Is it Ok to make up places if I want the reader to think it’s set in the real world?
What I’m doing is making a story in the medieval times and I wanted to make up a village and have my characters be there and travel around there but do I have to make everything around there in the book like how it was in real life? For example if my character where to travel south, in real life he would reach Berwick castle but in the book I don’t want anything to be there. It’s important to me that it’s set in the real world because the second book is supposed to be in Wisconsin so I don’t want to switch from not real to real. (Sorry if I’m confusing)
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Do as much research into the place you want your fictional village to be as you can. Find out the topography, the climate, the surrounding large towns. Know something about the people of that time and region. At the very least it will grease your creative wheels and give you the ability to flesh out your fictional town with some degree of authenticity.
If you want to deviate from what is really there, for example you want Berwick Castle not to exist, then just make up a reason for it not to exist. Who built it? That guy just happened to die in childbirth. Easy enough. The main thing is just to make sure you know what is in your world in RL, and when you deviate, do so by choice, not by ignorance or apathy.
Depending on how much you want to deviate, there may be a lot of work involved. For example, if you want a huge stretch of wilderness for your story, in a location that in RL is quite thickly inhabited, you need a good reason for that. Maybe a plague? But if so, how did your town survive? A war? Then there would be ruins. A hostile force of some sort? Then the story needs to deal with that hostile presence.
Of course, you can choose to ignore all this and just arrange things however you like, and many readers wouldn't notice at all. But if you are writing a story that includes alternate historical elements, your target audience is likely to be knowledgeable in that area, and is much more likely to notice any mistakes.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36917. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Jane Austen routinely did what it sounds like you want to do: she kept the big places intact (London, Bath), but the estates mentioned in her stories (e.g. Pemberly) are fictional, with only their general location given. The estate was fictional, but culturally it was set in its time, in England, which is all that she needed. Similarly, you can invent a village, and not bother too much with precise distances and where exactly it should be on the map. Pemberly could have existed, so could your village. In fact, I believe this was a common way of writing at the time.
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