I consider myself fortunate to be able to do my thinking in Yoruba and to be able to write them out in English. Living in immersion, I believe makes this somewhat easier to do. In my contiguous community the everyday language of conversation and commerce is Yoruba .
When writing The Bata Dancer, my thinking had to constantly bestride the confluence of the two languages, one foot in each language; sometimes it was like a game of hopscotch, sometimes alternately sojourning , wholly within either languages as the story demanded. It was a difficult book to write.
Writing wholly in Yoruba, a recent experiment, is a new challenge entirely. When the story is done with, it is not at all even nearly finished. Indeed, that is the beginning of the real work-adding tonal marks to every single syllable of every individual word. Otherwise , whatever you have written may actually turn out to be unreadable. From my recent experience the process of adding tonal marks to a single typed page may take up to three hours,or more - because you need to play each word in your head and hear what it should sound like before applying the correct tonal marks. It is fun and exciting really, if you have a good story to tell and you have a lot of time in your hands . Otherwise it could be a really excruciating task which you may be persuaded to eventually abandon midway. It is really a trying task.
Now I have stopped wondering why there are not many books written in Yoruba.