Language Preferences

It has been bothering me for a while now that I'm not able to really commit to only one language when I write. I would basically enjoy more doing it in Finnish, since I can use a wider vocabulary and it allows me to play with the words in a whole different way. The advantage in writing in English, though, is that I can show it to people and get some sort of feedback.
This leads to another problem: what if I write a book, could I translate it myself? I don't think I've heard of really anyone who'd done this, but then again, I would really rather do it myself, since might be that someone else would get the actual meanings all wrong.

There is a subtle difference in the way I use the two languages, when it comes to writing. Well, there's even more differences to this when I speak, but let's not focus on that. There's a line in Jack Kerouac's On the Road that says "I was half-way across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future." (p.15/16) In my case this would probably be 'the Finnish of my youth and the English of my future'.
I started using English regularly, by myself, when I was about 15 or 16 years old. There is a sudden change in my diary at that time where one entry is written in Finnish and the next - until the end - in English. I don't know why exactly I thought this would be the way to go, might be that I just wanted to improve my written English that way, which I did. The first entries are just horrible in regards to grammar and spelling, but soon the language got a lot more... readable. Let me just put this in perspective for you. I wrote a lot in those diaries. I could write the whole afternoon, about 15 pages a day, just filled with basically nothing. Or nothing of actual importance. And then of course, when I was about 17, I started using it more and more as I came to know my boyfriend and talked to him daily online, and then on the phone.

This all means that more or less during the change from 'youth' to 'adulthood', my main language changed. Finnish still remains to me as a sort of playful language, nothing too serious. Even things concerning love and maybe even death sound a little foreign to me, somehow raw, when said in Finnish. And English, then, flows a lot more efficiently in these situations.
Weird enough, I am much more comfortable in speaking to people I don't know, or giving oral presentations, when I do it in English. This may have to do with two things: I have many bad experiences of giving oral presentations when I was younger, and I have a very 'me' way of speaking Finnish. In my family, the language is sometimes taken to a whole other level, and we invent words as we go, not really giving a damn about grammar either. Pronunciation sometimes fails us a little, but that's fine. I'm not saying that we don't speak proper Finnish. It's just that we do it a little differently, a little more playfully at times. And that's how I like it. I've even started using the same things in English and Portuguese a bit, but not to the same extent, since I still have to think about the right words to use and grammar, and cannot just crumble up all the rules at once.

How does this correspond to my stories, then? Well, it's pretty simple. Whenever I feel like writing something a bit more 'experimental', say, such as 'Can You Love a Girl', I use Finnish. When I want to write something more serious and stuff, such as 'Roses and Violets', I use English. I used to write everything in Finnish, only some poems in English maybe, but now that's more or less the other way. I write mostly in English - which also means that the way I write has changed - and only bits here and there in Finnish.
Sometimes I like to read through one or two stories, just to see if there's anything that needs changing or if the language seems okay, and I've noticed very strongly that in Finnish, I tend to use way too many extra words, which I don't do when writing in English. These words are the likes of 'probably', 'maybe', 'eventually'... I should look them up to remember better, but the point is that, even though they are sometimes rather essential, I use them all through the text, in a way that becomes sort of overpowering to the actual language. They are extra in between the important words. In English I can trim it down and I write in a much more direct way, so that the language itself doesn't come in the way of the plot. Actually, I've tried not to continue a story or two, in Finnish only, so far, so that next time I open them, I take a long hard look at all those little words and the language in general, to see if I can make it better somehow. This is because - not only but also - if I ever translated them in English, which is very likely, it would be twice as difficult as if the language was more simplified.