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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/41527
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/41527
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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](https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/41518/what-are-the-advantages-and-disadvantages-of-setting-a-story-in-a-made-up-countr/41524#41524), 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.

Original score: 9