5 tips for writing a novel in your second language
BY Sarah Jost
4th Apr 2023
Sarah Jost was born and grew up in Switzerland was born and grew up in Switzerland in small yet stunning Montreux against the backdrop of Lake Geneva and the Alps. She has been living in the UK since 2008 and works as a housemistress and French teacher at a girls’ school. Sarah studied on our three-month Writing Your Novel course in 2019. Now her debut novel One Last Chance will be published by Piatkus on 13 April. She shares her experience of writing a novel in a second language and offers advice to help with the challenges this presents and find the joy that comes with it.
When I moved to England in my mid-twenties, I had written short stories, poems, and some novels in exercise books as a teenager, all in French. I had won some competitions and thought that I could write. What I didn’t know, though, was English. Once I figured out that I didn’t want my year abroad to remain a one-off and realised I had fallen in love with this beautiful, insanely hard-to-spell language, my first few years were spent learning it. Then one evening in St Albans, in my shabby house share, I spotted a book under the television. It was a battered copy of Last Chance Saloon by Marian Keyes. It’s previous owner, a teaching assistant like me, had abandoned it, when returning to their home country. That book changed my life.
I deciphered it slowly, stopping every line or two to look a word up in a dictionary. It was frustrating, exciting and delightful. I didn’t know books could be like that – dark and light, sexy, full of humour while debating serious themes. It would be another few years until I dared to have a go at writing in English myself, and a couple more years until my debut novel, One Last Chance, would be finished.
One Last Chance is a time-loop love story featuring an expat heroine living in the UK, wavering between her two lives, two languages, and finding meaning and belonging. It is out on 13 April with Piatkus, Little Brown, and it all happened because someone’s suitcase was too heavy for Easyjet.
As expats, we develop a unique perspective on where we live. We all have our own story; if like me you have started this strange process of moulding your brain to a new language, and taken on this crazy challenge of writing a novel in it, I hope these five tips will be of some use.
1. Read
It is quite freeing when you start from scratch in your adopted literature; it is impossible for you to catch up with native-readers, so you might as well step out of the race and pick up only what you fancy. In English I read much more widely, more commercially than I did in French. Having no preconceptions of what I should be reading, no expectations to fulfil, was freeing for me and allowed me to develop a more authentic style.
2. Listen
If I had written in the way I, a humble Swiss lake-girl, had thought English people spoke, my characters would all sound like Victorian urchins selling newspapers. While this might work in some genres, I do happen to write contemporary fiction… In my CBC three-month Writing Your Novel course we were encouraged to listen; to eavesdrop on the train or in cafés and note down how people are saying what they’re saying. This is something I’m still working on, but paying attention like this makes me so much more aware than I would be of my own language.
3. Learn
Everything is new – it is very difficult starting to write a novel when you don’t know the rules of punctuation or how dialogue should be formatted. For me, signing up to a CBC course has been a great way to learn. It’s a steep learning curve, but I think I was much more open to learning as everything was so unfamiliar.
4. Share
Share your work and be open to feedback (if you weren’t open to feedback, you probably would not have learnt a new language! Remember when you used to be corrected constantly?). It will bring either learning or reassurance. Not everything will work, but if native speakers love something you’ve written, that’s the biggest compliment of all; I’ll never forget my first CBC workshop and the praise my tentative first chapter received. That’s when I knew it was worth keeping on.
5. Experiment
The pressure is off. You’ve got so much to learn, the only way is up. There might be some odd turns of phrase in your writing, stuff that doesn’t work, but you can also create something new and exciting: your own metaphors, quirky expressions that will stay with the reader, or even the way you would look at a particular situation that would seem utterly new to someone with a different background to yours. You have the privilege of standing in this language one foot in, one foot out, and it will give you a fresh perspective.
We non-native speakers can enrich English with our own different backgrounds and cognitive pathways. Sometimes you might get a huge bout of imposter syndrome, but persevere. Languages are living, breathing creatures that enrich anyone who treats them with respect and playfulness. You belong here, and you have earned the right to have a go. So have fun with it, keeping trying, keep learning, and you never know where it could take you.
Pre-order One Last Chance, out 13 April.
Get tuition and feedback from leading authors and publishing professionals, apply for one of our three- or six-month Writing Your Novel courses.
If you’re writing your own romance novel, learn more about crafting a heart-warming love story on our six-week online Writing a Romance Novel course.
The books linked in this blog can be found on our Bookshop.org shop front. Curtis Brown Creative receive 10% whenever someone buys from our Bookshop.org page.
If you're looking for more advice on writing fiction in a second language, read this guest blog post by former CBC student and award-wining author Clarissa Goenawan.