#but in french itd be like.. 'lapin' which could be a nickname ig but | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

moodr1ng · 4 months

Text

one weird and annoying effect of me spending so much time on mainly american social media and watching all these american shows and movies and reading books by american authors and having all these online friends from america etc etc is that like.. when i write i no longer feel like i can set my stories in france? like, bc i write in english it feels like i need to set my stories in an english-speaking country, and the us is the easiest one to set up (i think in a way it kinda feels like the "default setting" of western media?). i feel like if i wrote a book set in france itd be weird or confusing to people, and also im always bugged bc like.. the stuff i write in english cannot be directly translated into french, like it doesnt correspond 1:1 to french sentences, and so if i set a story in france im always bugged bc i think "but that cant be what the characters are actually saying, because theres no equivalent to this in french". so i end up setting a lot of my stuff in the us, except ive only been to the us once and not long enough to get a good impression of what living there is like (not to mention ive only been to nyc), so i also feel like when americans read my stuff theyre gonna immediately go "huh? thats not how things are here. this author is a hack who cant do research." .. so then sometimes i set my stuff in fictional countries or in an ambiguous impossible setting which mixes stuff from various english-speaking countries + france, but then that makes my story immediately less grounded. this is such a big issue that it blocks me from writing entire stories i wanna write bc i just cant even begin to put them somewhere 😔

#97 #ig the two options are like..#either suck it up and write shit set in france even if ik the language thing bugs me #or set it in the us and have someone from the area im writing about read through it and correct everything i got wrong #both of which are a bit daunting.#'sunny' is my one story thats explicitly set in france #and the language thing bugs me SO SO SO much.#even the tiniest bit like..#omars nickname for sunny is 'bunny'#which works double as a cute nickname + as a play on her name right #but in french itd be like.. 'lapin' which could be a nickname ig but #it has a totally diff vibe. its not as cute. it comes off more weird or forced as a nickname.#and it has nothing to do w sunnys name.#stuff like that is always annoying me.#oh yeah 'brotherhood' is also set in france i forgot lol and i had the same issue there!#the librarian in brotherhood makes a pun on the phrase 'early bird gets the worm'#but thats not a phrase in french and neither is 'bookworm' with which she makes the pun #so its like. no she didnt say that. she cant have bc theyre supposed to be speaking french.#actually sometimes i even feel like im not knowledgeable to write france either!!#like i wanna set something in paris but while im in paris often im always a passerby #and i feel like i cant write paris in an authentic and genuine way #so what am i just supposed to set all my stories in my city and nowhere else??#i probably overthink this stuff.

3 notes · View notes