Writing Junk

i can pretty much guarantee that ↑that↑ is not a heading you see everyday.

now i will not be giving advice on writing cyclopses, (though it may be sort of the same thing) i still hope this will be helpful for some people out there that are looking to provide a more diverse cast to their wip!

i have never ever ever read a book, watch a show movie etc etc that involves a character with one eye. (aside from those badass characters who wear eye patches bc they lost sight in one eye in some badass way)

for context: i am one of many people who was born with microphtalmia, an eye disease that results in one or both eyes develope smaller than normal at birth. i myself was born with a smaller left eye, which resulted in my left eye being removed exactly twenty days after birth.

microphthalmia (along with many other eye diseases) typically leads to being half or fully blind. i lucked out and only lost my left eye which i am so so thankful for.

i would really really love to see more representation for my community in literature, especially so people would come to see that being half blind isn’t as unusual and weird as people make it out to be.

without further ado, i present to you, a list of information, facts, and first hand experiences from yours truly!

i’ve had prosthetic eyes made to fit my eye socket for about fifteen years (i’m 16 lol) (the first 6ish months after the surgery i never had a prosthetic)

in my life i’ve had four different prosthetic eyes made because just like other people, my eye socket grew alongside the rest of me, meaning the prosthetic needed to be made bigger

i’ve had my current prosthetic for four years now, the past ones lasted about 2-3 years at a time. this one will probably last me through the rest of my life unless i need/want a new one

as opposed to most media/assumptions, my prosthetic (along with most prosthetics) is PLASTIC (people always think it’s glass) and only half a circle!!

i’ve had three surgeries related to my eye

i do not have depth perception which makes doing certain things very difficult (estimating distance, how close/far i am from something etc)

driving is not affected too much, i just have to turn my head more than other people. i believe being blind in the right eye might be more difficult, but i couldn’t say

doing my make up is kinda easy, except for eyeliner is a pain in the ASS since most people close their eye to do it on their upper lid, but clearly i can’t close my right eye whilst doing it lol

my family as well as my friends and even myself often forget i have a prosthetic, which sometimes results in awkward/funny situations

i hate walking with people on my right bc i can’t tell where they are unless i’m constantly looking down at my/their feet

i sucked at basketball bc i had such a disadvantage (no depth perception, i could only see half the court, i was constantly turning my head) but professional swimming is much easier for me since it’s not a contact sport and doesn’t really require for me to be paying attention to a million things at once

i rarely have to take my prosthetic out, and if i do, it’s either to clean it, (we do get eye crusties on our prosthetics just like other people do when they have pink eye or sever allergies) it’s bothering me/really dry, or i want to take it out to show/scare people lol

a lot of people don’t realize when i first meet them that it’s fake bc my recent prosthetic is amazing accurate to my real eye. others notice and assume i have a lazy eye since it doesn’t move

for some reason people think i can’t cry out of my left (prosthetic) eye??? i still have a tear duct??? i actually think more tears come out of my left tear duct than my right lol

i am extremely self conscious about it, but i know there are other one-eyed beauties out there who aren’t which is amazing!! i try to live vicariously through them lol

i make sooo many jokes about my eye lol, and i’m usually ok w other people making jokes as long as they aren’t like overly rude/offensive, then i’ll feel a lil bad about my self

people never really made fun of it, but kids in middle school likes to wave things in front of my left eye/on my left side that i couldn’t see which got really annoying after a while

getting custom designed prosthetics are available, but they’re really expensive (so are normal lol) they costs thousands of dollars, just like other prosthetics do

i run into things that are on my left side ALL THE TIME it’s actually kinda funny lolol

i try to hide my left eye/turn more to my left side in photos bc my eyes aren’t always looking in the same direction, which really gets to me

i wear glasses for both protection and bc my right eye is -1.75 lmao but i did used to wear non-prescription glasses purely for safety

i do have contacts to wear during the summer, swim meets etc, for when i don’t want/can’t wear my glasses but need to see. bc of this, i have a second pair of glasses that have no prescription

if doctors/scientists managed to figure out a way to fix microphthalmia (a birth defect), or do a sort of eye transplant, i would not be able to have that done to me because all parts of my left eye have been removed from my body

microphthalmia is NOT the only disease that results in the haver losing sight in one or both eyes!! there are many others, but it is not my place to share any experiences for something i have not experienced!!!

for once i just want to see a clumsy character who has one eye that WASNT a result of some tragic event.

so please please please consider including a character with one working eye in your wip. it would mean the world to myself and all the other members of the community (there’s a lot of us, trust me) plus, i wouldn’t mind starting an acting debut playing a half-blind female protagonist, that would be so dope.

Adjective:

She had a fragile accent.

The people had throaty voices, sawing out words in blunt grumbles.

Metaphoric:

His voice was splinters and broken glass.

Her accent had a song-like quality that reminded her of swaying tides.

Straight-forward:

He had a French accent.

“I have to go,” she said, though from her accent, French, the words sounded more like “I hive tego.” (Note phonetically describing accents is seldom the best way to go about this and can be offensive, but works in a rare pinch.)

Straight-forward & ‘Technical’:

He had a French accent, perhaps Northern, his voice lilting the edges of his vowels and dragging out others.

Some methods work better in combination with others, such as straight-forward combined with technical (as shown). It truly shouldn’t take many sentences to give readers enough info to imagine how someone’s voice or accent sounds. Therefore I wouldn’t overdue the clues, as it can stir into offensive.

More Reading:

Describing Voices

55 Words to Describe Someone’s Voice

Online Thesaurus

Describing Qualities of the Human Voice

My brain: Just skip it? Scenes can be written in non-chronological order.

Me:

How to Diversify Your Sentence Structure

This is a really common problem that I think a lot of writers have! Having a repetitive sentence structure without variation can make your prose really choppy, boring and difficult to read, while overall weakening your voice.

Here are some techniques to help you change things up a bit!

Switch around your subject

Very basic grammar: Every sentence has a subject and a predicate. I think when we think of subject in a sentence, we often think of person. This might be especially true in creative writing because we deal with characters.

For example:

Amelia opened her front door and walked outside. She felt a cold breeze blow through her. She realized that she wasn’t dressed appropriately for the weather. Amelia turned around and went back inside to grab a jacket.

In this example, Amelia is the subject of every single sentence, and a verb is followed immediately afterward. Because every sentence begins with ‘Amelia’ or ‘she’, there’s no variety and it’s a little bit boring to read. 

Here’s what it could look like if I switched the subject around somewhere.

She felt a cold breeze blow through her.

A cold breeze blew through her.

The difference is subtle, but now the subject of the sentence is the breeze, not Amelia. The sentence structure is still the same: The subject is followed by a verb. However, because the subject is different from Amelia, it still brings variety to how your sentences read. 

Here’s what it looks like now:

Amelia opened her front door and walked outside. A cold breeze blew through her. She realized that she wasn’t dressed appropriately for the weather. Amelia turned around and went back inside to grab a jacket.

Now that every sentence doesn’t begin with “Amelia” or “she” it seems a little bit more interesting.

Put dependent clause before subject 

So we changed one subject in a sentence, but we still have multiple sentences that have Amelia as the subject. It still doesn’t have too much variety in sentence structure, and as a result, it can be stilted.

So let’s try bringing a dependent clause before the subject.

She realized that she wasn’t dressed appropriately for the weather. Amelia turned around and went back inside to grab a jacket.

Realizing that she wasn’t dressed appropriately for the weather, Amelia turned around and went back inside to grab a jacket.

By bringing ‘realizing’ before the subject, I created a dependent clause and succeeded making the first word something other than the subject. 

However, because it’s a dependent clause, ‘realizing that she wasn’t dressed appropriately’ is a sentence fragment — it’s an incomplete thought. So I combined it with the last sentence to make it complete.

So after those two techniques, let’s compare the original with the rewrite.

Original

Amelia opened her front door and walked outside. She felt a cold breeze blow through her. She realized that she wasn’t dressed appropriately for the weather. Amelia turned around and went back inside to grab a jacket. 

Rewrite

Amelia opened her front door and walked outside. A cold breeze blew through her. Realizing that she wasn’t dressed appropriately for the weather, Amelia turned around and went back inside to grab a jacket.

Now because there’s a variety in sentence structure and subject, the paragraph  is not only more interesting to read, it also flows better and more smoothly. It also has the added bonus of diverse sentence lengths which was lacking before, and it helps make the writing more engaging.

I just wanted to note: there is nothing bad about having your subject as the first word in a sentence. I don’t want anyone to feel like they have to change every single sentence they ever wrote. Like in my example, the first sentence starts with Amelia. That’s fine.

The problem is that when every single sentence starts that way, it becomes repetitive. You can still have some sentences that start with your character, just make sure to throw in some other sentence structures, and your writing will be more engaging!

Outside of this specific example, you can also try playing around with dependent clauses in your existing sentences as well.

Jamie walked into the haunted house, despite her reluctance.

Despite her reluctance, Jamie walked into the haunted house.

The sentence is the exact same, but I just switched around where the dependent clause ‘despite her reluctance’ is placed. Even though it has the same meaning, it can provide a different feel or at the very least, switch up having your subject as the first word of every sentence.

I also talk about this in my guide about how to make your writing flow better. Sentence structure has a lot to do with making your writing sound cohesive and eloquent, so I would definitely recommend checking that out as well!

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.)

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

an issue i see a lot in various excerpts when using the singular they pronoun is unintentional pluralization! changing ‘themself’ to ‘themselves’ isn’t grammatically correct when referring to a singular they-using character

instead of saying ‘they took it upon themselves to help’, say ‘they took it upon themself to help’

instead of saying ‘they themselves were well known in the area’, say ‘they themself were well known in the area’

instead of saying ‘they did it by themselves’, say ‘they did it by themself’

a.k.a. you may find your work Bad and Cringy™️ but you wrote something and that’s a Good Thing™️.

“Show, don’t tell,” was what I was taught at school.

You, too?

Here’s a simple example of “show, don’t tell”:

Show: The skin resists the blunt knife, dimpling slightly before bursting open in a splatter of red liquid. All over my hands. All over the kitchen counter. What’s inside is worse: a viscous mess of seeds and soggy flesh that oozes across my plate, and turns to a fragrant mush in my mouth. It isn’t the taste, but the texture that makes me long to spit it out. Tell: I hate raw tomatoes.

In my example above, the difference between the two approaches is marked. However, in practice, it isn’t always so easy to distinguish between showing and telling.

In this article, I’d like to explore the techniques used by 3 famous authors to blend showing and telling in order to unfold the plot, the characters, and the world.

Here is a general comparison of showing and telling:

How vs. What – showing is more likely to explain and describe how something occurs, whereas telling can simply state what happened.

Detail vs. Overview – showing focuses on providing details in an effort to imitate the character’s experience, while telling is more useful for providing a broad overview or generalisation of the situation.

Verbose vs. Succinct – since showing requires more detail, it’s usually wordier than telling.

Slow vs. Fast – another consequence of providing more details is that the pace of the narration slows down. Telling, in contrast, usually speeds up the story.

Character vs. Narrator – because showing often relies on the way the action of the story is perceived, the character becomes more dominant. However, this character may be the narrator themselves.

Perception vs. Context – even if the perceptions are shown from the point of view of a disembodied narrator, they’re usually more focused. Telling, in contrast, is better suited to provide context.

Personal vs. Impersonal – because it foregrounds perceptions, showing can feel more personal, whereas telling can impart a universal quality as exemplified by the fairytale formula: “once upon a time, in a kingdom far away, there lived a…”

Writer vs. Reader – showing requires a writer to expend skill, time, and words. Although it can help to draw the reader in, I think it can be argued that telling a story demands more of the reader, who has to fill in the details through the work of their own imagination.

The aim of the “show, don’t tell,” rule is to encourage writers to describe the action of the story in a way that draws the reader to experience it alongside the character.

It’s a useful reminder to think about how you convey information.

However, as I think the examples in this article will demonstrate, showing and telling are more effective when used together.

The techniques of showing and telling are essential to fleshing out your plot structure.

✓ Telling can impart a lot of information very quickly, which is why it’s often a good choice for setting the scene.

✓ Showing, on the other hand, conveys story information slowly, but more in-depth. It’s more entertaining, so I recommend you use it in abundance for scenes that you want to linger in.

One of Ernest Hemingway’s writing tenets is to pare down story information as much as possible. His aim is to erase the narrator, and thereby the filter between the reader and the characters, but this doesn’t mean he shies away from telling. Quite the contrary!

For example, here is the very first sentence of THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA:

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

This telling sentence brings the reader up to speed, introducing the character, the location, and the situation.

You might argue that the rest of the novella is Hemingway showing the first sentence and its consequences.

A writer can often give away a surprising amount of information about the plot, because the reader can still enjoy the pleasure of the details unfolded through showing the character’s journey.

After his first telling sentence, Hemingway continues to weave showing and telling throughout the novella, creating the oceanic rhythm of the old man’s monologue.

For example:

“Bad news for you, fish,” he said and shifted the line over the sacks that covered his shoulders. [showing]

He was comfortable but suffering, although he did not admit the suffering at all. [telling]

You can use this technique of alternating lines of showing and telling as a way to break up long sections of introspection.

Hemingway has another interesting trick that combines the functions of telling and showing.

Glossing over boring passages of time is one of the chief advantages of telling.

Throughout The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway repeatedly tells how much time has passed, but simultaneously shows its effect on the character through the perceptions of the old man…

The sun was two hours higher now and it did not hurt his eyes so much to look into the east. There were only three boats in sight now and they showed very low and far inshore.

…

He rested for what he believed to be two hours. The moon did not rise now until late and he had no way of judging the time. Nor was he really resting except comparatively. He was still bearing the pull of the fish across his shoulders but he placed his left hand on the gunwale of the bow and confided more and more of the resistance to the fish to the skiff itself.

…

For an hour the old man had been seeing black spots before his eyes and the sweat salted his eyes and salted the cut over his eye and on his forehead. He was not afraid of the black spots. They were normal at the tension that he was pulling on the line. Twice, though, he had felt faint and dizzy and that had worried him.

…

He had sailed for two hours, resting in the stern and sometimes chewing a bit of the meat from the marlin, trying to rest and to be strong, when he saw the first of the two sharks.

To use this trick, look for descriptions in your story when your character is fairly still for a long period of time. Instead of mentioning the passage of time, and what your character does before and after, describe their sensations during that time period, and how they perceive time passing.

How can i make my female character win a fight without forgetting about biology?? I don’t want her to be a sue/overpowered

Without exception, people who say, “women cannot fight” or “cannot win a fight,” because of biology do not know what they’re talking about. It’s an easy way to instantly recognize that the person speaking or writing is pretending to be an expert on the subject.

I’m going to be slightly hyperbolic here, but the two most important things in hand to hand combat are, stability and force generation. Now, if this was a different discussion, I’d probably step back and include some other factors, but for this discussion, those are the two things we need to look at.

Stability is exactly what it says; how well you can remain standing based on what happens to you, and what you do. More stability makes it easier to generate force, and makes you more resistant to being knocked down, or thrown. The lower your center of gravity, the more stable you will be. This why you will see martial artists go into low stances. You spread and bend the legs, while keeping your feet flat on the floor to lower your center of gravity. In hand-to-hand, there a huge advantage in having the lower center of gravity.

This leads right into one of the “biology,” fallacies. Women tend to be shorter than men. That is biology, but it’s not a combat disadvantage. Additionally, even at the same height, women have a lower center of gravity than men. For a woman with hand-to-hand training, that’s a significant advantage. She will be significantly more stable than a much larger, male foe.

The second major factor we’re looking at right now is force generation. This is your ability to put power behind your punches and kicks. It’s also another case where, “biology,” misleads you. If you’re untrained, it’s easy to believe that you’re generating the force in your arms. This leads to the idea that someone like Schwarzenegger will have a very powerful punch. As a result, it’s easy to say, “women have a disadvantage because it’s harder for them to build upper body bulk.” Thing is, that argument is irrelevant because power does not come from the arm, it comes from full body rotation, starting in the hips. You keep the entire core in line, without twisting the spine. This has a result of putting your entire body weight into the strike. Properly executed, this will deliver far more force than you need, regardless of your gender.

If you’re wondering, this is also true of kicks; generation starts in the hips, you’re putting your weight into it, and when you connect, you’ll do so with far more force than you need. A trained female martial artist can easily apply more than enough force to shatter the heaviest bones in a much larger foe. For example, a properly applied Muay Thai shin kick or sidekick into the side of the knee will destroy it.

The role of momentum, or force generation, is where we connect to the powerful spinning and jumping attacks in martial arts. The greater the moment you generate, the harder you hit. Add running to the equation and it’s even worse. You might’ve been hit by someone running at you, now imagine getting hit by someone who knows what they’re doing and can weaponize a flying leap. That’s skill, not gender.

There’s also a related detail that exists agnostic of gender: You don’t want to, “just,” punch someone. Your hand, whether you’re a man or woman, consists of twenty-seven small, delicate bones. The same structure that allows for human manual dexterity also makes using the hand as a blunt instrument, “less than optimal.” This means, understanding where to put your hands, and how to hold them are far more important than simply applying unlimited force and reducing your foe into chunky salsa, simultaneously obliterating your ability to ever operate an ink pen again.

Again, this is mostly true for the feet as well. There’s only twenty-six bones, and you’re probably not using them to hold a pen, but you do rely on them to walk. The heel is a bit more sturdy than the palm, but you can still wreck it with a bad impact. Most neophytes have no idea how to protect their toes, and you can break those toes on impact. You can’t just hurl your foot at someone and hope for the best. You need to know how to maximize your impact, turn your hips over, and balance on a single leg while delivering enough force to shatter bones.

Combat is about what you know; what you have internalized and what you’re willing to do to another human being. If you are not willing to harm another person, that is debilitating in a fight, but it is not biological, it’s social.

Society harshly punishes acts of violence, and this can result in a real aversion to following through. Additionally, many martial artists do not practice with the intention of ever using what they’re learning on another person.

If you know what you’re doing; if you have the muscle memory; the hardest part is the mindset. Being willing to set aside the social norms, and decide to end someone’s life.

That’s the one thing about this that’s almost true. In western civilization women have been conditioned against engaging in violence. This starts in childhood. Girls are frequently given domestic focused toys, while boys are given martial ones. The games they’re encouraged to engage in follow similar patterns. Media produced also follows this. Action films are aimed at a male demographic, while romcoms are aimed at women. In a real sense, men are sold violence, women are sold love. The important thing to understand is: there is nothing real about this dichotomy.

Society tells you, “you should like this,” but, you have the freedom to choose what you do and what you like. The success of female led action films in the last few years solidly illustrates that there is huge untapped market among women for more aggressive representation. Climb into any MMO, and while you will find women in “traditional,” support roles, and RP communities, you’ll also find them the endgame raiding communities, and in aggressive combat roles. There are plenty of girls out there who eschewed, “traditional,” feminine toys, in favor of the same thing the boys were playing with. This is society, not biology.

If you think, for one second, that this doesn’t carry over into the real world, remember that there are women in police, military, and intelligence roles. Some nations are far happier to put women in combat roles, while others still find the idea socially unpalatable. However, these women exist.

Society tells you, “you should be like this,” but, you have the freedom to choose who you are. Social norms would prefer you to be domestic, passive, and waiting for rescue, but peer pressure only goes so far. Especially among women who simply migrate to peer groups more accepting of who they are.

Okay, having said all of that, let’s loop back and talk about the Mary Sue for a moment. The term itself is not, inherently, misogynistic, but it is frequently applied that way.

There’s nothing, inherently, wrong with an overpowered character. However, they are harder to work with. Especially if the character is so powerful that they could easily resolve the central conflict. This doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Just that more powerful characters can easily become the focal point of the story, so plan ahead.

Second, extreme combat proficiency does not, inherently, make a character overpowered. Being superhumanly skilled at combat will help you deal with a very specific, and somewhat rare, set of circumstances. It won’t help you interact with characters in any way that doesn’t involve the application of violence. So, the character is incredibly dangerous, but, only in one field.

A Mary Sue is not “a powerful character.” They are a character unconstrained by any limits. They are, “the best,” at everything. Any challenge placed in front of them can be solved trivially, in the optimal way. It’s not that they’re good at violence, but are in over their head when the conversation turns to politics. In short, a Mary Sue never faces adversity of any kind. The result is that a Mary Sue weakens the story they appear in. They’re blatant power fantasies, who only exist as an ego trip for the author.

The term is sometimes gendered, Mary Sue/Marty Stu, though the effect is the same. This has nothing to do with the character’s gender, beyond which label you prefer. (Male characters can also be referred to as Sues.)

However, the term is also, sometimes, applied to any powerful female character as a pejorative. In this context, it is a reactionary insult by someone who is offended or threatened by the idea that a woman could possess any power to influence their world. You can probably guess that my opinion of this particular “critique” is low.

If your character faces adversity. If they grow as a person. If they experience pain and loss. If they face challenges they cannot overcome, and must find other solutions, they’re not a Sue.

Your characters can be powerful. Women can be powerful. That’s not a sign that they are flawed. If someone is threatened by that idea, it tells you more about how insecure they are.

-Starke

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A friend asked me recently for advice on moving from thinking about writing a book to actually getting it done. I told her what I tell everyone: set small goals. Really, really small goals. Goals so easy that anyone could do them. Write half a page a day. Write 200 words. Write two sentences a day. Write one sentence a day.

When you make a goal so easy that you can’t not do it, something magical happens. You stop having excuses for not getting it done. Your life isn’t so busy you can’t get that one sentence is (at least almost always). And when you start doing it, most people find that they’ll keep at it for a little while longer than they expected.

So what if you just stare at the computer screen for a while? That happens. You can make different kinds of goals. You can make a goal to produce a certain number of words or to spend a certain length of time working on a project. Different goals work better for different people. I’ve actually moved to a time goal rather than a word count goal to keep myself honest. YMMV.

I’ve found this simple rule has worked in a lot of areas of my life. I fired my cleaners recently and decided that I could actually clean my house myself. I do it with 15 minutes a day. I have a list of simple jobs, from vacuuming stairs to cleaning toilets listed on my fridge. There are days I skip, I admit. There are also days when I end up doing a lot more than 15 minutes. But telling myself I only have to do it for 15 minutes has meant that I almost always have the energy to do a little bit.

When I first started running, I did it very, very slowly. The first day, I ran .1 mile on the treadmill. The second day, I ran .2 miles, and so forth, only adding .1 mile per day until I could run 6 miles all together.