Writing Adventures in Foreign Languages

There can be many challenges to writing and editing… and even more when multiple languages are involved! If you’re a writer who dabbles in different languages, NaNoWriMo writer Claudia Schmidhuber has some tips:

For many of us NaNoWriMo starts with questions like these: Who are my characters? What is my plot? Where are my 500 gallons of coffee? For some of us NaNoWriMo starts with a question like this: Which language do I write this in?

If you didn’t grow up in an English-speaking country, or grew up speaking more than one language, you might have run into that exact problem. You might have wondered if you should give writing in the language you’re less comfortable with a shot. Particularly when your second language is English, you might have considered that writing in English instead of your native language will give you a larger audience later on. Or maybe you’re just in the mood to challenge yourself. 

There’s a variety of issues that are likely to hold you back. You don’t want to spend half of your writing time looking up words you don’t know, you think your grammar isn’t up to par, and maybe you feel like your writing won’t be good enough if you write in a language you’re not as familiar with. Many of us have been there. And we decided to go for it anyway. 

Here’s what you can do to make things easier for yourself (other than getting those 500 gallons of coffee): Find fellow writers who speak the language you’re writing in, be it in forums, on Twitter, on Discord, or in whatever other spaces are available to you. It’s not so much about having someone to correct your spelling and grammar – honestly, spell check will help you out quite a bit here – but more about having someone to ask, “Hey, do you actually say this?” You’ll learn vocabulary, idioms and phrases at school and later on you’ll find out that no one who speaks the language you learned actually says those things in real life.

If you struggle with vocabulary, don’t hesitate to put words in your native language in the middle of a sentence. Go ahead and write entire sentences in your native language. Make sure you can find them again later and look up those words once you’ve come to a point where checking a dictionary won’t interrupt your flow of writing. Don’t be scared of the Grammar Police. You’re learning a language and you’re allowed to make mistakes! You’re doing something really impressive and, no matter which language you’re writing in, your first draft doesn’t have to perfect. 

At the end of your foreign language adventure, you’ll know tons of new words, you’ll have great new friends to practice that other language with, even when you’re not writing, and most of all, you’ll be extremely proud of yourself for writing a whole story in a non-native language.

Claudia Schmidhuber is a frequent NaNoWriMo participant from Germany. She started writing as a hobby while pursuing her BA in Literature and wrote her first novel in English. She hasn’t looked back since. You can follow her on Twitter @ahlettuce.

Top photo licensed under Creative Commons by Clair Pickworth on Flickr.