Hello When I was a kid, I thought I would like to be a writer.And actually, I did have the talent of writting in Chinese. However, the saddest thing is, the better my Chinese writting became, the wor

Hello

When I was a kid, I thought I wanted to be a writer. I was talented in writing in Chinese, but the worst thing was that the better my Chinese writing skills became, the worse my English writing skills became (although I don't think these two things are connected). While I'm learning English , my reading and listening improve, but my writing remains poor. Just like many English learners , I'm not good at speaking English. At first, I didn't mind at all because I'd just finished college and started working. However, I found that I really wanted to study aboard professionally. So I decided to practice my English writing and speaking skills properly at this website.
If there's anyone would like to help me on my English, I'll be really grateful. And if anyone would like to practice Chinese , please contact me. It'd be my pleasure.

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I'm not learning Chinese Mandarin right now, but this mini entry hit pretty close to home for me. I also want to become a fiction writer--but some people would argue that if you're writing regularly, then you're already a writer. I guess I need to take my own advice and start saying I'm a writer.

Anyway, you get your point across well, and perhaps that's due to your writing skills in Chinese. I'd say, besides basic grammar points like being consistent in what tense you're in, you need to develop a writing style in this language. This is very tough, and I honestly don't know how to teach it--let alone learn it. I guess it's just a lot of reading and writing.

I want to recommend you the books that helped me develop my writing, but it's kind of biased to fiction. Anyway, here are my favorite books on writing:

On Writing by Stephen King. It begins with a short memoir of his writing life, and the second half has his pointers on fiction. Wonderful book on the craft, and it changed my whole perspective on fiction in terms of reading and writing.

On Writing Well by William Zinsser. It's about nonfiction writing. Honestly, I only read through the first half because I got tired of the excerpts, but I learned quite a bit. Biggest thing I learned was to use the least words necessary to get your point across, but use just enough to get your point across.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Rennie Brown, Dave King. I love this book to death (oh yeah, avoid cliches unlike me). Even though the book is small, there's a lot of content in here. Take your time to develop the skills they mention, and don't beat yourself up when it gets tough.

Honestly, the books above already took everything I can say about the subject, and I would just be repeating them in a mediocre variation if I tried. Nonetheless, my personal tip would be to write for the experience. When you show people your writing, you're basically giving them something dear and precious to step on. You'll have people with good intentions who will compliment the heck out of it, and there will people who will rip it apart and logically tell you why. The latter often hurts more because it's true. So when you write for the experience, you'll continue to write despite what happens.

Good job for writing in a foreign language. It's pretty brave. And have fun with it.

-Thomas

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