Do you find yourself writing descriptive passages meant to “wow” the reader? Later, do you find that such passages amount to nothing more than small talk?
Or maybe you’re just tired of your current revision process?
Writer Stefani Nellen stumbled on a method that has helped her attain needed distance to see her writing for what it really is—and to distract her from trying to impress:
A few months ago, I decided, as a kind of experiment, to translate a few chapters of one of my novels into German. … As I kept looking at the alien, almost-but-not-quite-normal German sentences that were supposed to be my words, I realized what I had done. By keeping my mind busy with translation issues (first from Idea to English, then from English to German), I had managed to distract myself from trying to impress. … While I struggled with the technical details, the story seized its chance to do its thing.
Read more about Nellen’s experiment here, in the latest Glimmer Train bulletin. And don’t miss these other offerings this month from Glimmer Train:
- The Story That Will Not Write Itself by Karen Brown
- Writing the Unfamiliar: Incorporating Different Cultures and Lands into Your Fiction by Sybil Baker
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
Wonderful post! I especially liked: Isn’t it time to go back to my roots and write like a German? In German? Voice, identity, sentences that need to be parsed with the help of three-dimensional diagrams, and words like “Fassungslosigkeit,” Stimmungsaufheller” and “Querschnitt”…What’s not to like?
That’s pretty fascinating, but, alas, not something I think I could do. While I’m a functional bilingual, as in “I can converse easily and navigate my way around Hong Kong if I had to,” written Chinese is so vastly different from spoken Cantonese that it’d be quite difficult for me to attempt to write a story in Chinese since my last year of formal education in HK was grade 2. I envy Ms. Nellen for being able to experiment in two different languages.
Love Glimmer Train! It’s one of the best literary magazines out there. 🙂
I can relate to this, because currently I translate my WIP from Russian to English, you DO kind of wonder occasionally – who wrote this stuff? lol
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