Language mix

The tale behind the story #3

Before leaving you to the 3rd episode of the tale behind the story, I just wanted to drop a few lines about my current “story”.

I had another spell of high stress, which left me with no energy and no mental space. Last Tuesday (which will probably be two weeks before this post) I was looking forward to finally have scheduled time to write, but I was unable to sit down and write a single line. Joe Dispenza, an author I follow, would say that my brain and heart were not coherent and my body was in survival mode: this is not a time for creation. I stopped resisting what was obvious (I was not in creative mode) and worked on releasing the pressure instead.

I have so many tools to prevent getting stressed in the first place, but somehow I now and then get sucked in the whirl of things without noticing. When I realize that something is really off, I am so deep in it, that unentangling requires time, and energy - both of which are a rare commodity in this sort of situations.

I though always believe that I can somehow get through and come back to my path again. I am glad to say, that today I wrote 1.300 words in an hour 🥳. Nothing which I can publish, for the time being, but it does not matter. It feels good to have found my creative spark again.

And now, back to the tale behind the story!

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I studied English, French and German in high school (which in Italy is between 14 and 19), I started studying Chinese when I was 16 and I later learned Spanish when I lived in Spain for a few months. I love learning and using foreign languages and I thrive in situations when I can speak more than 2 at the same time!

Obviously, English is not my mother tongue, and I know I come across as a foreigner writing in English. But I decided to accept that. I am aware that there are some things which I won’t be able to do when writing in English, like reproducing accents from an English-speaking country or a specific region within that country as they are not familiar to me. But I can still play with languages across cultures.

While writing my novel, jungling characters who speak different languages was though challenging. I always feel irritated when in movies or books doors are open without ever being closed, gas stoves are not turned off or characters do improbable things. I could not bring myself to use English for my book and skip explaining how communication was possible, given the fact that characters had different mothertongues. Thus, I added a few sentences here and there to show that the communication was sometimes taken place in translation. I used some French words and some pinyin (romanization of Chinese characters), and I gave some characters a broken language, to show their language skills were not so good. In one scene I opted to have a short exchange fully in Chinese characters to create some tension.

I wonder if I am the only one bothered by such details or not. Do you ever stop wondering how characters communicate when they obviously are from another country?