Over ten years ago, I switched from writing in my mother tongue to English, mostly for two reasons. The first one was that English had become my main language after moving abroad and I increasingly used it for everything from reading to talking to friends and organising my life. The second was that I wrote niche stuff, but still wanted my stories to reach a wider audience. I had my debut novel translated and realised that I couldn’t afford to do this with my other books, so it made sense to start writing them in English instead.
I learned later on that there’s a word for this (isn’t there always?) Exophonic writers are those who create in a language other than their mother tongue. At the time, I didn’t give it much thought except accounting for the adjustment period. I fully expected my writing to suck for a bit before things took off.
What I didn’t expect was how different writing fiction in English would feel. It wasn’t so much like breaking in new hiking shoes as hiking while wearing ice-skates. Not that my English wasn’t good enough. I’ve been speaking it since I was nine and wrote fiction since I was seven or eight. My biggest challenge was to disable internal translation. I had to switch from thinking in Slovenian to thinking in English without imposing the specifics of Slovenian grammar and language onto English.
My first stories written in English sucked, alright. It was the right language, but it sounded clunky. After all, I was creating something new using a different structure, with tools I yet had to master. Plus, thinking in a different language changed the way I sounded, which was somewhat disorienting.
It took quite some learning and unlearning before the outcome resembled something I wanted to share. I learned what most translators know well, namely that navigating between languages means navigating between cultures, concepts and structures, which goes way beyond translating the meaning. On top of that, storytelling practices differ across languages and cultures in things like tone, style and subject matter.
For example, writing long sentences came easy in Slovenian, but when I tried it in English, they were convoluted and sounded awkward. Some storytelling traditions value baroque prose and sentences that are up to a paragraph long. This can either work out beautifully in another language and bring freshness to your stories, or it can make the prose sound stiff and unnatural. The readers might not know what exactly is off, but they’re sure to notice it.
In hindsight, my biggest obstacle was that I invested more time in writing in English than I did in reading in English. I also had to stop comparing myself to where I wanted to be and instead celebrate every minor sign of progress, like not having to pause to search for words or using a new word correctly. Little by little, I stopped thinking about writing in English and just did it.
Being an exophonic writer has advantages as well. For one, it pushed me to work on my language and grammar skills. It also allowed me to get creative when describing words or things that don’t exist in English. I found a new appreciation for the richness of language and the ways we encode meaning. Not being a native speaker meant I often had to ask ‘What do you mean by that?’ The answer usually leads to something insightful.
So, if you wonder whether you, too, could write fiction in an other language, and do it well, the answer is yes. Two of my books won awards and the third one was a runner-up. I know several exophonic writers who have secured agents and signed book deals with one of the big five. It does take time and practice, but you don’t have to start from scratch. Here are a few learnings I picked up while making many, many mistakes.
1) Start small and scale up
Before attempting a novel in a foreign language, write some shorter prose, e.g. flash fiction or short stories. Not because it’s easier (it really isn’t), but because it will equip you with all the essential skills that you’ll need when writing a novel. Because of the limited word count, you’ll have to make your point much faster and you’ll have less ‘space’ and time to bring your story and characters to life. Nailing the story beginnings, the “show, don’t tell”, the story structure and the balance between the backstory and the main narrative are the essential tools you’ll need to write any kind of prose. Not to mention that it’s way less frustrating to revise a 3000-word story than a manuscript of 80 000 words.
2) Write first, edit later
I’d recommend this approach to any writer, not just exophonic ones, because it saves you time and energy. If you write a few sentences and go back to edit what you’ve written before writing a few more, your brain is burning energy on switching between creative (right rain) and analytical (left brain) tasks.
When you’re in ‘create’ mode, you need the freedom of possibilities and the permission to make mistakes (including writing badly).
When you’re editing, you’ll want to pick things apart, question your choices and find ways to improve your work. As an exophonic writer, you’ll be even more inclined to look at your prose with a critical eye. However, if you’re trying to edit and write at the same time, you go back and forth between the two. This means you need longer to finish and when you do, you might have to go back to change the things you’ve edited, anyway.
Do yourself a favour and save this task for after you’ve written the story down. Creative writing comes with chaos and it’s worth embracing it. If you need to turn off the spell check to help you ignore your mistakes, then do so. Think of writing and editing as wearing a different hat or taking on a different persona. Mine are Joy Wild for writing and Ruth Lesslie Sting for editing and while my Joy might be enthusiastic about telling the story, she’ll struggle to put it down on the page with Ruth constantly second-guessing her choices and scolding her for the mistakes.
It can help to develop visual cues that keep your inner editor from interfering with your creative process. I, for example, like to light a candle before starting to write. This signals to Ruth that it’s time for her to take a break. For as long as the candle is burning, Ruth stays in the waiting room.
3) Hone your writing skills
The dis/advantage of being a non-native speaker is that you’ll need to practice a lot, but this also leads to conscious examination of your choices, life-long learning and continuous improvement.
a) Practice by immersion
Language, like any other skill, relies heavily on practice. The more you speak, read and write, the more the storytelling in your second or third language will become intuitive. The goal is to use it without thinking and avoid ‘inner translation’.
A good way to do that is to immerse yourself into storytelling in that language. Be that the New Yorker’s short stories and articles or listing to podcasts and watching shows/movies. In fact, the more, the better, because you’ll familiarise yourself with that style and structure and soon be able to use it without thinking.
b) Master the grammar
Today, there are many tools that help you master grammar, from apps to books, courses and whatnot. I use a combination of books (e.g. Writers, Shoots, Leaves by) and AI tools like ProWriting Aid and AutoCrit (affiliate link). The tools scan my prose for mistakes or signs of weak writing, such as the use of passive voice, cliches or repetitive words. These tools also help me identify my weaknesses and show me how to fix them.
After I’ve written and revised my story, I run it through AutoCrit’s fiction analyser and check how it performs against other works in this genre. Are there enough slow and fast-paced paragraphs? Does the sentence length meet the genre expectations? There’ll always be deviations, but I like to get an idea of where my story fits.
It’s important to keep in mind that AI tools don’t replace a human editor and that it’d be shortsighted to automatically accept all their suggestions. A lot of writing is about making deliberate choices. It’s okay to ignore a ‘rule’ if you know why you’re doing it.
c) Identify your tics and work on them
Every writer has a tic, whether it’s a particular phrase or a word they overuse, or a specific way they like to start or end a sentence. Those tics will stick out when someone reads your work out loud. Editing tools like the ones mentioned above can help you identify those tics. In addition to that, Scrivener will show you the statistics of your most frequent words. Once you’ve identified them, it’ll be easier to spot them and remove or replace them when you’re revising.
d) Keep it simple
Exophonic writers often try to make up for their lack of confidence by using overly wordy and complex vocabulary, which can make the prose sound stilted. Most of the time, a simple word will do the trick, unless you’re trying to make a point. If you don’t trust me, take it from George Orwell:
‘Never use a long word where a short one will do.’
‘Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.’
So, use Thesaurus sparingly, e.g. to look for a synonym to avoid excessive repetition of a specific pet word.
4) Collect new words
If you read a lot (and you should, if you’re serious about writing), you’ll come across new or interesting words and expressions. Write them down and look up their meaning. E-readers have a nifty feature that allows you to use a dictionary while you’re reading and highlight and export parts of the text. If you’re more of a paper person, then dedicate a notebook for this purpose and write down new words and their meaning next to them. I sift through my notebook periodically when looking for a certain expression or word.
5) Take things apart
When you come across a sentence or paragraph you love, take it apart. Break it into smaller bits and figure out what makes it work. Is it the style, the use of words and the melody of a sentence, a variety of sentences’ lengths and structure or something else? The more you analyse good writing, the more you’ll understand what makes it good and how to apply that to your own prose.
6) Find fun ways to learn
Learning a new skill is easier if you enjoy doing it and things like crosswords or games like Wordle, Strands or Scrabble can help you do exactly that. The more enjoyable the activity, the easier it is to incorporate it seamlessly into your daily life.
7) Read your work out loud
Always read your work out loud as a part of your revision. Yes, always. This will help identify the jarring spots or places where you got too creative with your word choices. If the words don’t slip easily off the tongue when you read them out loud, consider replacing them. I still do this and am amazed how many things I discover.
8) Be fair when you compare
When you start writing in another language, the road ahead might feel like a void. Comparing your skills to a native speaker’s will only make things worse. Instead, track your progress throughout the time and compare what you know to what you knew a year ago.
Note and reward every small step and be kind to yourself. Not seeing any visible signs of progress doesn’t mean no progress. After all, we rarely notice that we write a bit faster, or take less time to revise our work. As long as you’re putting in the time and the effort, there will be progress. It just might not be immediately visible.
