LIT STUFF ON DA

♣ "*simplyprose aims to provide a place on DA where prose writers can feature their prose pieces without a selection process. Every month, a new journal entry will be put up with the month's prompts. There will be four types of prompts: a scenario-type prompt, a character-type prompt, a word association prompt, and a miscellaneous-category prompt."

This is a wonderful idea and I hope the club gets many, many entries. New clubs need all our support, but don't forget it's equally important to support older ones!

♣ *Queen-of-Marigold won the Literature category of *Le-Visage "Face of 2008" contest. Go read her entry and drop a comment if you're feeling extra available!



♣ New workshop on *Writers-Workshop: Brevity is the soul of wit, by `conorschild. More info here: [link]

ABOUT ME

I will try to make this as short as possible

I started thinking longer about this while writing my entry to *Le-Visage's "Face of 2008" contest; however, it has been a recurring thought since I became more involved in DA's literature community.

The thing is... my primary language is not English nor it will never be. I learned English at school, when I was just a little girl. Back then, when the only contact I had with English was on classes, I thought I understood it pretty well. Not all the words and expressions, but still, pretty well.

Now, I come to the conclusion that I'm still a novice when it comes to the English language. I read poems and stories on DA and there's not a single text I don't have to go to the dictionary because I don't understand a word or expression. That makes me read several times a piece just for the sake of understanding it. Such thing does not happen on my native language.

It's getting frustrating now, and not only because of the reading, but also because of the writing. It's difficult to write on a different language when ours is the one that screams in your brain, in your thoughts, in your ideas. The sounds are different and there are sentences which are so beautiful in my language and get ruined in English (and vice-versa, too).

The definite conclusion came with my entry to *Le-Visage's contest, as I referred above. Why? Because I read all the other entries and I was astonished. Such complex words. Such wonderful constructions, sentence mechanisms, ways of writing. These are not natural to us if English is not our first language, because we're used to write in a totally different way. We have to adapt, read a lot, write a lot in English. Frankly, I'm getting a little tired by now. I miss my native language, I miss being creative and putting in the paper the words that are more immediate to me. Writing in English, at this point, is immensely tiring because I have to try so hard to make sense in a language which is not mine. And not only making sense (because we aim for functionality at school), but also molding and tranforming the language so it can be poetic. So it can be gracious, flexible, and a pleasure to be read. Ah...

I would like to know, people who don't have English as first language, how do you feel about this. Is it as easy to write in English as it is in your native language? What major problems do you have about writing in a language different from yours?

I'm also sad because people say it's difficult to submit something on literary magazines because the market is so full. But, then again, most literary magazines are in English; primary English speakers already have the advantage of having the most important language of the world acquired on their heads. They don't have to learn it if they would like to write well. Non primary English speakers will always have to struggle more.

(Ok, this ended up being long. I'm sorry I believe this is, by far, the most personal thing I've posted in my journal.)

All of this to say... I need some rest from the English literature, at least for a while. Which is why I won't come to Deviantart for some days. I will still be here to support my new, wonderful friends and to pimp whatever contests and groups/deviations/people need to be pimped. However, I don't think I will submit anything in a looong period of time. And I'm strongly thinking of storing my writing pieces. They seem so ugly to me right now

One more thing: I won't stop participating in the Haiku-thon! But I will only update the deviation once I'm pratically finished. New haikus will be written by me everyday but will be in my notebook instead. Also, I need to stop being on the computer for a few days, due to some health issues

Take care, everyone...