Tag: courting the muse

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Courting the Muse

Why All Writers Should Read in Translation

In my last year of college, I took a class that destroyed my trust in translation. For our first session, the professor passed around a thick packet of poetry, full of lines that echoed one another — crying or singing ospreys, ladies gentle or modest, the flowering of duckweed or cress. Though they pulled from a common pool of imagery, each poem felt different, in the structure of the lines and the texture of the vocabulary. But in truth, they were all the same poem.

In those five or six different versions, we encountered the same classical Chinese, retracting through the minds of five or six different translator-poets. Filtered through their understanding, ornamented by their artistry, the original verse seemed to shatter and burst into a multitude of different colors, like white light forced through a prism. The resulting translations didn’t read like different versions of the same poem, they read like different poems entirely, even though the same bright-voiced birds called from within each of them..

That single, ninety-minute class taught me that translation was more daring and less precise than I realized — not so much like distilling mathematical truth from an equation, more like carving an image out of living wood. Two artisans, shown the same flowering tree can whittle it down to reveal two wholly different shapes.

Precisely when I lost faith in translation as an exact science, I started seeking out more translated texts to read. I was fascinated by all the literary choices they represented — why this word, out of all the possible synonyms? Why this phrase to convey an idiom that doesn’t exist in English? If something must be lost in translation, why sacrifice this element of the text, instead of that?

As writers, we’re forced to make challenging stylistic decisions of our own, even if we work only in our native tongues. Reading in translation, I’ve found, brings these choices to the forefront and helps us conceptualize them as the challenges — even dramas — that they are.

Suppose you write a scene one way, out of all the ways that you could have rendered it. What are you giving up by doing that? What possibilities for your story are you closing off — and what possibilities are bringing into being?

All writing, in a way, feels like an act of translation: not between languages, but from the rush of images and moods in an author’s head to a cluster of words that can be parsed by outsiders. Like translation it’s about opening up something that was inaccessible.

A translator proper has to consider whether their decisions do justice to the text they’re bringing to new life. As writers, we’re not beholden to a true source text — just the visions we harbor inside our minds. But the relationship between the words we write and the imagined text we’re writing toward can be just as fraught as the twisty opaque connections between translation and source text.

At the end of the day, no translation is perfect — at least not the way a mathematical proof is perfect. By the same token, no story will look exactly how the author envisioned. But they can still be striking and moving in unexpected ways. By reading in translation, we can learn to appreciate those beautiful imperfections.

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.

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Courting the Muse

How Reading Perfume Catalogs Can Help You Show, Not Tell

Emily Dickinson knew how to find inspiration without leaving the house. In her thirties, the reclusive poet withdrew into the quiet of her childhood home, holding conversations through her closed bedroom door. But she also carried out lively friendships through letter-writing, and even traveled — so to speak.

Dickinson, as much a landlubber as any, wrote movingly about the nautical sweep of reading, something we as writers know well:

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away.

But there’s another vessel that can carry our imaginations to distant lands without moving our bodies at all: perfume.

Smell, as Helen Keller once observed, is “a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles” — often to places we’ve never been before. Perfumers use this teleportational magic to tell a story, bottling up exposition, climax, and denouement to bloom through the air as top notes, heart notes, and base notes.

Perfumes are succinct, vivid, and memorable — all show and no tell. As storytellers, we can learn a lot from how they work. How to distill an experience into a few drops of salience. How to ensnare someone’s attention from the opening and keep hold of it as the story unfurls. How to evoke emotion directly, by playing to the senses instead of the mind. Still, there’s one problem when it comes to transmuting perfume into writing inspiration: scent is notoriously difficult to capture in words — at least if you take a direct approach.

What happens if you list out a perfume’s component scents? Violet, ylang-ylang, rice powder. The words are pretty enough, but they feel abstract, even sterile — no living fragrance clings to them. The ingredients might tell us what the perfume smells like, but they don’t show us how it feels to dash it along our wrists, to wait as the heat of our bodies makes it dance across our skin. When it comes to scent, words so often fall flat.

Luckily for us, copywriters in the fragrance industry have grappled with the inexpressibility of scent for years. As creative writers, we can learn a lot from the perfume catalogs they assemble, which translate stories told in scent into our chosen medium of language.

As an example, let’s look at a perfume built around the violet, ylang-ylang, and rice powder scents I brought up either. These notes take on a starring role in Blanc Violette, a powdery floral scent developed by the indie perfume house Histoires de Parfums.

Instead of simply listing out its olfactory components, the perfume’s catalog entry uses evocative language to capture a delicate and playful mood:

Amidst the subtle games of shadow and light playing out in the underbrush, heart-shaped flowers flourish, showing off their delicate lines on a lush blanket of chlorophyll and Violets.

An image of purity and innocence, White Violet enhances the skin with a delicate freshness, at once iridescent and scintillating, and powdery and creamy.

An evening perfume caught between shadow and light, and innocence and seduction: a sweet, powdery and witty fragrance.

Whether or not you know what violet smells like, this catalog entry develops striking but accessible imagery — the heart-shaped flowers, the play of light and shadow — to convey how wearing it feels. When we grapple with linguistically elusive concepts in our own writing, we can do the same: showing what we mean through powerful imagery instead of telling it in spare and lifeless words.

Failing that, we can always spritz on a bit of perfume to inspire us as we power our way through our drafts. Why not write in a cloud of Paper Passion, which captures the aspirational scent of new books?

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.

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Courting the Muse

Why Reading Bad Prose Can Make You a Better Writer

A quarantine isn’t a writing retreat. Sure, some of the greats managed to transmute epidemiological panic into excellent prose (and poetry). Shakespeare — as I’m sure we’ve all heard — may have taken advantage of the Globe Theater’s shuttering to pen King Lear as the plague ravaged London. Now, panic sweeps through our own communities while government orders shutter our doors. Should we channel the Bard and try to write our way out of alienation and anxiety?

For some, that’s easier said than done. Maybe you’re spending this time caring for loved ones, looking out for vulnerable neighbors, or even just learning how to navigate this new normal: urgent and necessary tasks that push your latest writing project to the wayside. That’s no reason for guilt. After all, you’re a human being before you’re a writer, and practicing compassion — for yourself and your community — will only make you a more sensitive storyteller in the long run.

That said, if you do have the bandwidth to craft a paragraph or fashion a plot, creating through the uncertainty can help you feel less adrift. It’ll stimulate your mind with something other than the news and give you a reason to reach out to like-minded writers — crucial at a time when we could all stand to feel less alone.

Just don’t put undue pressure on yourself by trying to write the next King Lear. Instead of force-fitting yourself into a Shakespearean mold, try looking to a counterintuitive source for authorial inspiration: bad writing. Not only will it give you a much-needed laugh, but studying shoddy prose will actually help you sharpen your craft. Here are three reasons why.

1. Learning how not to write can be easier than learning how to write

Think back to your standardized test-taking days. Remember using the process of elimination to puzzle out a question that might have otherwise stumped you?

Studying bad writing — a plodding novel, a disjointed short story, even a muddled and misshapen sentence — can improve your craft in the same way. Read enough problematic prose, and you’ll quickly build up a checklist of things to look for as you revise. Speaking of which….

2. Honing your editorial judgment is easier when you’re reading someone else’s prose

As writers, we can be blind to our own stylistic quirks, letting our gaze slide over major bobbles because we got inured to seeing them. On the other hand, we might be oversensitive to our faults. Without a firm sense of our own writerly strengths, we end up second-guessing everything and finding fault with perfectly sound passages.

When you read bad prose produced by another writer, these emotional hang ups aren’t in play: you can read the passage for what it is and critique it with a cool head. Over time, you’ll develop sound editorial instincts — and be able to draw on them when you return to your own writing.

3. Seeing the greats falter is a great reminder of your own potential

Maybe you’re worried that this particular form of writing inspiration leads to a mean-spirited exercise in punching down. After all, does anyone turn out terrible prose except for newbie writers — the very people we should be showering with support and encouragement?

Luckily, that’s not quite true — you can find plenty of models for how not to write among the oeuvres of literary giants. Just look at the hordes of Booker Prize winners who have earned nods from the infamous Bad Sex in Fiction Award and the fearless book reviewers who savage the bibliosphere’s stars. Even Shakespeare himself doesn’t always hit a home run: Titus Andronicus has garnered its share of thumbs downs over the years.

You should absolutely read celebrated writers at their best. But don’t be afraid to read them at their worst as well. It’s a much-needed reminder that every literary luminary was once like you — a writer intent on improving their craft.

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.

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Courting the Muse

When Watching TV Doesn’t Mean Procrastinating on Your Manuscript

During my last semester of undergrad, I spent a lot of time watching 30 Rock.

Like many graduating seniors, I suffered from a mild-to-moderate case of senioritis: a heaviness that periodically gripped my limbs at the very thought of academic work. But the time I spent riveted on Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin as they traded repartees? That didn’t count as a symptom. My steady diet of sitcom wit wasn’t procrastination — it was research.

That was the semester I signed up for a workshop on literary translation, taught by a celebrated translator of Hebrew and Arabic. Over the course of fifteen weeks, the class chipped away at individual projects, wrestling with texts in languages that — for the most part — neither our classmates nor our professor could understand. Then we’d read each other’s work as a group. As the term wore on, we sampled a dizzying array of translations: Russian realism, Greek philosophy and, in my case, classical Chinese domestic farce.

Of course, we couldn’t offer notes on how accurately each translator treated the languages we didn’t know how to read. What we could critique was the quality of the English that came out the other side: the flow of the sentences, the music of the syllables, the feelings that arose as we read each line. That was when I realized literary translation was as much about writing as it was about understanding a text: it was creative, as well as critical, work.

Now, what exactly did translating classical Chinese have to do with 30 Rock? Not a lot at first, as you’d probably assumed. But that changed as the semester progressed and my project started to develop in a new direction. 

The piece I’d chosen to translate was earthy, irreverent, and dialogue-rich: lively with farcical liaisons, domestic squabbles, and pretentious characters who’d misquote the classics to justify their jealousy and lust. It was also literally full of holes — and not the plot variety. Part of a cache of excavated texts from the Western Han, the rhapsody dated back to the second century BC, and the bamboo it was inked on had been badly damaged, gnawed away by time. In the transcription I worked from, typed out by a Peking University professor, brackets and ellipses stood in where the original characters could no longer be read.

My first pass through this fragmentary text left me with a tortuous translation, pocked by footnotes and straining toward literalism. The other workshop participants gamely picked their way through the frustrated tangle of my English, asking insightful questions. But I could tell from their reactions: all I’d manage to get across was the text’s brokenness and difficulty, not the wit and soul that drew me to it in the first place.

So for my second draft, I decided to cut loose a little. Instead of bowing under the tyranny of the corrupt original, I’d turn this fragmentary story into a play, letting the sharp humor of the dialogue speak for itself. I wanted to spotlight what was still there, not the parts that were lost forever. 

When I told the workshop about this new approach, I couldn’t resist ending with a joke: “I’m thinking about watching a lot of sitcoms to make sure the dialogue sounds right.” But my classmates — and our professor — took me seriously, encouraging me to study TV writing as I learned to craft dialogue. So Liz Lemon and I started spending quite a bit of time together.

As it turns out, a tightly scripted sitcom really is a masterclass in writing conversations. Break it down, and you’ll learn more than the art of a snappy one-liner: you’ll get a sense of how to write dialogue that sounds natural without being pulled from real life, with all its pauses, mumbles, and wasted air. 

The next time you’re stuck on a bit of dialogue, try taking inspiration from your favorite Netflix show. Whether you’re writing a novel or turning a 2,000-year-old text into a play, the characters you’re trying to coax into conversation will thank you. Best of all, you’ll get to watch TV — guilt-free.

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.