What are the advantages and disadvantages of setting a story in a made up country, compared to a real one?
I have story ideas that involve civil wars or revolutions happening while a character is travelling. I was wondering what would be the advantages and disadvantages of setting such a story in a made up country, compared to a real one.
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Every revolution is different. Every civil war is different. They are different in why they are fought, they are different in how they are fought, they are different in who is fighting. (To clarify, I do not mean the obvious "who" as in "the English" or "the French". "Who" can mean different classes, different tribes, it can be different noble families fighting on the back of peasants who have little interest in who wins, just so long as the fighting stops. Compare, for instance, the War of the Roses to the Russian Revolution.)
It can be that you want to say something specific about a particular struggle, about a particular location and period. Or it can be that you are writing a story that needs some form of civil unrest as a story element, but the exact details are unimportant. Those are two distinct cases, so I will review them separately.
You want to say something about a specific struggle
Let's say you want to talk about the French Revolution. You can talk explicitly about France, or you can use an invented country as a metaphor for what you want to say.
Talking directly about France, what you're saying gains a measure of "this is true, this is what happened, this is how it was". It might not be completely true in all it's particular details, but it is true in spirit. Take Les Miserables as an example (yes, I know its events are set several decades after the French Revolution; it's just a famous example) - the particular boy named Gavroche might never have lived, but in the streets of Paris there were many similar "Gavroches".
The strength of such a presentation is also its weakness. You bind your story to a particular place and time, it remains bound to that frame. If you wished to take the side of the Royalists in the French revolution, it would be hard for the reader to untangle themselves from their already existing view of the French Revolution giving us such ideals as Liberty and Equality. (A concern more pertinent the closer the event you're describing is to our times, that is the more the issue is one of politics rather than history).
At the same time, it's all too easy for a piece about a certain period to be read as being about that period only - without any hint to modern times that you might want there. France is only far-away, in-the-past, France, but "made-up-land" easily becomes "every-land" and "my-land".
Your interest is not in any specific struggle, but in "a struggle"
As @Amadeus points out, if you write about a real struggle, you have to do the research about it, and you are bound by it - it might not go where your plot would like it to go. That is one consideration for making up your own land.
Concerns about readers having pre-existing opinions about the particular struggle, which might not mesh with your story, are all the more pertinent, since in this case the particular conflict isn't even interesting to you.
But there is an advantage too: if your character arrives in Paris in early 1789, you don't need to give your reader all the cultural background of what's going on - they already know at least the general framework of what's going on. The stage has been already set for you, so to speak. In fact, you can create dramatic irony (e.g. "The Bastille would stand forever") and you can create anticipation (the reader eager to see the storming of the Bastille, while the MC has no awareness anything like this is going to happen).
Now, with those considerations in hand, you can see what serves your story best.
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Three main advantages:
You won't have to actually research that country... If you set the story in Iraq, there is a lot of history and politics that your readers are already aware of, and your fictional iraq must share much of the same history as the iraq that people know.
You won't risk offending the actual country. If you write about a real country like China, India, Saudi Arabia, etc. etc., many of them can get very sensitive about your portrayal of their country.
You can have a lot more artistic liberty about your fictional country.
There is a key disadvantage....
- You risk looking like a mega racist. Now you making broad stroke assumptions about an entire continent...
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The advantages are not losing a large proportion of your audience, and not being accused of being a racist, a liar, a hater, a bigot, an ignorant writer, etc.
If you use a real country, there will be people both attached to that country, and opposed to that country. There are real facts about that country and its history. There will be vested interests there; what you say about the real country and its previous politicians and celebrities will be subject to expert scrutiny and criticism. People may grow to literally hate you for what you have written about "their" country.
If you use a fictional country, and make it different enough from any real country, you can sidestep all these issues. (You can't just change the name from "The Soviet Union" to "The Marxist Union" and leave everything else exactly the same; everyone will see through that.)
You liberate yourself to create a new history, whatever the story calls for. A new culture and traditions, perhaps a new religion or lack thereof. New politics, or a new dictatorship.
If you want a country in the same geographic area with a similar culture, you can even change history: for example, The "United States of America" never existed; the colonists lost the American Revolution. But in 1788, when King George III went literally insane, he was assassinated, and in the ensuing chaos a second American revolution succeeded, but this time an American monarchy instead of a Democracy. And by the time George IV was secure on his throne; the American King had consolidated his armies and territory, and it was too late for the UK to do anything about the Americas; George IV had domestic issues and enemies to worry about.
You have greater freedom, complete freedom, with a fictional country. It takes a little more work and you can't be lazy and just crib from reality, but that's the point: Write Fiction. Use your imagination. And avoid all the baggage from reality and real emotions about real places.
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Create a fictional country if there are no existing ones that meet your needs. Or if you need to change things enough that it would be confusing or off putting to place your characters there.
If your story is set, for example, with the Spanish Civil War as the backdrop, then you would need to allow the timeline to unfold as it actually did. Unless you're doing an alternate Earth, but that's an entirely different issue. So you shouldn't change the major players in Spain and elsewhere, or change the dates, but you could still place fictional characters there.
If you'd like to show a major event (like a civil war or revolution) and the country that works for your story didn't have such an event, then don't use that country (unless you're placing the story in the future). Don't write a revolution in modern-day Japan.
Whether you accept the constraints of a real setting, or decide to completely make your country up, is your choice as an author.
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