Writing Setting: USA vs. UK

I’ve lived in the UK for 4 years and I grew up and lived in the USA for 18. Something that I’ve noticed during my time here is that I haven’t written a story that takes place in the UK. I haven’t even written a story with a fictionalized location that I based around the UK. It’s interesting to realize I’m still not comfortable writing about this country even though I’ve been here for a little while already. Something else I’ve noticed is that I’ve stopped setting my stories in a fixed reality. Everything I write now has started to take place in a vacuum as I’ve started saying. 

When I was younger everything I wrote took place very specifically in my area. I would write about people just over the state border line and I thought that was stretching it. My stories were always about some aimless girl living in the suburbs or in some fictionalized version of what I thought a city was like. I wrote about my walk to the bus stop, being in high school, what I thought love might be like. But it all centered around what I knew. That’s the most common writing advice after all. But I still can’t bring myself to write about the UK.

I think part of it is that I never grew up here. I don’t know the inner workings of what life is like here, I know life in the UK through the mind of a university student. I think I would only ever be able to write about the UK through the eyes of a transplant. I think some of my American-isms would seep through otherwise. I’ve been here 4 years and I feel like I still learn new things about how life goes here every day. At the same time I think I know less about America than I used to.

I don’t know what American college is like. I spent two weekends in August traveling to visit my friends at their campus’ and when they talk about specifics I find myself confused. I don’t really understand what they mean half the time. I know how a UK university works. I know an American childhood. 

So now I write about places that aren’t real. Places that have no setting. My WIP is about an island that doesn’t exist, with vague European signalling and American coded characters. I find this easier. That also comes with a shift in genre though I suppose, when I was younger all I wanted to write about was the places I knew and the feelings I felt. Now I want to write about things that don’t exist. I think I like the distance it gives me from the material. 

Before I used to pour everything into the writing. Sloppily. Everything had to do with me. But it didn’t matter as much because nobody was seeing it unless I wanted them to. In university I started realizing I was turning my work in. It was being read and it was being read much more intently than I was used to. And I was still turning in midwest teenage stories. 

It genuinely makes me cringe to look back on so maybe I’ll dissect those in a separate blog post, but I think putting distance between myself and the writing truly made me a better writer. Everything I write about is still very personal and definitely draws from my lived experiences, but it has less to do with me now. I create characters unlike myself, and I invent monsters and problems to make them deal with. Everything is much more fantastical and separated from reality. Now I just haunt my notes app on my phone with my personal complaints and wearies. It’s a much more professional way of writing that I had to learn, because you can’t really just write about how bored in the suburbs you are forever. 

I think being between two countries makes that easier. I have more experiences to draw on for inspiration, but I also am free to just come up with places rather than feeling trapped. I will say the UK has excellent gothic inspiration. There are really just churches everywhere. I walk through a church graveyard in the middle of the town to get to the train station. I used to walk by this church in my neighborhood that absolutely loomed in the dark. You can genuinely tell why gothic literature started here, it can be really gloomy outside.

I wonder if down the line I’ll feel more comfortable writing about the UK explicitly. I’ll probably still tell everything through the lens of a foreigner as I feel like I can’t ever really let go of my innate identity. But I also think that can be really interesting. Going back to the USA every few months is interesting because I’ve found myself changing. My first year I was so uncomfortable in the UK and so eager to go home. I was treating it like a year abroad rather than the next three years of my life. The next few years I really started to enjoy it. Even though now I’m a lot more isolated than I was in my undergrad, I still really enjoy it. 

Interestingly, I’ve never written about the USA outside of the midwest. Outside of maybe a vacation story I wouldn’t feel comfortable. So maybe the feeling of discomfort applies to anything unknown. However, if I lived in a different US region I would definitely feel a lot more comfortable writing about that place than the UK. Obviously, cultural differences between countries are larger than the differences between American states and regions. 

If I ever decide to try writing rom-coms again maybe I’ll write some sort of American in the UK style story. I think it’d be kinda funny to break up gothic/horror stories with a rom-com every now and then. Granted my current project was supposed to be a love story and definitely no longer is so who knows.