posted
Are there any members from England, currently living in England, can point me to a website, book anything about England. I want information on what it is like to live in England. Culture, people etc but more specifically I need information on University life. Is like going to college in America? Is it more formal, less formal, more fun, less fun. What is dorm life like? How are people treated from other countries? The context for this is that my main female character is from Japan and is going to school in England. I want to get an idea of what kind of challenges she'll face (beside the language issue) while she's there. And speaking of language. Anyone know of any good 'How to learn Japanese in three easy steps' books?
Posts: 45 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
Why are you writing a story about something totally unfamiliar to you? That breaks the cardinal rule of writing.
You should always know as much or more about your subject than the vast majority of your audience. Whether because the setting is completely out of your own head or because it's where you live, all really good writing deals with what the writer knows better than the readers.
posted
I will add a tiny note to what Survivor said. In boot camp, I remember Card saying that the old saying "Write what you know." really should be "Know what you write." Meaning that as writers, we need to seek out new knowledge so that we have things to write about. After all, writing about sitting in front af a computer and writing isn't very interesting. So on that note I applaud your willingness to learn about something totally new.
On the other hand, there are certain things that you CANNOT learn, no matter how much you research. A feel for another culture is something you have to experience, you can't be told about it. The only way to learn about British Universities is to go attend one for a semester. I wouldn't even attempt such a thing. Yet I have set several stories in American Universities, particularly ones in small college towns in the midwest.
I don't have many black characters in my stories. When I do, they are not main characters. This is not because I am racist but because I would not presume to write about their culture from too deep within it. For my money, I'd rather read something like that written by a black author who knows.
I would not set a story in a foriegn country if I had not been there to experience it firsthand, and I would only write it as a tourist unless I spent significant time there.
I hope you see where I'm going with this. Even rewording it "Know what you write." doesn't work unless you have the means to know what you're writing. If all it takes is some resarch into historical times then that's one thing, but there are quite a few Brits out there who might take exception to what you have to say about their universities. I can't imagine there is a way to make it sound real without having gone to one.
Is there any reason your idea can't be someplace you know?
posted
First off, you may want to work out which university your character is attending. There'll be as much difference between Oxford and Bangor as there is between, say, Harvard, MIT, UCLA, or the University of Florida in the states. I certainly can say I've seen my alma mater get horribly maimed by writers who do live in the same country.
Second-- well, I'd suggest finding someone who went to school in Britain to talk to. I've attended college in the States and taken a class at a uni in Australia and, well, there are many more differences between the two systems than one would think to ask about, or than would be written about in a research source. If it's at all possible, you might try to get someone who went to university in Britain to do a nit crit of the book.
As for dorm life-- dorms as the ultimate breakdown of student life are rather, well, American. Oxford and Cambridge have the college system, as do I believe most other English schools (and Aussie schools, as it happens). Even some universities in the States use Houses (Harvard) and Colleges (Yale) after the first year. And living in a House or College is rather different from living in a dorm, although I suspect the exact experience varies a great deal with the school.
For online research, I would suggest finding and reading the daily weblogs of a number of people going to the school you're looking at. There's a number of LiveJournal communities you might find interesting for tracking down people at the school (click on the poster's name to get to their personal blog), including this one focused around Oxford, some of the UK LiveJournal communities, and such. There are a lot of people from the UK on LJ, and because of the target age a lot of them are in uni, and they write a great deal about their daily life.
I don't totally agree with Survivor. If I kept to writing only things I knew a great deal about, all of my characters would be geologists, writers, or people working on humorous awards shows (and man would they be boring). But I will say that with both of these elements, you'll be making it rather hard on yourself....
posted
I'll try to give you a bit of an idea about what it was like for me, but I'm sure there are a lot of differences I'll not be able to point out, having not experienced US colleges.
First, the big ones. I studied at the University of Warwick, which is generally considered as a "second tier" university -- it isn't as good as Oxford/Cambridge, but better than most of the rest. It's also a modern university; it was established in the 1960s and only came to prominence in the 80s.
Most British universities offer undergraduate courses that last 3 years. Students typically study 30 weeks of the year in 3 terms of 10 weeks (although a few universities use 2 semesters of 15 or 16 weeks, and Oxford and Cambridge have 3 terms of 9 weeks, IIRC). Most students study only a single subject throughout their course; although there are usually options to take modules from other courses it is unusual for a student to do this much.
Now, on to your specific questions:
quote:Is like going to college in America?
Having never been to college in America, this is hard to answer. Based on what I've seen of dramatised American college life, it isn't _hugely_ different.
quote:Is it more formal, less formal, more fun, less fun.
About the same. Nobody really keeps track of what lectures you go to, all that matters is that you do the assignments and turn up to the final exams. People have a lot of fun.
quote:What is dorm life like?
We don't really have 'dorm's in the sense that US colleges do. Most British universities provide student accomodation only for the first year of the course, and in units of "flats" which typically have 6-12 students living in them. They may be single or mixed sex; most universities offer a choice of both, with mixed sex being more popular. After leaving the flat, students will typically form groups of 3-5 to rent nearby houses.
The centre of student social life tends to be the Students' Union (sometimes called the Students' Guild, and note that Oxford and Cambridge have an entirely different system that I know little about), which typically provides many social societies, organises sports events, and usually has quite a few bars.
quote:How are people treated from other countries?
Depends on the specific university. Most universities aim to attract overseas students because of the present political situation in the UK -- the level of fees they can charge British students are set by the government and are very low, so overseas students get charged a lot more and subsidise the local ones. Warwick is very good at attracting overseas students, we particularly had a lot of Malaysians when I was there.
Warwick also has a special accomodation block, International House, for overseas students, although not all choose to live there, preferring instead to try to integrate with the locals.
quote:The context for this is that my main female character is from Japan and is going to school in England. I want to get an idea of what kind of challenges she'll face (beside the language issue) while she's there.
If she's going to a university like Warwick, there'll be a fair few other Japanese people there, and she'll probably get to know them fairly quickly. If she wants to get involved with the local students, she would probably want to find a society based around some of her interests (the available societies are numerous; there's a list of the Warwick societies here: http://www.sunion.warwick.ac.uk/portal/societies/ ).
posted
To answer both Survivor's and Christine's question. I have lived in America all of my life. All I know is USA and a little bit of Canada. I thought about having this character come to America but I just was not satisfied with that idea. To me, that is boring. I have enough stories about characters in the US. It was more interesting to me as the writer of this story that she lived and became educated in a different country other than her home country Japan or USA.
I understand the reasoning behind the rule 'Write what you know.'But to me that seems very limiting. To me, writing is about expanding our thoughts, not keeping them tightly reigned in a small little area that I'm not allowed to leave because I don't know anything about what's outside of that.
I may have never lived in England but i don't feel that means I cannot research about the place, talk to people who do and use my basic knowledge and their experiences to give my stories the authenticity it needs.
Or does it? Is not having FIRST HAND knowledge of a subject a viable excuse for not writing about it? I don't think so. In this day and age there are other ways of getting information about a subject besides being there. Hence I put a post on the board asking for information/help with this particular subject. I search the internet for information.
But it sounds like a good topic for discussion. Anyone else with an opinion about this is more than welcome to post a comment about it here.
I do appreciate, very much, the help given thus far and if anyone else has any experience they would like to share, I would love to read about it.
posted
You should have read my post more carefully. I said "Know what you write." I only tried to point out the difficulty in truly knowing enough about other cultures to write about them. If you can find out about British culture in such a way that makes you convincing as a writer of the topic then go for it, but I certainly would at least have a British person read the story fo ryou and comment. I remain skeptical about your ability to turly write from the perspective of someone within the culture without you having been a part of it, but stranger things have hapened. I think you may find that the amount of research necessary makes the story not worth telling in the way you have proposed.
No, I don't believe in "Write what you know." but on the other hand you have to be reaslistic. As writers, it is our responsibility to keep learning new things so we have more to write about than, in my case, middle clsas w hit Americans who went to a midwestern Universtiy and studied fairly mundane topics. I suppose that's part of why I write scifi and fantasy, because I can make up new worlds and be the authority on their culture. But also, I did not shy away from a detective story lately because I didn't know about police officers. I called a police station and talked to a cop about it. If I wanted to write a historical novel (as I've considered doing) I would research my time period and become an expert on it. I would be aware that it would take a long time.
If I wanted desperately to write a story set in the UK I would go there, and for longer than the week I'm planning to spend there this November. I can't go to a historical time period; all I can do is read about it, but I can go to England.
quote:If you're writing to escape the mundanity of your own life, then you can't write well.
You're getting a big old "Huh?" from me here, Survivor. Building and creating something greater than ourselves is at the core of why many people write. Now, if you want to escape the mudanity of your own life it will be difficult to be a nonfiction writer or journalist, but scifi and fantasy depends upon escaping the mundane.
posted
I think "transcending the mundane life" is more like it: you can't write about what you did not feel at all. All writing is rooted in experience. But I agree that escapism is a major component of any writing. Just my two cents.
Posts: 1075 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
Well as I'm British I did go to Uni in the UK. Also I am a high school teacher so I know the entry qualifications for students and what their first time experiences are. Also, I have taught in international schools so I know the entry requirements for foreign students, one of which is passing an english exam.
Your overseas student may have some problems with the language, but most probably most of it will be down to dialect and slang, which I'm afraid you seem to know little about. As for Uni life it does depend on where you go and also who you are. For instance Asian overseas students have their own societies and will tend to stay in Uni accomodation for their whole degree. Overseas students are provided accomodation by most Universities unlike home students who after the first year are encouraged to find their own.
I am willing to read it, but i think that you are first going to have to do a lot of research. This is not like most stories which involve Universites because your character will spend most of their time on campus.
Apart from that their is the cultural difference. Coming from Japan she will be used to different things. But then she is unlikely to be the only Japanese student there. From my experience overseas students from countries like Japan tend to hang out together. It's nice to talk to someone in your own language.
About 15 pages into the story my main character developed deep and abiding issues with her father that made her decide to move to a point exactly halfway around the world from her home in Japan. So after pulling up world maps and calculating distances, she ended up in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.
Since the universities at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean only offer underwater basket weaving as a major, she had to decide between the east coast of the United States or the west coast of Europe. I flipped a coin and she ended up in the US with all of my other characters.
I'm a little disappointed in the change of location. However using this little bit of information to describe the character's relationship with her father more than makes up for it. In fact, I think I'll even use the coin flipping action in the story...
So into the file cabinet goes all of my research on England to be used in another story perhaps.
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