Prove you wrote it yourself

Recently, I had to prove that I’d written 300,000 words myself. Why? I’m now a qualified member of the UK Institute of Translation and Interpreting (MITI) for all my three source languages: Finnish, German and Polish into English. If you translate into or out of the “big four” languages, or FIGS (French, Italian, German and Spanish), you qualify as a member by doing an exam. The assessment is as close as possible to a real translation assignment. You get a text, a couple of days to research and translate it, and then you submit it, with a commentary explaining your decisions. I did this for German into English years ago, and now I assess other translators’ assignments. But if your working language is not so easy to study in the UK, there are not enough assessors to mark the exam. Helping with assessment was my motivation to qualify as a MITI in two “smaller” languages (Finnish and Polish). That process was different: I had to gather a portfolio of evidence about my translation work. But if I say I’ve translated something, how can they know it was me? It should be easy enough, when translators are named. While my name is in the published books I’ve translated, for other texts, we don’t always know the translator. The author or publisher of that writing might not acknowledge their work. Or the translator might not be able to say, if the document is confidential.

Proving it was you is getting difficult for other kinds of writers. A few weeks ago Lizzie Wolkovich explained in Nature how a journal wrongly accused her of using ChatGPT to write a research paper. It works the other way too; large language models are using authors’ work without their consent, breaching copyright. In its response to this issue, the UK Society of Authors is clear that “machines cannot be authors. Our copyright regime relies on concepts of human originality and skill and labour. Only humans can create and receive copyright protection.” The Russell Group universities in the UK have come up with very broad principles on the use of generative AI in higher education. They raise ethical concerns and make a commitment “to ensure that academic rigour and integrity is upheld.” In such a fast-changing field, the practical policy is much harder work.

If you write yourself, assess people’s writing, or help others to write better, I’m sure you’ve been thinking about this. I have, too, with my editor and translator colleagues, and the academics I work with. We’ve been talking about how machines affect human writing at writing retreats, on training courses, and in committee meetings. While some have already had more than enough of it, the conversation is only beginning. Shaping policy is hard work – but exciting. We can prove the value of human originality and skill and labour. When you write, you should be able to prove it.

new retreat dates – seuraavat retriitit

Cyborg writing

We are cyborg writers now. Can we write at all without machines?

When my laptop broke, I felt bereft. I decided to write by hand. But how could I share it? Could anyone read it? Writing offline felt scary: it was clumsier, less secure, more precarious.

While my laptop was being fixed, I started writing this in a google doc on my partner’s laptop. None of my programs and files were on this strange machine, it worked differently, everything was slower. To work, I needed to find stuff online: references in GoogleScholar, notes in my encrypted cloud drive, and VitalSource books in the app on my phone. How could I write well without my companion screen (a laptop is like a companion animal, isn’t it, or at least like a farmer’s horse)? I discussed this in our social writing group on Zoom and we shared our stories of tech glitches. In a browser, you can connect with others, but writing is clumsier, less secure, more precarious.

You could start to translate this post at one press of a button (I did, to use a version of it in another language I speak less well). Lots of writers use machine translation, never mind generative AI. But who gets access to your text, then? Finishing and polishing it might need as much work, if not more, as translating or writing yourself from scratch. You’d need another human to read it, to make sure it sounded right. The text the machine made might feel clumsier, less secure, more precarious.

We are human writers still. Can we write at all without each other?

We write with our bodies, senses, and feelings. I started writing this on a retreat I also facilitated, in a sunny rooftop room, with other writers, after a good lunch. An hour before, we were walking outside on the frozen lake. Despite the technical glitches, because the community was supporting me, I felt better, and my text felt better. Even if I’d been writing alone, other people would have been with me, whether they’d written things I’d read or were going to read what I wrote.

When I trained to facilitate writing retreats, I remember thinking that as a facilitator, I won’t be able to write anything myself. Now, if I’m not facilitating, I struggle to find time to write. The community has become essential to the process. But so has the machine. We need to get together online, even in oder to meet offline. Still, for our writing retreat to work, for us to connect with each other and our texts, we have to disconnect. We have to get away from our phones, email, and social media. We might even draft and create with pencil and paper, by hand. It feels less clumsy, more secure, less precarious.

vegan snacks on the writing retreat where this post was drafted

new retreat dates – seuraavat retriitit

Women writing socially in academia: the lineage of an idea

You might not notice when you started writing something. An idea can take years to develop, and years more to come to fruition. But looking back can be revealing and help you look forward. If you’ve never tried this, I absolutely recommend it. Inspired by Margy Thomas and Helen Sword in #Acwrimoments8 I decided to trace the lineage of the idea for our book on social writing. It goes back almost a decade…

September 1998 – I start writing my PhD, living in a shared house with five other humanists (all but one are women). Some of us go to the brand-new British Library to write. We meet for lunch, plan what we’ll have for dinner at home, and talk about our writing. I didn’t know this had a name…

September 2015 – at international translation day in Helsinki, my colleague Virve Juhola talks about Nordic Editors and Translators. I join NEaT straight away.

October 2017 – METM17 – my first METM, or Mediterranean Editors and Translators Meeting, in Brescia. Professor Rowena Murray gives a keynote. I can see the potential in my work for social writing.

April 2019 – I train to facilitate structured writing retreats with Rowena Murray in Scotland and write that retreating is engaging when you put writing first, together.

November 2019 – Ridge Writing Retreats has its first day retreat. We write in the former city library designed by Wivi Lönn, the first woman architect with her own office in Finland. I’ll go on to write more about her later…

March 2020 – we move all our retreats online. Writing together virtually becomes increasingly important when we can’t meet physically.

June 2020 – retreat facilitators start meeting together online. These zooms see us through the Covid-19 restrictions and we realise we have more to share with others.

July 2020 – with Wendy Baldwin and Joana Pais Zozimo, we plan a book proposal to Palgrave Studies in Gender and Higher Education.

November 2021 – The book is born. Our proposal is peer reviewed and accepted by the end of the year.

2022 – we write the book! A dozen authors contribute from all over the world, mostly in Europe but also in New Zealand, Canada and Australia.

November 2023 – I start writing a chapter for another book about social writing, edited by a member of our writing retreat facilitators group.

December 2023 – we finalize and submit the proofs of our book to Palgrave.

January 2024 – the book is published: Women Writing Socially in Academia: Dispatches from Writing Rooms

February 2024 – we plan the launch.

March 2024 – we present the book at the launch meeting of the WRAP network for social writing, research and academic practice. Join us at the summit on 18 March! Find out more about WRAP and register for the summit here.

new retreat dates – seuraavat retriitit

New year, new words

At the end of the year, the English dictionaries hit us with words of 2023 thick and fast. In 2024, which ones do you think will stick?

Artificial intelligence (Collins)  was the obvious choice. In 2023, this meant generative AI based on large language models you could ‘talk’ to, like ChatGPT (the Economist). But these technologies hallucinate (Cambridge), which means they make stuff up. So how do you distinguish between what’s artificial and what’s real, to find what’s authentic (Merriam-Webster)? Generative AI charmed a lot of people – did it have charisma, or rizz (Oxford)? But a lot of others worried about losing their jobs and the cost of living, or cozzie livs (Macquarie). The Germans went further and picked Krisenmodus, or crisis mode (Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache). You might relate to that: the Polish youth word of the year is rel (PWN).

The Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus) added five thousand words to their database in 2023. These ranged from ahneusinflaatio, or greedflation, to äänikloonaus, or voice cloning. See, Finnish is easy! I have two personal favourites from the Finnish list. Käärijänvihreä, or käärijä green is the neon shade worn by the Finns’ 2023 Eurovision candidate. Heviballetti, or heavy metal ballet, was born through a surprisingly successful collaboration between Black Sabbath and Birmingham Royal Ballet. I think those two will stick, but will they? We’ll find out this year.

Mystical dictionary in käärijä green from HDWallpapers.

new retreat dates – seuraavat retriitit

All I want for Christmas is time to write

The holidays are coming closer and so are deadlines, but if all you want for Christmas is writing time, we have new dates and a new venue for the new year. Looking forward to writing with you in 2024!

Writing in a Winter Wonderland, Unity Tampere 8&9.2.2024

Unity is a brand-new venue for us, in Pyynikki, with a beautiful light-filled writing room, accommodation, restaurant and sauna overlooking the lake. If you are staying overnight, ask me for an accommodation discount code. If you aren’t, you can still stay after writing to use the sauna with us for free. Book here.

Write in the Light, Valo Helsinki 21&22.3.2024

This will be our fifth retreat at Valo, our most popular venue to date. If you want to stay in the capital but away from your usual writing space and up onto the rooftop spa, this is for you. If you are staying overnight, ask me for an accommodation discount code. Book here.

Spring into Writing, Säynätsalon Kunnantalo, Jyväskylä 16&17.5.2024

This is our fifth retreat in Säynätsalo Town Hall, too. We had a wonderful retreat last month and I’m looking forward to having you back on my home island. The venue is a unique Alvar Aalto building surrounded by Päijanne, Finland’s second biggest lake. Book here.

Scholarships

The pricing of retreats reflects the different costs of different venues; some scholarships are available so ask me before you book on Eventbrite.

Tohtoriverkoston retriitit verkossa

Seuraavat päivämäärät vahvistetaan uuden vuoden puolella. Nämä verkkoretriitit ovat ilmaisia Tohtoriverkoston jäsenille.

Retreats are in English and Finnish (except the Tohtoriverkosto ones, in Finnish only), but you can write in any language. If you can’t make these, but want to know about future dates, join my mailing list. If you want a retreat just for your own group, offline or online, get in touch.

And the Christmas chocolate in the top photo? That’s from our retreat last month. We spent 12 days writing together in 2023, not counting Wednesdays on Zoom; looking forward to more in 2024.

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Lydia Davis – Essays One

Here is one of those delightful books that lure you into the pages of their fellows. Reading it, I kept wanting to send photos of pages to particular people. And to read what she’s been reading. By the end, I felt I had made a new friend.

Lydia Davis is deftly insightful about her own and others’ writing processes, the forces that shape them, and the books they bore.

In the opening essays she explains how she moved from forcing herself to hone classic New Yorker short stories to her own unique voice.

Essays One is also one of those books that make you want to write better. Like First you write a sentence or Steering the Craft, it urges you to pick up your own pen. And I mean pen or pencil here, not keyboard. Her micro-stories are snippets of delight. She shows you how other writers do things and what effect it has – till you have to experiment yourself. “Can you write the same thing in radically different ways? If you write it so differently, are you, in fact, saying the same thing?” Her thirty recommendations for good writing habits could be summarized as “observe, observe, observe.”

Before picking this up, I wasn’t aware of Davis‘s translations. Essays One includes essays ranging from her translation of Proust to John Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud. Her analysis had me reaching right away for Essays Two, which focuses on translating.

This is a fat book crammed with ideas, but also a page-turner – I was drawn straight from finishing one essay into the next.

Read it – like Davis, with a notebook and pencil by your side. Essays One will keep you reading and get you writing!

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When should you write in a language you learned later in life?

When should you write in a language you learned later in life?

Some people never do. They are monolingual and they only write in the one language they learned to speak and listen and read and write in as a child. That is true of fewer people than you might think.

Some people always do. They have to write in a more privileged language to get published at all. Their own strongest language is not considered “serious” enough. Or the community of speakers and readers is too small to support publishing what they want to say. Or the community of readers and writers in their stronger language(s) doesn’t let them in. So they go to write elsewhere.

Some people have to. For example, if you are an academic, the pressure to publish in English is enormous. English is the lingua franca of the best recognized scholarly journals and publishers. Your funding, your project, and your whole career can depend on publishing in English. I help academics get published in English, so I know a lot about this. If you want to get published at all, you may have to write in the strongest language of the country you live in. Most of the publishing world in Finland, for instance, is in Finnish. Finland’s other languages – Swedish, Romani and Saami languages, signed languages – have a much weaker status. Not to mention the languages of people who were not born in Finland. Writers in these languages find it much harder to reach an audience. I know about this too, as I am only beginning to write for publication in Finnish.

Some people don’t want to. They want to write in the languages they learned first, to keep those languages alive and growing. They think and feel in those languages and want to help others do the same. This is essential. Languages are ecosystems that need resources: water, air, light, food. The biodiversity of languages is threatened and needs environmental activists.

Some people want to write in a language learned later. But it is not easy. It takes years of dedicated hard work to learn a language well enough to write in it and be published. You have to read widely. You have to find good teachers. You may need an editor – editing helps any writer, but some need it more than others. You need fluent speakers of the language you are writing in, who are on your side, and create space for you to share your work. You might end up creating those spaces yourself, with others. Because the traditional publishing channels are so hard to access.

The people who never, always, have to and (don’t) want to write in a language learned later in life need to talk to each other. This needs to happen on an equal footing. Soon, I’m talking about authors’ editors as access allies at a conference. Recently, we talked about writing in a language learned later at a book fair. Before that, I was at an event where somebody spoke about “us” and “immigrants who don’t have degrees.” I felt like I couldn’t challenge the speaker in plenary, in my fourth language, and say “I’m an immigrant with a PhD and I’m here.” Next time I will. For many of us, the conversation is just beginning.

Writing with Pleasure

Writing with Pleasure is a pleasure to read. I whizzed through it on the train down to facilitate a writing retreat. I was travelling to a pleasurable writing experience, with people I had written with before as individuals, though not in the same group. But I also knew the experience would be a pain. I had to make corrections to a text I’d started months ago, and I expeted it to be hard work. Could this book help?

It did.

Helen Sword writes beautifully, using metaphor to get complex ideas across in a memorable way. From Air and Light and Time and Space I knew I would enjoy her latest book too. But part of me worried it would be a bit Pollyannaish – is it possible to ignore the dark side of writing, the difficulties it causes?

Sword sees a research gap “you could drive a bus through” here. Plenty of books address the problems and inequalities that make writing a pain. Productive and creative writers must enjoy it on some level: but few books say why, and how. As in Air and Light, Sword asked over 500 academics what made writing a pleasure for them, and the book is peppered with their stories. Interspersed with these are pictures and poems by Selina Tusitala Marsh. Instead of traditional endnotes, there is a delightful reading notes section. This was scholarly and organized too, but the only piece missing from the book is an index of exercises.

SPACE is the core concept that structures Writing with Pleasure. What makes writing socially and solo, physically engaging, aesthetic, a creative and cognitive challenge, that gives you an emotional uplift? How can you do this in practice? What tools, processes, and identities help? The book closes with a road map for making that bit of your writing you hate, a bit more loveable (for Helen Sword, it’s email).

You don’t have to read the book from one end to the other and take notes. You can start at any point that interests you, pop out, and dip back in.

But you do have to do the exercises.

Exercise one is to find yourself a new notebook. You then use it to free write and reflect on what can make writing a pleasure for you. On retreat, I did the first exercises in my brand-new notebook from the Glass Mountain (the Latvian National Library). I talked through them too with my fellow writers. We remembered when we had enjoyed writing, such as in the early hours before anyone else was up. We shared what else we enjoy doing that could feed into our writing SPACE. One said that ballet is like research – there is a strict framework, rules within which you can create. We got ideas from each other.

Starting to work through this book, I realized – again! – that I love starting writing, but hate finishing. The bit I dislike doing for myself is something I love doing for others; the final edit. The details of that last text need to be right, but by then I already have one foot, one hand, and one brain lobe in the next. Once I’ve finished the exercises, I should have found a way to make that last self-edit more of a pleasure.

If you’d like to write the exercises together and talk about them, let me know. But first, get Writing with Pleasure from Princeton University Press. Here it is in situ during that retreat…

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Little and often

I’d love to have vast swathes of time to do nothing but write, but I haven’t got it. So little and often works for me. What about you?

For three years now, pretty much every Wednesday, I’ve been writing with others on Zoom. We started in spring 2020 (no prizes for guessing why, but here’s some context), and I can’t imagine stopping. Except for holidays, of course. We started doing half-day mini writing retreats, because that’s what I had been doing offline. With a colleague in the library once a week, ending with a long lunch. Now, we meet online on Wednesdays at 9:30 am Helsinki time. We share our goals for a few minutes (camera on), write for an hour (cameras and mikes off), then take a few more minutes to plan our next steps. For me, mid-week works well, as even with a six-day weekend, I should be writing then. And if there are other deadlines, I can fit them in later that day. It’s a popular time for team meetings, but that’s what this is, too.

It’s a writing meeting. As Rowena Murray and Morag Thow say, if you can’t make time for writing that other people will respect, call it a meeting. Then they won’t bother you. Your diary is full, you’ve booked your room. You can work undisturbed.

While a writing session like this has a clear structure, it’s more flexible than a retreat. On a writing retreat, I expect people to commit to the whole day or all the days, with no distractions. There are costs involved. The online writing sessions are free. And so long as you don’t disturb other writers, you can be freer with the structure. If you have to be somewhere else, pop a message in the chat and leave early. If you come in late, you keep your mike and camera off and join the flow. If you can’t make it for months because you’re teaching, or have a dance class, or have been ill, or are too busy, that’s fine. If you only come when you’ve got a massive deadline, you can start writing without some friendly faces round you. If you write with me every single week, I’ll be delighted. Because that’s what I aim to do. And I’m happy to see you when you can make it.

During these Wednesday sessions, we write all sorts of things from blogposts to books. In early summer one of us joined from a different country every week, as they moved around doing research. In the new year we used it to write an article in 12 weeks. You use it for what you want to write, when you need to write it. And you can write in any language. We speak a mix of Finnish and English, and most weeks, people are writing in more languages than that.

Perhaps a huge project is looming over you like a storm cloud. Or there’s that one tiny task that you can’t find time for. Or you need a bit of a push to get back into something you’ve been putting off. For some, the hardest part of writing is starting, for others, it’s finishing. But an hour isn’t so bad. Having some other people to write with, just for an hour, is doable. Little and often adds up to a lot.

If you want to join us, help me choose where and when we’re writing next, and I can send you our regular Wednesday link. See you on Wednesday?

PS For Finnish speakers: 1.9. Camilla Lindholmin kanssa puhutaan yhteisöllistä kirjoittamista Tohtoriverkoston kirjakahveilla. Tervetuloa mukaan!

We wrote a book

This week, with two colleagues, I sent a book we had edited off to the publisher for peer review. This same week, I finished the first draft translation of another book. I’m working on that one with the author and a master’s student on placement with me. So in both cases, we were a team of three getting ready to send the manuscript to the publisher. These aren’t the first books I’ve worked on, and they won’t be the last, but some of the same things struck me in both processes. Here are my ten commandments for writing a book together.

1. Talk to each other

Face-to-face conversation creates responsibility and community – and gets things done. My co-translators are in the same country, but different cities, so we met offline, but not often. My co-editors are at the other end of Europe, and the writers of the chapters are on three continents. Start with group video chats, and whenever things got sticky, talk.

2. Read the questions

Like in an exam, reading the questions closely can save you time later. For the book I co-edited, we checked some guidelines quite late and had to tweak things at the last minute. For both books, I wrote a style sheet before we started, which the other two people in the team checked and used. Check or make your style guide early, and use it.

3. Set up systems

Use email only when you have to. We worked a lot in shared online drives. One of my co-editors was amazing at setting up checklists and steps so we knew what to do and when. One of my co-translators was fantastic at catching things to make sure we were consistent. In a team, you can take take on roles in your system that suit your strengths.

4. Share the good news

A whole book is a long slog, so short positive updates help you keep going. When a team member got good feedback from an author, I told her straight away. When someone wrote a lovely foreword, it boosted us to write a better introduction. When we submitted our edited book, the contributors started planning the launch… It’s never too early to celebrate!

5. Be flexible

If there are twenty of you, you can’t always have things your way. During the co-editing process, people had babies, moved continents, and faced serious illness. During the translation, I had to share my drafts early enough that two other people could work with them. Systems fail, circumstances change, things come up. You can adapt, and the person who has less going on can take more on.

6. Stet

Sometimes making no changes (stet, in editor speak) is the best change. People have very different ways of working, and writing. Some like to plan to the sentence level months in advance; others do their best writing as the clock ticks down to a deadline. Working outside your natural rhythm isn’t easy, but sometimes you have to leave things as they are and wait.

7. Give yourself time

If you want your editors to give you constructive feedback, you need to give them time to do it. So you need to give yourself enough time to write. You need to give people enough notice that a bit of text is coming their way. This has the advantage of letting the text rest, from your point of view, which makes it better.

8. Challenge kindly

Reviewing others’ work is an art. I try to do this kindly but don’t always succeed. Seeing how the other people on my book teams did it helped. I learned a lot. Giving constructive feedback makes the other person’s work stronger, and is a way of honouring them. When they do the same for you, your work gets better.

9. Let go

Good enough is good enough. Sometimes, when texts need input from many different writers, there isn’t time to revise as much as you’d like. It’s going to peer review, let the reviewers do their job. If something did not go to plan, but you found a solution, let go.

10. Rest

Like dough rising, a book needs to rest. And so do its bakers. Now our co-edited book is with the peer reviewers, there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. When my translation is with the author, I can’t touch it. When your text comes back, you can knead it with renewed enthusiasm.

When those manuscripts come back, there’s always something that could be done differently. But remembering to talk and rest, and everything in between, makes the process better for everyone. Next time, I’ll have a different ten commandments. But when we meet in the same place (as pictured) there’ll still be cake. What works for you when you’re writing a book together?

new retreat dates – seuraavat retriitit