What writing in a second language has taught me (about writing in general)
On craft and the joys of defamiliarisation
I’ve been writing seriously since I was seventeen. By writing seriously I mean writing with projects in mind, not just for the sake of writing (and by projects I mean short stories, essays, anything that feels more than just noodling ideas on a piece of paper). And although it was only back in 2008 that I started to toy with the idea of writing in English, by 2010 I was doing it mainly in this language. If someone asked me right now why I left my mother tongue behind in order to embrace a language in which I’ll never feel as comfortable, I wouldn’t be able to answer truthfully. Before I used to believe that it was all part of a desire to become more accessible to those who surround me (who happen to speak mainly in English) — that is, that it was all down to a desire to be read. But in the past few years — as I get more and more acquainted with the métier of writing and the scant attention that comes with it — I realised that there is something deeper behind this choice, something that doesn’t have to do with a quest for readers, something that I can’t explain very well, nor do I want to, lest I ruined my experience with an unpalatable discovery.
Whatever the reasons why I write in a second language here are five things I discovered through it, things that have made me think differently about the craft of writing as a whole.