Every Friday I have my French lesson with my teacher, Claude. For the first half hour we talk in French randomly, but sincerely and intimately, since over the years we have become friends. Then, for the second half hour, I read to Claude a written French text that I have prepared. The setup is this: for each week, Claude gives me a subject — it is always just a word, a noun, but it can be anything — clouds, butterflies, pepper, couch — anything. The rule is I have to include that word in my writing for that week. Other than that, I can write anything. I read what I have written paragraph by paragraph, then Claude reads it back to me and makes the corrections — there are always a lot of them — and we discuss what I meant to say if it’s unclear.
When we started I just wrote a serious essay on whatever the subject was, but I quickly realized that that wasn’t very satisfying. So I thought, why not write a murder mystery, and make every week a new chapter? So that’s what I did, for 60 chapters or so. But then, as the mystery came to an end, and as I realized I didn’t like to plan much in detail, and that I wasn’t very good at plot, I transformed the story to a more modern novel. In fact, it became a post-modern rather existential novel, that I am still working on. As you can see below, I now have around 200 chapters! I skipped some numbers, so maybe it’s really more like 180. But whatever. I have my characters, whom I more or less love, and Claude has her favorites — mostly Juliette, and maybe Jules, I’m not sure. I think I now have about 12 characters, some very constant presences, others more like walk ons. Besides not having much of a plot line, I also discovered that I don’t like my characters to be unhappy, and I don’t like them to fight much, but in their own way, I think my characters are striving toward happiness. Instead of there being difficult problems to be faced, the problems kind of sneak up on them.
As for the post-modern element, I don’t want to give it away quite yet, but let me just say that I become impatient with the fourth wall, and I think that characters ought to be able to speak back to and push back against the author.
So each week as I write another chapter, there are these requirements: I have to include the topic of the week, I have to advance the story, and, importantly, to have to make Claude laugh — every week without fail.
Usually, my chapters are full of dialogue - I think and Claude thinks that this is what I do best. But for some reason, when I wrote a chapter that didn’t have a lot of dialogue, I thought that this chapter - or just half of it, actually, - is something that readers of this blog might like to read best. For some reason I felt touched by it. I won’t describe it more; it’s short, so you can easily read it and decide for yourself.
One other interesting thing is this: my French is improving but I still don’t think in French, and I’m not sure, but I think that as I’m writing, I think in English but then write in French. But then when it’s on the page in French, it just becomes a French chapter, and then when I translate it back into English, it seems a bit stiff and even stilted. Does this mean I actually do think in French? Or more likely, does it mean that translation is hard, and I can’t even do a good job of translating my own writing? I don’t know, it’s a mystery.
So anyway, here is my little extraction of a chapter. First is the French, then my English translation. The word (le sujet) that Claude gave me for this chapter is, obviously, Les Insultes. And you’ll also notice that I have gotten into the habit of sometimes inserting a picture, either one I myself took, or an image from the internet — which is where I got this picture to start off this chapter.
216 Les Insultes - un extrait avec traduction