smol thread!
Do you ever do something as an author that's SO VERY CLEVER AND CHALLENGING and then
and then
nobody notices?
Y'all I wrote 1 of 5 POVs in a 3rd person book entirely without personal pronouns and I don't think anyone's mentioned it at all 🤣🤣🤣
I've started talking about it in like every interview now because I want more people to see it ah hahaha, and the reaction tends to be, "omg I didn't see it BUT NOW I DO"
I guess it's not as awkward to read English without pronouns as we tend to assume? 😉
me to my sister: NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT MY WU YONG PRONOUN CLEVERNESS
her: that just means you did it well, it's so smooth nobody notices
me: well I want them to notice a LITTLE 😂
(I think most people are assuming female, even though I tried to put in subtle "Wu Yong is not a woman" moments CLEARLY THEY WERE TOO SUBTLE. That's on me lol)
Why did I do it? Well when a book is "translation convention" from a language that doesn't gender pronouns --
and the group is genderdiverse-norm in the midst of a regressive society --
but there's no misgendering via pronoun or in-POV way to introduce neopronouns --
#TheWaterOutlaws
#language
#linguistics #fantasy #pronouns #AmWriting #WritingCommunity
well then, what do, how write?
I experimented a lot & no pronouns felt best for the character!
(they're in "fantasy Chinese", which doesn't gender pronouns just as real Chinese doesn't...which doesn't stop misogyny btw. Anglophones sometimes seem to assume that'd correlate but ungendering pronouns doesn't magically heal sexism/transphobia, sadly 😭)
@slhuang This is super cool. The Water Outlaws is already on my shelf and it's now officially at the top of my tbr pile.
