What's the benefit of inventing a fictional region, if it's based on a real one?
Sometimes authors invent regions, which are very similar to real ones, e. g.
- Gabriel García Márquez's Macondo (which is similar to real city of Aracataca) or
- William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County (similar to Lafayette County).
I understand the benefit of using an existing region as a scene for fiction because you know it well, and you can describe it in little details, which makes the reader feel that you know the place intimately.
But what's the benefit of inventing a fictional region, which is based on a real one? Why not use the real one in the novel?
I'm asking because I'm writing a story, which plays in a region I grew up in. I need to decide, whether I should use a fake city based on that real city, or use the real one in the story.
Benefits of inventing a new city
- Easier pronounciation. The real city is in German-speaking part of Europe. My target audience is English-speaking and is likely to break their tongues, if I use real location names in my story. In a fictional city I can name the places so that English-speaking readers can remember them more easily.
- Adaptability of the world. I can bend the history of the fake city so that it suits the needs of my story in the best possible way (even if in reality the history was different).
- No stereotypes. If I say that the story plays in Moscow (strongly stereotyped place), the reader will have ideas about the characters and the settings, incl. those I don't want her to have. If I have a fake city based on Moscow, it's me, who decides, which ideas come to her mind based on the geography of the story.
Any other benefits?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/24118. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
2 answers
I think the most important reason may be that it is one small step into faery. There is always something of faery about every story. Stories take place in a neater, stronger, brighter world than our own, a world in which coincidences are more likely and more meaningful than in the real world, in which people are more definitely and consistently who they are, in which the weather and the seasons reflect the moods of the inhabitants. It is a world of symbol and a world of consequence. It is more real, more gritty, more permanent, and yet also smaller and more ephemeral than our own.
So, stories are not really set in real places, but in the faery equivalent of real places. Some places, like New York or Rome exist more in our minds as their faery equivalents than as their real noisy crowded selves, so you can set a story in faery New York or faery Rome without changing the names.
But for other places, and perhaps this is more for the author's sake than the reader's, it is necessary to create the faery equivalent of those places under a new name so that the faery place can have a clearly established character that differs from the real in all the ways that story places differ from real places.
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I think the main advantage of using a fictional place is what you perhaps allude to in your comment about "adaptability". With a fictional place, you can invent whatever you want that helps your story.
I've occasionally heard people really nit-pick details of a story set in a real location. Like, "What?? The author says that the hero ran out of an Italian restaurant and into a newspaper office next door. Now here I have carefully compiled a list of every Italian restaurant in that city and every newspaper office, and there is no case where the two are side by side."
Of course by definition a fiction story is not true. The rational reader expects details to be altered to fit the story. At the very least, people will be invented who never lived in this city, indeed who never lived anywhere. Fictional details will be invented. For most readers, if you say the hero lived at 137 Broad Street in a 3-bedroom house with a green door, etc, they're not going to rush to Broad Street to see if such a house really exists and really fits the description in your story. But if you set the story in New York City and mention the hero driving past the Eiffel Tower, most readers will balk. We expect the big details to be right. Thus, the writer may often find himself wondering whether some detail that he wants to put in the story is "big enough" that he has to make it match reality, or not. With a fictional place, this issue goes away. You have to be consistent with what you said earlier, but you don't have to be consistent with reality because there is no reality.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24139. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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