Lost in Translation

There’s a Vietnamese grocery store on McPhillips Street and there’s a sign out front that says, “Free Run Chicken.” My thinking is that they’re selling free-range chicken and the translation between Vietnamese and English is maybe a little less than direct. Either way I have this image in my head of chickens running lose inside the store.

It got me thinking about what’s lost in translation and, in particular, how we try and recreate the world around us; especially now that there’s so many outlets to do this through.

In our Creative Writing class this week we’re working to create radio dramas which we’ll produce later on. Our instructor, Karen Press, is getting us to think about the tools available to us that’ll help create a sense of the real for our listening audience.

We listened to ‘The Suicide Tapes’ which with its tape recorder hissing (I learned this was a filter) sounded so legitimate that I thought they were real. The possibility of it being real made listening to the tapes all the more creepy. And interesting.

We also listened to ‘Afghanada,’ modeled on Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. The problem I had listening to these episodes was not being able to tell when the narrator was reminiscing and when a scene from his memory was being re-enacted. Sure the extraneous goat bleets cued me into a rural terrain but it wasn’t enough to help me make sense of the structure.

Above all else, if what I’m listening to is supposed to be “real” then there has to be a reason to be listening to it. Like with ‘The Suicide Tapes,’ you can easily imagine you’re listening to evidence collected in what ends up being the murder of a psychiatrist by her patient. It’s their sessions and her case notes. Simple.

And what about dialogue?

When you’re writing  a fiction story, making your dialogue sound realistic (like it could actually have come out of someone’s mouth) is more than half the battle. Not only do the words used need to sound natural, the lines spoken by one character have to “sound” different than the words spoken by another. Creating different voices without a voice to speak them: it’s challenging. But you probably knew that.

What’s weird again is how much effort goes into sounding natural. I’m tempted to say that sounding natural should come naturally but that somehow sounds too contrived, like I was waiting to say that very line. Hmmm...

And take a moment to consider Twitter.

There are a small number of people in my class on Twitter who have crafted a very natural (and witty) voice in their tweets. Yes, that is a tinge of jealousy peaking through my letters. I’ve been on Twitter since September and have yet to feel comfortable hitting that send button.

It’s likely that the limitation of 140 characters compacts the trouble of creating a standout voice for either yourself or one of your characters, something that makes success all the more impressive. But it still seems to me a bit peculiar. Beyond that I haven’t quite figured out my opinion.

Writing schizophrenia

As a CreComm student who is familiar, and had been familiar prior to this point, with multitasking, I’m finding that my brain, so close to Christmas break, is having a difficult time doing so, particularly when it come to writing.

I’ll say right now that the sentence you just read, unless of course you read things from the second paragraph onwards, is offending every Journalistic cell in my body. (I can tell you that there aren’t many of them.)

It’s maybe a little convoluted, I think there’s six commas, and I can feel my J-instructor just cringing. But what you just read is how I hear stuff in my brain. If you shrunk down and walked around inside my head these are the words you’d see, in that order, lined up and ready to give my fingers their marching orders.

Or it used to be.

Today, sitting here (multitasking: eating my lunch, writing a blog, as well as) editing my creative writing fiction I find the sentences forming in my head are straight, to the point, with no words like convoluted. Perfect for Journalism.

The problem is I used to think of myself as a good writer, it was the thing I loved to do. But reading over some of my stuff for Journalism, articles, reviews, etcetera, it’s good writing, but not something I’m particularly proud of. The thing is it doesn’t sound all the way like me, probably because my sentences have very few commas or semi-colons (God, I love a good semi-colon) and adverbs have been ripped right out of my vocabulary.

Trying to write my first, second, and now third revision of my piece of fiction it’s coming out of my brain all wrong. I haven’t had writer’s block this bad since…I wrote a review assignment this weekend. I’ll be honest, the problem is not lack of what to write, it’s insecurity about how to write it and, being honest again, I’m a stubborn person. The way I want to tell you a story is that was I think this story should be told—with interjections, set off by commas, dashes, and lots of brackets. (Did I just say that?)

I’m suffering…yes, suffering… from writing schizophrenia. And it sucks.

The way I see it, only option available to me, given that I’m too something (I can’t think of the word and I hate it when that happens) to compartmentalize my writing style properly, is to get through the next two weeks and then sleep it off for two more. Maybe, just possibly, my convoluted sentences that I love so much and that I’ve worked so hard to take out of my writing will come back to me in their proper place: a separate Word document with the title “Creative…blah blah blah” on it.

ps. One of the reasons I’ve come up with for the panic that now accompanies sitting down with my laptop, besides the need to pare down my writing by 50 or 60 words  for J, is word count. If this side note sounds a little awkward, it’s because I’m trying to stretch it out to 500 words to fit some criteria. 528. Wait, 530. That number would be heading in the opposite direction if this were a Journalism assignment.