Starting Point

When you come from another language you realize several pain points as soon as you start writing. 

First your vocabulary is mostly business, well at least mine was. Also, you need to overcome powerpoint speech or technical requirement sentence building or whatever other use of english you are coming from. And then there is punctuation, where to put the commas or how to write dialogue tags, especially, where to put the commas.

Don't get me wrong, you know all these in your mother tongue; you've learned to write in school and with the writer already set-up in your head, you probably even tried it out and it worked. You know how to write - in German or French or Italian or whatever language you've been raised.

Writing in a different language exposes you to a new layer of complexity in all parts of writing, setting the scene, plotting and character development. 

I started this blog to let you participate in my journey discovering the differences but also the similarities between english and german and my struggle with it. 

There is one first advice I got from a pro via Twitter: Read a lot. An advice I already put in place - with a little twist: Read with focus on vocabulary, punctuation and dialogue. Oh yeah, read a good mix between current fiction and the classics. 

Apart of that, writing and sending in short stories seems to be an efficient way to shorten the feedback cycle and improve the crafts.

And if find an error or a misplaced comma, just write me an e-mail; I'll be happy to correct it.