Actual vs. fictional setting

Use it by all means...but tweak it so that it isn't absolutely true-to-life. Make up street names and business names and give the festival a new name too.

Sometimes it can work well. It's nice to think, "Hey, I've been there, too!" and you're able to see exactly where different events happen in your imagination. I get that feeling about Boulder, or New Orleans, or Galveston, and it gives me a warm, fuzzy connection with the author. Or, for example, if you see people, like PC and Kristin Cast set their vampire series in the Broken Arrow/Tulsa Oklahoma area, and you know they're trying to give a bit of hometown color to their worldbuilding, and not defaulting to a more exotic/historic location. That also comes across as a cool touch.

Other times, it's a little clunky. The writer obviously is familiar with the territory, but the reader is less so, and gets a bit confused trying to visualize something. I remember one John Dickson Carr set at the Tower of London; he knew his territory, and he provided a map, but it was a little tedious keeping track of stairs and walls and rooms that I'd never seen. Dorothy Sayers had one in a Scottish village and some others at Oxford; it was familiar and colorful territory to people who vacationed in Scotland or studied at Oxford, and she was very precise in her descriptions, but the Scottish village ultimately could have been imaginary (she put her story there as a favor to a friend), and the Oxford-specific descriptions rather overwhelmed the plot in places.

Imagine a novel set on the campus of wherever you went to undergrad. The author talks all about these locations that are familiar to you as an alumna, but the rest of us kind of glaze over when it comes to this building or that street. And then, suppose the campus got changed at some point, but the author remembers the campus in "this" way, and the alumni who predate and/or postdate the author think of it in very different terms--- a fountain might have been built and then eliminated, a dorm may have been bulldozed, a cafeteria closed, the museum or library changed locations, science got a new building, a new football stadium may have been built in a totally different location...

And then sometimes, you get authors who totally want to write, say, a book set in London, but they have the British Museum and the Tower of London jostling as next-door neighbors, and then the characters run down the street to picnic in Hyde Park. And you think, "If the author only took a few moments to do a little research...!" But that doesn't sound like your situation.

So, yeah. If you want to give a warm, fuzzy feeling to everyone else who's fond of that festival, and give a touch of hometown color, set it in a real location, but be aware you're anchoring it to a specific point in time. And try not to bog things down with too much extra color, so that someone who's never been to your festival isn't overwhelmed by the minutiae of too much specific detail-- let them draw on their personal experiences of small towns and festivals to fill in the gaps.

brmerry said:

What are your thoughts about using an actual setting over a fictional town?

Click to expand...

Having done both, I can say that they both involve a lot of work, but the fictional town, based loosely on a real one, is more fun (for me). I enjoy sketching out a map before I start writing: "Let's put the liquor store here, a block away from the church..."

The main problems with a physical place is that most readers will be able to spot when you screw something up and it may throw them out of the story. While you’ll still probably need research for a fictional setting that’s close but not quite to a real place, I’m sure readers will be far more forgiving.

WriterBN said:

Having done both, I can say that they both involve a lot of work, but the fictional town, based loosely on a real one, is more fun (for me). I enjoy sketching out a map before I start writing: "Let's put the liquor store here, a block away from the church..."

Click to expand...

Me too!
I pick a state and make the town fictional.

You can make fictional places based on real locations. In some of my works the places and their layout is real (for the time setting) - for example, part of my WIP occurs on the college campus I attended in 1972. I describe it as it looked then. But another location, the MC's home town, is based on where I grew up, but I gave the town a different name and moved things around a bit.

I set many things I write in Toronto, but if I'm setting something in a small town, I use a fictional town.

Here's the thing. Take, for example, my husband's hometown. Population of 1500, only a handful of businesses, no stoplights. I wouldn't use real businesses that exist in the town, and if you start making up restaurants and stores and streets and putting them in that town...well, then it starts to feel like an entirely different town. Whereas if you make up a restaurant and put it in Toronto, it doesn't change the character of the city at all.

My WIP is set partly at the Whistler ski resort. I wasn't sure about using real names either, so I made up a restaurant, and for everything else, I'm using vague terms like, "Irish pub" and "luxury hotel." Anyone who's been there will know exactly what I mean (for ex., there's only one Irish pub at Whistler) and for anyone else, the vague descriptions would be enough to form an image/idea for story purposes. I'm with lonestarlibrarian that I get a little thrill reading a story set in a place I've been.

With my current project, my town is a fictional town based on a real town--and I've moved it all over the map throughout my editing process, from Chicago, Illinois to Portland, Oregon, and it's now settled in Asheville, North Carolina. If it's a fictional town based on a real town, you have a little more creative freedom, but be weary of the laws and culture of the region you set your town in, whether it's real or made up. It's now set in "Asheville" because way back when I had it set in Chicago, I wrote in a somewhat significant character who dealt pot to the MC. That was a problem in the Pacific Northwest, where I can just walk into a "pharmacy" and buy it at will.

On the other side, if you use a real town--make sure it's a place you've visited or at least watched enough travel youtube videos of to get the gist of it. I read a book recently set in New Orleans, and I could tell the author clearly never stepped foot into the city.

Problems with using a real locale can come in not only with people being nitpicky if you change things, but if you have bad things happen at a known place. You don't want someone in your story getting food poisoning at a real restaurant or a murder happening at the local theatre or something. Fictionalizing it is safer.

Related idea: I'm thinking of tossing in “differences” that are obviously intentional so the reader knows this is not *exactly* our universe. Then necessary differences will not seem so odd, and occasional accidental inconsequential differences are not “wrong”.

LJD said:

I set many things I write in Toronto, but if I'm setting something in a small town, I use a fictional town.

Here's the thing. Take, for example, my husband's hometown. Population of 1500, only a handful of businesses, no stoplights. I wouldn't use real businesses that exist in the town, and if you start making up restaurants and stores and streets and putting them in that town...well, then it starts to feel like an entirely different town. Whereas if you make up a restaurant and put it in Toronto, it doesn't change the character of the city at all.

Click to expand...

Yep...that makes total sense.

ElaineA said:

My WIP is set partly at the Whistler ski resort. I wasn't sure about using real names either, so I made up a restaurant, and for everything else, I'm using vague terms like, "Irish pub" and "luxury hotel." Anyone who's been there will know exactly what I mean (for ex., there's only one Irish pub at Whistler) and for anyone else, the vague descriptions would be enough to form an image/idea for story purposes. I'm with lonestarlibrarian that I get a little thrill reading a story set in a place I've been.

Click to expand...

Love that you're in the States but your wip is in Canada I'm the opposite.

That's a tough question. I spent a few years in Winchester VA (coincidentally a small town of about 30,000 people with a very large summer Apple Blossom festival) and I think I could use it in a story even with some minor changes. I wouldn't want to do major ones, but so long as the basics are right you're probably going to be okay.

In general, I think it's better to focus on verisimilitude than strict accuracy. You can get away with changing a lot of details if you can nail the emotional truths of the setting. It just has to feel right.

I usually use my hometown as the base for my setting, but it has a different name and different features. For instance, in one series our river became a lake, because it suited my purposes better. Basically, I start with reality, then add fictional layers.

I've used both, and like others have said, they've both required research. I'm currently working on edits to a MS that's set in Dalian, China, a place I've been living for more than six years. I'm taking the change-just-enough approach to avoid potentially offending or pulling readers out of the story.

I would use the real place for a 'map', but change the place names and some of the features/businesses (whcih would be a lot of fun, when you think of it)

Like Thomas Hardy's Wessex... http://scalar.usc.edu/works/mapping-wessex/about-wessex

My recent novels take place in fictional settings that all pull heavily from real life places. In each case, I started with the actual real world setting and ended up fictionalizing it. For me there seems to be this need for distance, and also an elasticity that fidelity to the real thing won't permit.

Receding Waters said:

I've used both, and like others have said, they've both required research. I'm currently working on edits to a MS that's set in Dalian, China, a place I've been living for more than six years. I'm taking the change-just-enough approach to avoid potentially offending or pulling readers out of the story.

Click to expand...

Oddly enough, I'm currently doing revisions to a manuscript that's partially set there as well. In my case the story is set in an alternate 1937, so I have a little more leeway than most but I still found myself doing an awful lot of research.

Ben Aaronovitch uses quite detailed London settings for his 'PC Grant' urban fantasy novels, but it's more as snippets of scene and background. Perhaps a reader with more detailed knowledge of London would find holes, but to me it comes across as a sense of local colour.

For my own work, I used a setting which is an amalgam of the town where I lived and worked for ten years, with the nearest town to where I live now. I imagine anyone who knew either of them really well might spot points of similarity, but I wasn't going for precise geographic layout. I didn't set out to specifically do this, just drew on places I knew to give a flavour to the setting.

The novel in my signature is mainly set in Corktown, the oldest neighborhood in Detroit. It's not a travelogue about Corktown or Detroit. It's not a newspaper article. It's not a historical document. It's not a Yelp review. It's a novel. Everything in it is made up. I don't get my knickers in a twist worrying a reader will find some picayune "inaccuracy" and "get tossed out of the story." I prefer a real setting to a made up one because I like the limitations and structure that a real setting provides as a backdrop to my fiction.

While I do strive for accuracy (that's my journalism background, what can I say?) the point of the novel is telling an engaging story. If your reader is so disengaged that she's going to get "tossed out of the story" because a structure exactly like the one you described isn't exactly where she thinks it should be, your fiction may have much worse problems than a minor topographical inaccuracy.

I put this at the beginning of all my work:

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Rather than use generic terms (Irish pub) for a real location, use similar names. Instead of Paddy's Place (real) use Darragh's Den (fictional).

I tend to use fictional cities that I drop in the place of real cities or suburbs. In my one finished novel, I use Ripley Beach for Cardiff-on-the-Sea, CA; other stories have Bernadette Springs instead of Barstow, Damiano Heights instead of Century City, etc. This gives me a framework for creating a fictional neighborhood and the spaces I need, within the larger framework of the real world.

This has worked so far, because I haven't set any stories in major locales (LA, NY, Reno), which I'm anxious to do, mostly because of authenticity. I've seen so very little of the world, and that includes the USA. A shame, for sure.