On writing in English
It’s done. Finished. Acabado.
The final version of The Seed Vault is ready, after adding about 2,500 new words and editing a few scenes. The feedback I received from the last group of beta readers was extremely helpful, focusing mostly on the final chapters. The end and the beginning are always the hardest parts to get right in a novel (the middle is tricky too), but the first chapters are read more often and by more critiquing partners, simply because of where they sit. The end is only for the brave, the ones who endure until the last chapters.
The next step is professional copyediting. How exciting. This is the closest I’ve ever been to publishing a book. Someone asked me if I’d considered copyediting the book myself. There are many reasons why this isn’t a good idea. A professional copyeditor elevates the prose without changing the voice, ensuring clarity, coherence, and consistency. They polish grammar, punctuation, spelling, and syntax. In my case, this is especially necessary because I’m writing in a second language.
In the 20 years I’ve lived in the UK, Portuguese and English have bounced off each other to create the four books in my backlog. Portuguese is a beautiful language, full of blooming descriptions and poetic undertones. It’s also extremely formal and literary, and its long words of Latin origin often sound elaborate and pompous to the English ear. English, on the other hand, is practical, sweet, and economical; it’s my day-to-day language and understood by over a billion people, which definitely has its upsides.
Fun fact: If I pick up one of my books, I can tell you which year it was written just by how my English sounds. I’ve never tried writing a book in Portuguese. Maybe one day it’ll come. I’m sure it will sound very different from the rest, even after translation.
I love both English and Portuguese, and what the words in each language sound like. I never tire of certain combinations, phrases, and passages. I can read some poems hundreds of times with the same pleasure. It’s as if they trigger an addictive part of the brain, one that thrives on rhythm, pitch, and repetition.
Overall, I dare say being bilingual (or multilingual) is an advantage rather than a hindrance, despite the need to rely on a copyeditor.
Not being a native English speaker has forced me to observe and perform the language “from the outside,” flexing and moulding it in deliberate ways to achieve a certain effect, purpose, or tone. I’ve lost count of how many books I’ve read on the craft of writing (in English); some helpful, some uninspiring. Most of all, nothing replaces reading, writing, and speaking the language out loud, to yourself and to others. Your ear becomes accustomed to the rhythm, order, and sound of the words, and you instinctively know what feels right.
There’s a flipside. With each year that goes by, I lose the fresh outsider’s perspective. The more I write and learn English, the more my choice of words leans towards the norm. It’s as if my individual quirks are being ironed out, flattened, standardised, made to sound like the words picked by an LLM. I don’t think there’s a way to halt this, but hopefully my deep-rooted idiosyncrasies will always carve out something original.
Why do some people think more in words and others more in images? I’m probably a combination of both. My inner voice is always blabbing away, and I must focus hard to shut it up when I want to converse with others. But the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (which is self-reported) puts me close to hyperphantasia, meaning I can visualise things very vividly “in my mind’s eye.” My memory is also mostly visual, and I struggle to retrieve some words on a daily basis. It appears my mind has a defective archiving system for words. The current strategy is to feed it more words in the form of courses, novels, non-fiction books, poetry, news, research, and hope some of them will stick.
