Acerca de el writing
Do you know Facebook? I’m going to suppose you do. Do you get those notifications instigating you to revisit some of your old posts? Because I sure do. I kind of like them. Every morning I check what did I write one, two or three years ago and then sometimes I remember that particular day in a more detailed manner. Most of the days are just normal days. Some are very bad. A few are not that bad. I usually end up remembering stuff that makes me sad. Don’t get me wrong, the free ticket to sadness is not what I like about the “on this day” feature. It’s just that I know that I’m going to end up remembering that stuff anyway, so I’d rather get a timely reminder of it than having the unplanned memories sneaking up on me while I’m doing other stuff, like taking a dump, for example. Let me tell you something: Bad memories have ruined enough of my dumps for something between 4 and 5 lifetimes. So yeah, I like that Facebook gimmick.
So yeah, the other day I laid my eyes upon an interesting post from the past. I’ve thinking about the subject of the post for 13 years. The post’s 4 years old. I’ve been thinking about the subject of the post for 9 years before I posted the post, and yet, when I read it again I knew that at that time I was not good at communicating what my nine years old experience with the subject was. My approach was naive and it showed. I relied too much on common places and the way video game reviews where structured in the mainstream media (magazines and some internet pages, mainly) and then… oh, shot, I revealed the topic of the post. Dang. I wanted it to be a more impactful revelation, but yeah, I was talking about video games. And here, look, I’m still talking about video games, which means that I’ve been thinking about video games for 17 straight years of my life and writing reviews of them for at least 4 years of those years.
So yeah, Deal With It®.
I’ve to deal with it every day.
I’ve been dealing with it for 17 god darned years.
What I’m trying to is that next year the neurons I dedicated to video game thinking are going to be old enough to legally buy beer.
What I’m really trying to say is that I could have a car by now.
Or at least nicer bedsheets.
But I don’t want to think too much about it, or else I’m going to end up shrieking so hard that I might kill all dogs nearby.
Well, okay: video games. I think about them, I write about them and I play them, in that order. It used to be the other way around. However, I’m older now. I’ve other things to do and I’ve played a whole big gulp sized serving of them. I’d already played an awfully lot of video games at the time of the post but wasn’t very good at writing about them. Not that I’m much better now, although you might not know it, because I haven’t written anything about video games yet, and I probably won’t, because, you see, this essay is not about video games. This essay is about writing, translations and also maybe at some point about growing up. And with that, I’m officially moving to The Point:
I wrote a review of the video game Sonic Generations in April of 2012. It was not the first time I wrote a video game review. It was the first time I wrote a video game review with the purpose of showing it. By the time I wrote Sonic Generations’ review, I’d already read a lot of video game reviews, so I was fully aware of how they were written, how they were structured and the sort of points they touched.
I could have gone with a regular video game review, but I felt like doing something different. I attempted to embed a narrative flow into the review, to make it more like a story in less than a Wikipedia entry, and since Sonic the Hedgehog was one of the first video games I’d ever enjoyed, I was confident that I could draw from my past to insert some anecdotes.
I didn’t succeed. I ended up talking about “graphics” and “music” in a stiffed manner. I ended up writing: “the graphics are good” and “the music is good”. I didn’t show it. I told it. I broke the flow and the whole middle section was written in a conventional style. The middle section ended up being a typical game review. I put the anecdote (just one) at the beginning and some remarks about the anecdote at the end. The connexion between the beginning, the middle and the end was vague at best, and despite its shortness — less than 1,000 words, I reckon — , reading it again I felt that the whole thing was an aimless mess.
The writing was regular. But again, the sentences were like sentences are regular video game reviews. I even mentioned “gameplay” at some point. That’s an empty word. It’s placeholder word. It’s a word you use when you don’t know how to describe something. There are many words like that, everywhere. They’re landmines, hidden pitfalls, capable of converting a conversation into not a conversation, for they will riddle the speech with the equivalent of real life NPC dialogue. They’re bad, but worst of all, they’re lazy. If you cannot pinpoint the crucial little details that differentiate something from the pack maybe you’re not paying enough attention. Or maybe you’re incapable of doing so. I think I was capable of seeing some of those details, but I couldn’t communicate those things. I sheltered myself into conventional phrasing instead of developing a more appropriated language. Here, let me show that dreaded sentence:
“El cambio puede parecer simple pero no lo es, ya que cada uno tiene mecánicas distintivas que modifican la forma de jugar.”
First of all: there should be a comma before “simple”, that’s grammar one-on-one.
Second of all: “modify the gameplay”. What a lame phrase. What an idiot pay of stupidity. And it sounds worse in English! Oh, yeah, I wrote the review in Spanish. Nowadays I write them in English. Not that there’s something wrong with writing in Spanish. I just find English — at least my version of it — more suited to video game writing. It’s comfy. Games are usually in English, so I guess it’s only natural to speak about them in that language. It’s almost logical. I wrote some other video game reviews in Spanish before realizing that. I migrated to English. I struggled a little bit. I learned new words. I read more. I learned new figures of speech. I developed something akin to a style. I kept writing. I’d got something akin to a style. I let that style do the hard work. Now I’m more preoccupied with flow and rhythm than with grammar and words.
But I keep reading.
Entre los tantos y muy variados tópicos sobre los que se puede escribir, los videojuegos claramente no son de los más profundos, interesantes o relevantes. No es que importe mucho. Después de todo, para quién se escribe sino para uno mismo. Escribir es, ante todo, una actividad lúdica. Las palabras son divertidas y sus combinaciones infinitas. Y una vez que se tiene idea de las reglas que básicas que rigen la sintaxis es posible abordar la cuestión del estilo, en cómo decir lo que se quiere decir. Se suele pensar que lo más difícil es tener algo que decir, una historia que sea interesante, una imaginación fértil y productiva. No es así. No creo que sea así. Siempre hay algo que decir. Lo difícil es decirlo.
¿Cómo decir lo que quieres decir? Pues hay que decirlo simplemente como es. Podría ser con frases simples y oraciones cortas. O quizá sea mejor emplear oraciones largas y laberínticas, en la que el tema no se aborda directamente, demorando al lector con una letanía que pudiera parecer interminable, hasta que, súbita pero inexorablemente, se llega al punto que se quería tratar. Eso a veces es divertido.
Es obvio que gran parte del estilo depende del lenguaje que se está usando, así como del dominio que se tiene de éste. Cada idioma tiene propiedades únicas, que afectan totalmente la forma en que se dicen las cosas.
Cualquier frase, por simple que parezca, es intraducible.
I was fifteen years old when I wrote my first original story. I’m not bragging. It was a dumb story. Not a cool, fun dumb story, just a dumb story. I came up with the whole thing in a handful of hours. I wrote it in less than that. I tried to read it. I couldn’t. I was awful. I felt bad. I tried to repair it. I added more paragraphs and edited sentences. It took me a whole day. Nothing much changed at the end; it was less awful, but awful still. I ditched the manuscript. Weeks later I thought of a new ending for the story. I tried again. The resulting story wasn’t good. I ditched the manuscript again. Some other weeks later I thought of a dumb twist. I tried again. This time I inserted as much dumb stuff as I could. I had fun doing that. The finished story was terrible. I ditched the manuscript. I started to write regularly.
En algún punto de mi vida aprendí los rudimentos del ingles. Aprendí a conjugar verbos, a formar oraciones gramaticalmente correctas y a darme a entender. Aprendí a preguntar donde se encontraba el baño y a comunicar mi nombre y número telefónico. Años después empecé a leer comics en ingles. Un día decidí leer un libro completo en ingles. Un libro relleno de puras letras y sin dibujos. Y pues no pude. Decidí leer un cuento completo en ingles. Me tomó un buen rato, pero lo terminé. Y a partir de entonces seguí leyendo cuentos, en especial cuentos que ya había leído en español.
In 2010 I got the new Harry Potter book. It was the British version. I decided that the best way to read it was translating it, word by word, and then read the translation. I fired up the text editor, took a bilingual dictionary and charged ahead with the plan. At the end I’d gone as far as translating the first chapter. I gave up and read the rest of the book in English. I sort of understood it. It was okay. I planned to read the official translation after its release. I never did. I watched the movie instead. I watched it in English. A few years later the last book in the series came out. I didn’t read it, I just watched the movie instead. It was good enough. I suppose there are many differences between the book and the movie, after all, if translating a writing between languages is hard, translating it to a movie should be harder, if not impossible.
But translations, yeah, they’re almost impossible to do. It is impossible to do a perfect translation. First of all, come on, nothing’s perfect. Second of all, every language is unique. Go to the Google and search for “Untranslatable words”. There are a whole lot of them. You’re going to find some curious word in German or Japanese that condense a full sentence into one word. Something like “blaferdafer” means the feeling of being left alone in the office because you got the night shift. That’s, well, untranslatable. However, there are certain words that cannot be translated, not because they mean a very specific or ample thing, but because there is not an equivalent on the other language. Those words only have meanings — and function — in the realm of the very same language that uses them; change it and they’re useless. I’m thinking about “it”, for example. Of course “it” means something in English, its meaning is one of the very first things we learn when studying that language! And yet, at least in Spanish, “it” doesn’t mean anything. In Spanish, everything and everyone is a he or a she. There’s no it. “It” doesn’t mean anything, therefore cannot be translated. Of course, you can put the corresponding replacement when translating, but the meaning is utterly lost. There’s a novel called “It”. In Spanish is called “Eso”. Put “Eso” in google translate — yeah, it’s the second time I mention a Google product, sue me (please don’t) — and you’ll get back “that”.
And that’s how you know that machines cannot understand poetry yet.
He escuchado a mucha gente hablar en idiomas que no son su lengua materna, con diferentes resultados. A veces pueden hacerlo muy bien. A veces no. A veces es exasperante. A veces es tierno. A veces es todo menos eso. Los idiomas son sonidos. Hablar es mover músculos. Cruzarse de brazos también es mover músculos. Cruzarse los brazos al revés es mover los mismos músculos, sólo que de forma ligeramente distinta. Cruzase de brazos al revés es un poco incomodo. Hablar en otro idioma es infinitamente más incomodo, porque requiere más músculos y movimientos más sutiles. También implica tener una idea, traducirla en palabras, revisar cómo estas palabras están ordenas (para evitar decir otra cosa) y después mover los músculos de la garganta y lengua para decir esas palabras. A veces, cuando estás hablando en un idioma que no es tu idioma natal (natural) hay que agregar un paso más: la traducción del pensamiento en el idioma natal al idioma no natal. Después de un tiempo es posible saltarse este paso, tener el pensamiento directamente en el idioma en el que se requiere. Después de más tiempo, ciertas ideas que sólo existen en cierto idioma empiezan a aparecer. Después de aún más tiempo se vuelve natural (pero nunca natal).
I started to write about video games in Spanish because only knew how to write in Spanish at the time. I moved to English because I felt comfortable with it. However, I don’t use English for everything. I use it for short stories, for example. Or for school reports. I don’t use it for novels. Not that I don’t want to. I know that I’m not good enough to write an English only story in 35,000 words. Heck, I don’t even know that many words. No, novels are out of the question. For whatever else… depends on what I want to say. When it comes to video games, ideas come fully formed in English, so I write them in English. When I write a short story in English is because I pictured it in that language, so I write it in that language. I’ve had ideas about a novel in English but, as I said before, I don’t feel capable to do that. I lack the ability. I know I would end up breaking the rules I’d set up for myself. That I cannot condemn, so I keep practicing. But rules keep accumulating, so it’s kind of a never ending race when I reach the training phase.
A lot of practice to be able to enforce a lot of rules in training. Sounds like I’m talking about becoming an NFL official. Sounds like I’m taking the fun out of writing. I’m not. I just want to write good stuff. Good stuff that I can pick up months or years later and read it and be like “yeah, this’s ok.” I’m that high school athlete that knows at the bottom of his heart that he’s not going to be professional, but at least he can be good enough to show off later the video of that time when he won the tri-state competition in his 25th high school reunion. Knowing it, that guy keeps hitting the gym. I keep making rules and practicing and then I go to practice.
And then comes the real thing.
En común encontrar pequeños escritos en Facebook o en blogs. Casi siempre los autores de estos responden a la ineludible pregunta de “¿cómo lo hiciste?” con el evasivo “sólo se me ocurrió”. “Sólo se me ocurrió”. “Sólo puse lo que tenía en la cabeza”. “Lo escribí de rápido”. ¿Por qué tanto miedo a esforzarse? Escribir no es diferente de cualquier otra profesión. Nadie se animaría a comprarle una casa alguien que la construyó “sólo porque se le ocurrió”. ¿Revisó los planos tan siquiera? ¿Escogió con cuidado los materiales? ¿Cómo sabe que tiene los cuartos suficientes? ¿Estudió arquitectura en algún momento? Construir una casa es difícil. Diseñar una casa también es difícil. Hay gente que estudia diseño de casas (y otros edificios) por años. Primero aprenden lo más que pueden sobre diseño, materiales, procesos, leyes y demás cosas que son necesarias saber para poder construir una buena casa, una casa que no se desmorone, vaya. La gente que quiere construir casas aprende todas esas cosas, es examinada por gente que ya sabe esas cosas y, si demuestra que aprendió lo necesario, recibe un titulo de arquitecto. El titulo de escritor, por otro lado, no es algo que se pueda obtener tan fácil. No hay escuela alguna que lo otorgue, para empezar.
Knowing how to write is not the same as actually writing. Writing is not imprinting spoken words into letters. It could be, but that’s not the sort of writings I’m talking about. Letter by letter transcripts is useful for, uh, the FBI or CIA. Not for a novel. Not for an essay. Especially not for a play. Maybe not for poetry. Poetry is weird. I don’t know anything about that. But yeah, do not tell it exactly as it was said. Also: don’t tell it in a contrived manner. Cut the chit-chat that happens in real life conversations to a minimum, but do not make your characters talk in an impossibly eloquent way, for that is not how we talk in real life. We usually don’t have a lot of time between thinking a response and saying it. We have even less time when we’re speaking in a foreign language. More often than not we want to respond as fast as we can, so we use the words that come faster to the brain. The words that come faster are usually the simplest ones, those we use on a daily basis. We say “black” instead of “darker as charcoal in the starless night.” It’s simpler and also better.
But then again, nobody’s going to read a novel which dialogue’s plagued of “dudes,” “uh,” “thing,” “very” and those other words that we use as placeholders for ideas or concepts in our head that we spoke out before they were fully formed. Nobody wants a history in which the characters stumble to find the words they want to say, or make a lot of detours to arrive at the point or are repeating themselves over and over again. But also nobody — or at least not that many people — wants dialogue that resembles those long monologues stuffed with pretentious words that would take something like 15 actual minutes (without counting the continuous dictionary consultations).
It’s a balance issue. Good writings are balance acts. Regular writings are self-restrained. Great writings are just great; balanced in their own messy ways, even when they’re not.
It’s a balance issue. Long dialogues could be unnatural and boring; short dialogue can be insufferable. Detailed descriptions stall the story; vagueness is barely tolerable. Relying on metaphors leads to cliches; just plain sentences won’t help. You should mix thing up to keep the reader engaged; change too often and he’ll become estranged. Don’t do much and also don’t do too little. Edit yourself and listen to quibbles.
Editar no es popular; no es lo primero que viene a la mente cuando piensas en escribir y, sin embargo, es casi o tan importante como escribir. Editar es escribir en reversa: quitar en lugar de agregar. También es cambiar cosas, pero lo más importante es quitar. Siempre. Si sólo estás cambiando palabras no sirve de mucho. Si quieres decir que “él cerró la puerta con fuerza” quizá sea mejor poner simplemente que la azotó. No se necesitan tantos adjetivos. De esos sólo abusan los científicos. Y honestamente, ¿quién quiere escribir como científico? Esos siempre dicen “paper” en lugar de “artículo”.
Editing can hurt. Gutting down the entire paragraph you’ve been working on for hours is hard. Nobody wants to admit that he (or she) wasted time doing something useless. Because that sucks. But hey, a whole lot of other things also suck. Man up. Write what you want to. Check it. Hate it. Cut it. Be ruthless. Check it again. Hate it harder. Scythe it. Be actually ruthless. Begin again. Do it a lot and maybe someday you’ll be good — I want to believe because I haven’t reached that yet. And maybe I’ll never be good. And who cares. Or maybe I will. And who the hell cares. As long as I don’t piss off the cops there is nothing stopping me from being bad at writing, translating and editing for another 17 years.
Editar es mi parte menos favorita. No es que no me guste borrar cosas, es más bien que no quiero re-leer lo que ya escribí, porque hasta el día de hoy no he podido volver a ver algo que ya había hecho sin pensar que es un montón de basura ilegible y sin sentido. Y pues me dan muchas ganas de corregirlo, cuando no es tan horrible, o de quemarlo junto con mis dedos, cuando sí lo es.
“This is just like a song,” I’m constantly reminding myself, “put a beginning, a middle, and then finish it before it gets boring.” Most of the time, the whole thing is boring right from the first sentence, so most of the time I just delete everything.
On the rare occasions in which I do a not-that-boring thing (at least according to myself) I spend a lot of time tinkering with the manuscript. During the writing phase I set up a diorama, and in the editing phase I check the little toy soldiers, I make sure they are looking at the right direction, moving them one inch to the left, and then half to the right until their position is good enough.
“Brincó”… no, tal vez sea mejor poner “saltó”… no, tampoco; le falta algo. Quizá sea mejor decir que “siguió corriendo, pasando por encima de la verja”. O no, eso es muy largo. Quizá, quizá… quizá lo mejor sea dejarlo en “salto”. O bueno, ya, ¿para qué hablar de eso para empezar? El chiste es que empezó a correr desde el punto A hasta el punto B sin detenerse. Sí, eso: “empezó a correr y no se detuvo hasta llegar”. Sí, eso. O ya sé, “corrió y no se detuvo”. ¡O ya sé, ya sé!: “corrió”.
Anything you might want to say can be said. But you need to be good enough to say it. Nothing is inextricable. So, if your idea is not understood it’s your fault (because you can’t write well enough). And if you over-explain everything and bore the reader it’s also your fault (because you can’t edit well enough). And if the idea is boring, to begin with, well that’s on you too. Why did you try to make bad ideas work? Just talk about something easy. Like video games. Those things are stupid. You can’t go wrong with that.
Escribir es, en fin, esa actividad que Borges decía que es menos civilizado que leer. Lo que al bueno de Borges le falto aclarar fue que sin los barbaros que escriban, no hay nada que los caballeros pueda leer. La tarea del escritor es, entonces, la de ensuciarse, la de bajarse al lodo y sembrar con sus propias manos las letras que alguien más se dará el lujo de degustar y juzgar. Y por eso para escribir hay que agarrarle el gusto a la mugre, o al menos recibir una paga que valga la ensuciada.
And baby, oh baby, you might wanna call the cops because I must confess: I do really enjoy all this filth.