How to write when thinking in multiple languages?
When writing, scenes come to my mind in different languages mixed together. For example in a single scene a description will be in French, some dialogues in English, with a few words of Spanish and Occitan appearing here and there. Sometimes a single sentence contains three different languages. The result can be an incomprehensible mess.
How should I proceed?
Should I write everything as it comes and have an editing phase later? Or should I try to translate my thought during the writing process?
Are there exercises or rules I could follow to help me control/focus my thoughts?
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1 answer
If it's your first draft, just write it as it comes. You can't edit a blank page.
After your first draft, go back through and clean up the polyglossolalia. If you're writing in third person, pick one language and make it all that. (Obviously if your characters speak multiple languages, you can decide what to keep and what to translate.)
If you're writing in the first person, you may choose to have a multilingual narrator. You then have to pick one "main" language (the language of whatever you think your audience will be) and figure out from there how much of the other language(s) you want to translate for them. For example, if the first-person narrator's main language is French, you can leave in a few swear words in Spanish, but if she's going to have a lengthy conversation in English, you need to translate that for your French readers.
There's a certain charm in code-switching (when a character changes languages for a few key words because the main language just doesn't have the term or phrase), so I wouldn't edit out your other languages entirely.
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