来来去去

[presumenothing]

Me? Writing fic in Chinese? In the year 2022?

Clearly more likely than you think, and solely to be blamed on ZS-adjacent The Truth brainrot. It's enjoyable enough (with admittedly some degree of annoyance re: not being able to write at my usual speed) and I've gotten a fairly gratifying level of response on Lofter (aka Tumblr-equivalent, for those lucky enough to not have fallen down this rabbit hole before) so that's fun.

Otherwise, nothing much to update aside from extensive yelling about the solo Douyin concert from earlier this month

which I managed to catch most of live!

Also:

10/10 adorable. That is all.

Comments

[trobadora]

Awwww! :D :D :D

And yay for the fic writing, that's great!

[elenothar]

Don't get distracted by the way I keep thinking 'gherkin' when looking at his outfit, don't get distracted-

I'm curious, do you find the fic writing process noticeably different in Chinese vs English beyond speed?

[presumenothing]

Also aside from the questioning my grammar/vocab/the universe and actually bothering to look stuff up in the dictionary, you mean? XD

Fannish conventions are already different to start with, of course, including fic formats and what gets mentioned in the starting notes – though arguably the latter wasn't exactly standardised in pre-AO3 English fic either, o days of wild potentially untagged yore.

Content-wise, I'm still on the post-canon/canon divergence/missing scene/unhinged crossover-ish-AU spinny wheel, which I think is quite agreeably on-brand for me and so doesn't feel much different (excepting the part where I was frantically skimming through the CN Wikipedia entry for Inception looking for all the story terms, brain why).

Language, though. I have been using so much metaphor. Also commas for days because I can't remember if/how run-on sentences have any legal standing at all. And what makes up a parallel construction in each language is vastly different given word count and syntax. Good thing each word has so much nuance because how else am I supposed to live without my italics. Dialogue tags?? Paragraph breaks between different characters?? Apparently nowhere near mandatory judging from the average fic I've read but not a habit I will give up, though being able to omit the context-obvious subject is incredibly convenient at times. Also the entire concept of a rigid POV is made-up and you can hop heads and vary the omniscience sauce as much as you like. I don't even think I could sanely translate my own fics back to English at this point without rewriting a significant chunk of it (at least if I wanted it to Vibe the same author-intended way). And so on, there's probably an essay I currently can't brain to be found in there.

[elenothar]

Oh, that's fascinating re: the language bits. Particularly using more metaphor - I already feel like there's a difference between English and German there (the two languages I'm most qualified to comment on), with the latter rather sparser in prose, but I always wondered whether the prevalence of, says, chengyu sort of makes Chinese more metaphorical by default? Do chengyu count as metaphors, always, or does it depend on their content?

Also the entire concept of a rigid POV is made-up and you can hop heads and vary the omniscience sauce as much as you like.

Now, that explains some other things I've been wondering about (mostly re: translated cnovels). It's interesting because the strict 'one pov per scene' thing is something I learned through osmosis when I first started writing English fanfic, but I definitely didn't start out with that, so it's not inherent, but really strong convention.

Good thing each word has so much nuance because how else am I supposed to live without my italics.

Oh, does Chinese writing not use italics at all then? What about bolding, underlining etc?

... do feel free to ignore any and all questions I'm throwing at you here, I just find this topic super interesting 😅