Maïwenn wrote:I'm not answering your question, but anyway :
One of my literature teachers always said that if you want to write a book set in a particular place, you have to live at least one year there and know the 4 seasons (if there are 4 indeed)... It's not totally stupid I think
If you can't get enough information about Turin, maybe you should consider relocating your story.
I cannot simply "live a year" anywhere I wanted. I really, really wish I could, but it is not financially feasible at all right now, and I'm still in college here, which ties me here as well. (I will say this, though: I also have a story or two set in Romania, and ever since I chose to set it there, I became fascinated with the culture, and am actually seriously considering majoring or minoring in Eastern European Studies or Eastern European Languages... but that's still a few years away)
However, there's several reasons I chose to set this story in Turin, and part of it WAS the challenge. Also, setting it in Florida (the only place I'm old enough to remember genuinely "living in", though I have been to New York a few times, and Ontario) would be boring, and maybe not even logical, considering how there weren't many people in this state until this very century, due to the fact that our climate is dry as a bone half the time, and kind of like an armpit the rest of the time (well, this time of year, and during the early winter, we get that handful of nice days, but aside from that...), and most of Florida was swamps originally, and especially because I highly doubt that a wizarding school of some sort wouldn't have been set up almost immediately after the American Revolution, considering the first and and from what we can tell only English-language school for wizards before that was British... .
It wasn't very comfortable, and for that matter, when the country was first formed (and thus, the most likely time for an American wizarding school to have been formed), it wasn't even U.S. territory, or even British. If I remember correctly, it belonged to Spain (hence the name "Florida" as opposed to something like "Virginia", "South Carolina" or "New York")! I've heard that the most likely locations for U.S. wizarding schools would be places like the northeast coast (due to the original prescence of the colonies, for one, as well as a reference to a "Witches Institute" from Salem, persumably the same Salem that's a city in Massechusetts), someplace in the midwest, and for more recently-founded schools, Texas (large, both in size and population, with large areas of not-widely-populated land) and California (ditto, except it's also got so many mountains, weirdos, and so many movies and TV shows being filmed there, and so many special effects houses, that nobody'd ever notice a few wizards. I like this suggestion for the "wacky" factor, but that's a whole other story idea!).
Anyway, you are right about one thing, though: it is much easier to "write what you know" sometimes, especially when it comes to locations and local cultures...
...however, a wise writer once said something to the effect of: "If you ONLY wrote what you already knew, and nothing more, your stories would be pretty boring and you would be pretty bored!" Part of what I love about writing is the places it takes me. I would never have gotten so fascinated with Japanese culture (another language/culture I am studying and am planning to more formally study) if I didn't at some point try to write fan fiction for a Japanese animated series; I would never have become fascinated with eastern European languages and cultures (or even known that Romanian was a real, let alone Romance, let alone absolutely beautiful language!) if I hadn't half-jokingingly set a fantasy story in Transylvania, then looked "Transylvania" up in the encyclopedia and learned it was still in existance - as part of Romania, and bordering Hungary; I would not have read Asimov (currently my all-time favorite science fiction writer) if I hadn't had a story idea about androids and started looking into the history of robotics; were it not for an effort to explain one character's "Gift of Tongues", I would probably never have discovered such fascinating stuff as I have now on the Mass Unconscious, the biology and flexibility of the human mind, the origin of human language, and quantum physics; and to be honest, I would not have had half the interest in languages that I have today (save maybe for Japanese, due to my love of Japanese animation and manga) if I had neither had that fantasy story set in Transylvania, nor a handful of other stories that involved the creation of new languages, dialects or slang (and therefore creating a need to research languages in general).
After all, JK Rowling is (probably!) not a witch, George Lucas is not a Jedi, and Arthur Gulden is MOST certainly not a geisha! If writers never chose to write about anything set in a location that wasn't their own, historical fiction would be nonexistant and the rest of fiction as a whole would be severely limited (this isn't to say that you shouldn't try to make up for it with huge amounts of time and effort put into research, though. I'll never forget watching this one movie that was set in New York, and having my mother say something along the lines of "That street doesn't connect to that one! And why haven't they taken 57th street? It connects with that one they're on AND the one they're going to! Waitaminute, how'd they get to Central Park so fast on foot!?". This is, of course, why I'm doing research *before* I start writing, and why long before I ever post it online, I'm sending it to an Italian friend of mine to "beta" read it!)
So...
Yeah. I wish I could follow that advice, but just because I can't move to Italy, doesn't mean I'm going to give up on the story completely (at least not for a while, anyway. I may lose interest in the story itself not because my research or experience is lacking, so much as simply growing bored with it, which happens to me sometimes, especially when the idea is this vague to begin with).
Although I will say this: I was considering having the main character be actually from southern Italy, and just going to school in Turin (which she's never been to before, and which she didn't get to see much of due to spending so much time in school during the early part of the year, etc.), thus hopefully avoiding SOME of the difficulties in writing about a place I've never been to.
That was a lot of words to tell you something that simple, for which I apologize!
svernoux wrote:What kind of information do you need, EmmaZule?
I think we have someone on the forum who might be able to help you, but I'm not sure she understands English and she might not check this topic...
If you tell us more precisely what you need, we can try to ask her.
Hmm, my main problem is that I'm not quite sure what "exactly" I need. I guess, just enough information to get a "feel" for the city. What did/do people usually do when the Olympics aren't there? What do the citizens think of their own city, and of people from outside the city? What's the best restaurant? What's the "bad part of town" or the "good" part of town, if any? What are the things most unique to it, and how do the people interact with their neighbors? Just things like that. Well, and street maps, but I think a fair amount of Googling should be able to get me street maps!
In the end, general "feel" and a few vivid details for the story are what I probably need most, since in the end, it's OK for a few differences to sneak in; it's pretty much accepted by now with fans of the books that the books aren't set in this reality, but an alternate one (this due to something about the current Prime Minister in book six being male, and something about the Playstation being mentioned in the first or second book despite being not yet released in the West until a year later in "real life", along with a couple of other little details, as well as the complete ignoring of several key events in recent history, not that we could expect a British author to be all that interested in American affairs such as the "War on Terror", but still... there's quite a few things that never get so much as a passing mention in the books, sort of like how the West Wing never had September 11 episode and had the current times have a Democratic President instead of a Republican, and so on).
It's hard to know what to look for when you don't know what you're looking for!
Love,
Emma (who should really be in bed right now...)
