Find Your Writing Voice Using Your Second Language

Grow as a writer in the Murakami way

Photo by Galen Crout on Unsplash

A year before I started to write in English, I was learning Italian. It wasn’t a mandatory language needed for work, I started it because I loved it and I just happened to have some extra mental capacity. Work was already a routine without major challenges and learning a language has always been an easy success for me.

I hired a private teacher, we had two hours per week and I loved everything about it. My teacher, Francesco (of course he had to be a Francesco, so typical) was giving me assignments, and I was writing compositions from the first day. It was on one of our early lessons, and my Italian was still extremely basic when Francesco suggested that I should be writing because I have an amazing way with words. I was both flattered and dubious. What on earth he could have meant? The language I used was simple, very straightforward with basic words and no special expressions. He told me answering my astonishment that there is something charming about my choice of words and yes, it is not literature level Italian, but it’s fascinating to read.

I didn’t know what he really meant, I just tried to express my thoughts with the obvious limitations, throwing in adjectives to make it vivid, using simple structures to make it grammatically correct. I…