Many people think that reading a classic in its original language is an impressive feat, since you would need to know about 20,000 words. To put this in perspective, you only need half that amount or 10,000 for sophisticated conversation and far fewer for daily needs. It follows that most of the reading vocabulary is almost never used in conversation and rarely in writing.

While reading classics demands a lot of dedication and sophistication, there is one thing that is even harder: writing a great novel. You would not only need a large passive and active vocabulary, but also a deep understanding of the nuances of a language. Writing creatively in even two or three languages equally well is far beyond the scope of most language learners, as it is the most exacting demand, far more challenging than engaging in sophisticated conversation, and even that is still challenging enough.

Successful literary writing is much more difficult because you have to write well enough to compete with and surpass native speakers, even though you yourself are already at a disadvantage by being a foreign learner. You not only need perfect grammar and spelling, but you also need to play with idioms and nuances of language well enough that it gets you into the big leagues by twisting an otherwise trite cliche into something new. It is not a surprise that many strong writers often read a lot of high quality literature as their source of input. Developing this intuition requires an extremely long time and there are no guides that will tell you how to hack this skill.

Given that most native speakers cannot reach the level of a skilled writer, it it highly unlikely that someone could even reach this level in a foreign language. But not all hope is lost, for writing can be cultivated to a high level equally across different languages, provided that the individual is able to avoid translation and think natively in that language. Look at non-native English speakers such as Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov who were able to write extremely well in English despite not being native English speakers.

Very few can avoid translating from their native language because it requires you to learn every single phrase manually and also subvert ingrained habits from early childhood. While translating is a convenient shortcut that saves time when learning, it is also the very same trick that can be detrimental to thinking natively in a different language, for your thoughts and expressions will always be chained to your native language, your mind unable to escape the mold.

Further there is an issue with culture, which can vary greatly even among neighboring countries with similar languages.

Some things are just so deeply enshrined in the culture of your target language that you need to significantly change a text to compensate for that. For example, it’s a fact that people in different countries swear differently. And they love differently. They may have different interpretations of what has a sexual connotation and what hasn’t. Or how much sexual connotation is socially acceptable. Given certain cultural backgrounds, a complete lack of sexual context may turn your book into a dull affair. At the same time, people who hail from a different target culture may already find the very hint of such a thing reason enough to give you an adult rating. This may make it necessary to have two versions of the same scene to cater to the conflicting expectations of different target audiences.

Understand the surrounding culture is a task outside of learning the language, yet it is nothing trivial. As with learning a language to a high level, mastering the culture cannot be “hacked” very quickly.

If you were capable of writing the same story in two or three languages, where each language comes from a different language family, you may find that the story in your second language is very different from the story in English. The way different languages are structured can have a lot of effect on the story, the structure, and how you tell it.

For example, in languages where objects without a natural gender are grammatically assigned a gender as well, you don’t always have to repeat which object you are referring to. So say you have been talking about a table (male) and a window (female), then you can safely use “he” in the next sentence to refer to the “male” table, and everybody will understand. In English this doesn’t work and you have to explicitly mention “the table” since otherwise it’s ambiguous. This may seem subtle enough at first, but such grammatical properties just keep piling up and in the end: they do have a huge impact on the end result.

Even among two languages in the same family, there are vast differences. It is further compounded when you take languages from different families. This is one good reason why people learn languages to read literature in the original instead of opting for a translation. Being able to read the original allows you to see how the author uses language to express a multitude of ideas. Only those who can appreciate the finer details of a language will strive to improve their understanding even when they don’t have to.

I do think that this work in particular has taught me more about languages and how they work (or don’t work) than any other novel I have written in my life so far. I would thus highly recommend it and my best wishes to anybody bold enough to give it a try. You really should.

The benefit of writing a story in different languages is that you could combine different versions into a single piece, where you pull bits and pieces from both stories. For example you prefer one scene developed in English and another scene in your second language. The perspective gained from interleaving two or three languages could make your writing develop its own unique style.

This experiment would require double or triple the amount of time it takes to write a well crafted story. Given the amount of depth required in each language is extremely demanding even for your native language, it is this reason that creatively writing in two or three languages is beyond the abilities of even the best writers. It would be like taking the height of the tallest tower in the world and multiplying it by two or three. Truly frightening, yet something worth working towards.