 or so on my main vault at the moment), but today I’m just going to cover my top 10 plugins for writers using obsidian!
presented in no particular order, and below a cut because it's pretty long.
(note: I’ve included links to the github repositories for all the plugins, but to find and install them in Obsidian, just search their names in ‘community plugins’ in the app!)
Templates
First up is a simple core plugin, that if you aren’t using it already…why??? I have so many questions about how you function ANYWAY
If you’re doing any kind of repetitive Writing Task, make a template. Character profile? Template. Worldbuilding note? Template. Scene? Template. Chapter? Template literally i have templates for everything. Set yourself a hotkey (I use ctrl+t), and let your dreams run wild with not having to write out the same information over and over and over again.
This is also vvv useful if you want to get into using metadata, because you can guarantee you don’t forget to add a field. (I might make a post with some of my templates later, if people are interested in some examples?)
Setting them up is very straightforward: enable ‘Templates’ under Core Plugins in Settings, set a folder in your vault to be a designated templates folder, and that’s it! Keep any templates you make in that folder, and go wild. As mentioned I use them for page structures, but also for things I don’t want to remember. Like tricky dataview queries, or infobox/callout structures. You can be so lazy if you make templates for everything, you’ll wish you had them in every app, I stg.
(You can use various other plugins in conjunction with templates to make them even more useful, such as QuickAdd and Commander, which I might talk about in another post if folks are interested.)
Workspaces & Workspaces+
Workspaces+ on github
Okay, so technically this is two plugins but Workspaces is a core features, and Workspaces+ adds extra functionality. At this point I’ve been using W+ for so long I genuinely do not remember which features are core and which it added. If there is one plugin I refuse to live without, it’s this one.
Workspaces are layouts you can save within obsidian: setups of tabs, sidebars, notes, etc. This is a fantastic bit of functionality that lets you make obsidian into an absolute powerhouse of seperate contexts. I set them up for different projects within my main vault (I have a workspace for my Obedience fics, one for my art projects, one for research, and many more), and for different needs in my worldbuilding vault (worldbuilding, outlining, writing, research etc).
Workspaces+ makes managing and creating your workspaces a lot smoother, and gives you the option to auto-save changes when you switch, which I like because my workspaces are very much active, living things that I don’t want to remember to re-save every time I change between them.
A NOTE!! - keep backups. keep backups, because sometimes - it’s happened to me twice - if you are syncing vaults between devices, the workspaces file can get wiped, and you do not want to have to rebuild them all from scratch. this is good advice generally, but KEEP BACKUPS! DO IT!
Longform
Longform on github
this is theeee writing plugin for obsidian. everyone recommends it, and that’s because it’s good! especially if you’re coming from Scrivener, as it adds a little of that flavour back into Obsidian.
with it, you can drag-and-drop re-arrange your scenes and chapters in the sidebar, which native Obsidian doesn’t let you do. my favourite feature is the project wordcount, because I like seeing The Numbers Go Up, and it will also show you per-scene wordcount, and you can set targets! (i don’t use the targets feature much, though, i track my words with Pacemaker)
it also has an export function that i have not played much with, but it worked very nicely to give me a basic file for the first draft of one of my long-fics, so that was pretty useful!
Kanban
Kanban on github
do you like outlining? do you like to-do lists? do you like drag-and-drop? me too, i have nothing else going on. i’ve been using kanban for book to-do’s for a while, and i’ve recently fallen in love with it for outlining chapters: yes, I can re-arrange things with longform, but with Kanban i can mark my scenes with various notes, and give myself a good visual overview of plot balance, and drag things around to arrange my book!
using it, i do recommend playing with some css snippets to add some lane wrapping, to get multiple lanes stacking. unless you like side-scrolling, i guess. (this is the one I use, which I got off the discord ages ago and I cannot remember who posted it, I'm so sorry TT_TT)
my top rec for using kanban in planning is to have lanes for ‘backlog’ ‘up next’ ‘active’ and ‘done’. this way you can list out all the million things you need to do, without getting overwhelmed about doing all of them at once.
completr / Various Complements
compltr on github / Various Complements on github
i have a lot of words to type and sometimes, i don’t want to type all of them! that’s where autocomplete comes in. I vacillate between the two, because VC has a tendency to lag my poor tiny laptop, but otherwise it’s great!
VC is the one if you’re doing worldbuilding, because the linking you can do is a lot faster, and it helps you remember all those ridiculous fantasy names you don’t want to type over and over and over. both have good settings for autocompleting/suggesting in metadata though, which is fantastic because then you don’t do what I used to do, which is forget how i structured my data and have four different versions of the same field.
however. neither are as good as the autocomplete from Libreoffice, which i miss dearly and is the only thing that is constantly tempting me to go back to drafting there.
Outliner
Outliner on github
This is a small and simple plugin, that adds some extra features to lists. I find it very handy because a lot of my outlining is done in bullet-points, and being able to quickly move items up and down a list with a simple button press is very handy for me.
Dataview
Dataview on github / Dataview documentation
okay so. strictly you don’t need this for writing. HOWEVER. if you like data, and organising, and tracking things for your writing, dataview is The One. It’s the one for auto-generating lists and tables, and you can, I’ve heard, do some buckwild things with it.
I am a simple man, and I use it in my writing for a handful of simple things: auto-listing characters and places in worldbuilding; making tables listing characters & plotlines & scene wordcounts; keeping track of my wips.
I’m not going to try and explain how it works here, there is an entire set of in-depth documentation for that. (also Danny Hatcher has a short and simple intro to the plugin here.)
Basically, anything you can add in metadata, you can pull into a dataview query. Status, character, plot — it’s the customisation thing again. There is no default, you get to pick what’s important to you, and then display it!
Here are some examples of my queries & their results, to give you an idea of what’s possible:
Left side: a query pulling the current fanfics I'm working on. Right side: what that table looks like in Reading Mode
Left side: queries pulling characters from the Renegade Prince series by race. Right side: What those tables look like in Reading Mode (each one displays the same, only filtered by the 'race' field I have in the characters metadata)
copy document as html
copy document as html on github
Another small, simple plugin that has been the saviour of my obsidian-to-AO3 export process for months. All it does is allow you to copy a note as HTML. That’s it. Which you can then paste into AO3’s HTML editor, clean up slightly, and be good to go.
For extra bonus points, you can set it up with a hotkey (or a commander plugin button, which. commander is a plugin tale for another list but OH BOY IT’S GREAT) and just one-click go. Fantastic.
I like it because much as I love obsidian, exporting things into other non-markdown programs can kinda be a pain. That is one of its weak points IMO. There are also plugins for exporting things in other formats, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.
Colourful Tag
Colourful Tag on github
This one I love because a) pretty and b) colour-coded plot tags my beloved. It gives you a simple, straightforward way to make your tags coloured (and to add emoji prefixes!). I use it in conjunction with kanban for outlining, as it gives me a really great way to visually track plotlines & character arcs.
You can see an example of this in the screenshot I posted for my kanban outline.
Smart Typography
Smart Typography on github
And finally, another sweet and simple plugin, that converts quotes to curly quotes, dashes to em-dashes, and periods to ellipses (it does a few other things as well, but those are the main ones). I like it, because I need those things for writing! Nothing complicated, just a neat little quality of life improvement that’s great for writers.
---
And that's my top ten plugins! as always, shoot me any questions you have about these or anything else I do with obsidian, I'm always happy to answer. I'm aware there's so much you can do with the app, it can be overwhelming if you're just starting out.
As I said, I do use a BUNCH of other plugins for things that are not specifically focused on my writing, so I can always talk about QOL and other types of plugins that I use another time, if folks are interested?
Thank you so much for reading all of this if you made it all the way to the bottom. I genuinely adore obsidian and everything you can do with it, so it's really fun to write these posts!
There are hardly any female werewolves because they break all the classic rules of femininity. They force you to confront female violence, strength, size, grotesqueness and uncontrollability. Historically female shapeshifters always shift into something dangerous (snake) or sleek (cat) or dainty (bird) but female werewolves ignore the masculine gaze completely. They're distorted beasts that have no ulterior motive except to destroy. Nothing about them is nurturing or modest. They're the opposite of what a woman "should be." Their omission from pop culture is not an accident.
hi I'm from your pseudo-medieval fantasy city. yeah. you forgot to put farms around us. we have very impressive walls and stuff but everyone here is starving. the hero showed up here as part of his quest and we killed and ate him
yeah umm actually everyone kinda lives, inside.. the walls yeah. no yeah theres not any surrounding farming communities or villages to levy taxes from so we're pretty much just in a stone pit all together. Theres a massive stone castle tho! where did the infrastructure for the stone quarring come from? I dont know... Evil wizard maybe?
If you actually want to know how medieval (and overall pre-industrial) cities interacted with its rural enviroment, check out these articles:
This week and next, we’re going to look at an issue not of battles, but of settings: pre-modern cities – particularly the trope of the city,
Last week, we looked at a model for what the countryside around an ‘ideal city’ might look like. Today we’re going to introduce some complic
Long story short, cities weren't islands in the middle of nowhere. If you're a generic fantasy character approaching a city, you wouldn't find a lonely Shining City Upon A Hill (hmm, interesting imagery there, wonder what it means...), but actually a highly populated area of farms, orchards and all that feeds and maintains a city.
