On writing

The truth is, I'm a terrible writer.

For most people, this has always been the case but they never realise it, or don't think too much about it. For me though, it was a sudden realisation at the end of my high school years, and I never really recovered from the shock.

I've always enjoyed language, but this enjoyment has always been in the form of reading instead of writing. This probably forms an image in your mind of some intellectual frowning thoughtfully while reading through War and Peace. The truth is much more embarrassing. I’ve read some of the classics when prodded to or forced - Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, Shakespeare - but most of my reading is limited to much more consumable stuff like Stephen King, Roald Dahl’s short stories for adults, Gerald Durrell, and Arthur C. Clarke.

When I realized how bad I was at writing, it became something I tried to avoid, except out of absolute necessity. I dreaded having to form arguments and write essays in university, and I just never felt the need to write at any other time. Looking back over some of those essays makes me cringe at how clumsily they were worded though, so I guess I must have improved a bit.

Eventually I discovered that I actually did enjoy writing, in the form of translation, and somehow managed to form a carrier around it. A lot of professional translators say that to be a good translator, you need to be a good writer. While I agree with this, I think that more than anything you need a strong awareness of your own language and its writing styles. Most of these styles I learned mainly through reading and then imitating them in translations, rather than learning them from scratch. Basically this means that I'm nothing more than a talented copycat. I don’t have anything of my own that’s interesting enough to talk about, so I have to let other people come up with topics for me.

Translating did teach me how to edit my own work though. This has been further improved by working as an in-house translator and having to edit other people's work. Suddenly I found myself spending hours a day doing nothing but playing with and contemplating English sentences.

In French there's a saying that goes something like "Eating increases appetite" and I guess that was the case for me. Even though I'm terrible at writing, I suddenly have the urge to do nothing but write, for writing’s sake, even in my spare time.

I've also slowly been translating my way through an untranslated collection of Murakami Haruki's (Haruki Murakami’s?) essays, published in his book "Murakami Asahi-do". I have no aspirations of becoming a literary translator, but for some reason I really find myself enjoying translating what he describes as his “scribbles".

So I guess that shock of knowing I was a terrible writer is fading, and I'm beginning to find enjoyment in it. Something tells me I will never be a Murakami Haruki though.