Don't try to write above your ability: but how do you figure out where your ceiling is? I keep pushing myself to do new things, because if I stay within my comfort zone I will never improve. I will forever be writing 1st person narratives of linguistic and/or cultural outsiders. This is a fun theme but I don't want to write myself into a corner, I am going to do 3rd person, and a completely different theme for my next story.
What I really meant, I suppose, is: be patient. If certain grammatical structures are confusing you, don't fret. Avoid them. Focus on your strengths. But every now and then add one. Or when you're not writing, go over your writings and see if you can make the simple sentences more complex (or something like that). Use your writings to learn the language, but don't take the fun out of writing, by trying to achieve what you're not yet up to. Language proficiency improves gradually. You can't force it.
An example: If the pluperfect confuses you, don't worry about it. Try to centre your (current) style around sentences that you feel comfortable with. If you're consciously trying to practise the pluperfect while writing ("writing above your - current - ability") you probably won't have much fun writing, and
other aspects (aspects that don't normally give you trouble - in the case of pluperfect probably simple past tense) will suffer. The result is frustration. You'll probably neither learn anything nor have fun writing. A waste of time.
Now, if you keep your writing simple, i.e. if you avoid situations which you're not comfortable with, you can go back later and try to see what you could have done. This will help you learn, as you're both motivated to do better, and as you see that you haven't done all that badly.
I don't how ESL textbooks look in other countries; but most of ours are full of out-of-context excercises, that reduce language to formulae.
For example, they'd have:
I _____ never _____ her. (meet)
You'll have to fill in either:
a) I have never met her.
or
b) I [slot empty] never met her.
The textbook will tell you that (a) is correct, and (b) isn't, because that's how the excercise is built. "Never" is supposed to be present perfect marker. Nobody tells you that "I never met her," is perfectly fine, if you're talking about a limited time period in the past, or if you don't ever expect to meet her again (because she's dead, or because she's moved away).
So, these excercises routinely cause lots of confusion when you're confronted with real language, where sentences like "I never met her," aren't infrequent. The thing is, when you're uncomfortable with certain aspects of language, and when you're confused in your text, you tend to fall back on exercise-mode. You're likely to trust the excercise more than your instict and change "I never met her," to "I have never met her," (because that was correct in the context free excercise). The mistake arises out of faulty rule application.
Even people who know English can get confused by excercise mode: In English class, we once listened to certain songs from
Jesus Christ Superstar. In one of the songs, there's the line "Try not to worry". The teacher said this was incorrect. It should have been "Don't try to worry." I had to correct him that the two sentences aren't equivalent. He knew, of course (and didn't make such stupid mistakes in speech or writing, normally). It's "rule interference". Class-room mode translated "too advanced" into "wrong".
(Edit mode is similar to classroom mode. I'm capable of adding the most stupid mistakes in an edit. Heh.)
Basically, don't write above your ability could be translated as don't try to apply rules that confuse you just because you think you should.
As a native speaker of a number of languages (not English) I was struggling most of my teens and early twenties with trying to choose a language to write in.
Interesting. I've been exposed to two languages, too, in my childhood (German and Croatian). That could come into it; a retreat onto neutral ground. I never really thought of that. Something to think about, thanks.
