My memory is not one of the best, you know. Keeps playing me tricks, and sometimes making me feel very, very silly. That's why I carry at least a small notepad and a pen with me wherever I go, cause I know I'm capable of the greatest 'forgactions', as I like to call it. But one thing I cannot forget is something James McSill taught me (meaning 'forged with burning iron in my brain') about the reach of a writer's work: if you want to reach a reader, YOU must reach the reader, not the other way around. And nowadays there isn't a better way to potentially reach the greatest amount of readers than to write in English.
When I first met James, in one of his famous 'Write in...', it thrilled me that he liked both my writing and the fact that I was already aware that if you want to make a living out of writing, you can't write for yourself. And that means you have to write to the market, and the readers are a part - the most important, but not the only - of it.
And during our writing coach sessions, James showed me that, if you are willing to play this game, you must do it right. If it is the market you want to reach, why not go for the biggest one? It's obviously harder due to the competition, but if you really take it seriously, you might already start ahead of the masses of not only unpublished, but also of 'non professional' writers, in the sense of writers who never really tried to learn how to write, mainly fiction. You can have the greatest idea in the world, heading towards a 67 weeks-in-a-row NYT best sellers list, but bookshops don't sell ideas, they sell the whole thing - the idea and the gazillion difficulties the writer went through to transform that amazing idea in an amazing book. There are quite e few of those writers out there, and, just like me, you're probably not one of them.
That is why we need to think of different tools that will help us getting there or at least somewhere near there. Back to the importance of writing in English, let's consider, for example, the situation of Iceland. Yes, that lonely island on the North Atlantic that grounded half the world's air crafts in 2010 because of the eruption of a volcano with an unpronounceable name.
By analyzing that small and highly developed country we can fully understand the power language has over the destiny of an entire nation. After World War II, when Iceland was basically a nation of farmers, the country developed rapidly and greatly after a wider and more intense exchange with the west, mainly the US (that maintained a military base on the island) and the UK. Now, virtually every Icelander under 60 can fluently read and write not only in Icelandic, but also Danish and English. Yes, English. Iceland is a 330k inhabitants nation, and only a handful more speak Icelandic outside the island. It is a tiny language that preserves the Old Norse roots to the point that modern Icelanders can read the medieval sagas, created by the brilliant storytelling minds of the Icelanders during the centuries that followed settlement by the Vikings from the continent, in the end of the 9th century.
The crucial point is: how much would the Icelanders have to spend, both in economic resources and in time, to translate into their language the immense quantity of knowledge available to so many other nations?
Today, the vast majority of the available knowledge is either produced in or translated into English, the language that has naturally become the major language of the so-called civilized world, as ancient Greek and Latin once were. Harry Potter, the most successful fiction work of all history, even though originally written in English, was translated into those two main dead languages.
That means only one thing: writing in English, or being published in English, today, is a total and complete necessity for those writers who want to go global, since English, for a wide variety of reasons that need no further explanation on what concerns the subject of the present article, is the current global language of mankind.
One may think that having a global language is something to fear, since it might, subtle and gradually, replace other less active and widespread languages. Nonsense. A great number of small languages and dialects are indeed endangered because the number of its native speakers is decreasing. However that has nothing to do with any external influence of a global language, but with how the communities that speak those languages or dialects are struggling to maintain such an important cultural element. We can once again take Iceland as an example. 300.000 people are less than the population of many UK cities. Still, the Icelanders not only maintain their language alive, but also cherish it with great passion: they love their language as a part of their forefathers’ heritage. But they are not blind to the fact that they do not possess a global mother language, like the British do, so they do the best of their efforts to compensate that disadvantage. By making it mandatory to all Icelanders to learn English and Danish as second languages, they actually are quite ahead of the British or any other nation that has English as a native language: they have access not only to knowledge in English, but also in Icelandic and Danish.
Thus the importance of being able to understand and to communicate in a global language, of which English is, by far, the most important: I am here, now, telling you how important it is to understand and to communicate in a global language, and I'm not doing this in Portuguese, which is my mother tongue. So, if you are reading this, and you are not a native speaker of English, you will automatically understand my point. If you are an Icelander, you might be smiling right now, feeling good about yourself (in a nice way), because you've had the opportunity to almost effortlessly be fluent in a global language that is not your mother tongue. My father, in Brazil, cannot feel that joy, since he cannot understand English. So, the next time I see him, when I go back to my home town, I'll give him a warm hug and thank him for the opportunity he bestowed me by having me learning English in a private school. A strong and warm hug, so my mother can feel it too, up there, in Heaven.
May the magic be with you!
London, England, 2012
Brit Writers
Facebook
Twitter
Writing is a global tongue - IMHO! Good post! :)
ReplyDelete