Fictional Settings

[Katie-Ellen]

It can be a bit tricky, have you found? I've driven places, sat over maps, fretting about whether to change place names, or move topographical features to expedite story events. Choose a real place, don't disguise it, and you had better know it well, or research it to the nth unless you want to risk credibility. Create a place from scratch, it will pull in the sense that Narnia or Gondor does, but again, it will lack a certain potential. There used to be a sign, approaching Middlesborough, whether it's still there, I don't know, saying 'Welcome to Catherine Cookson Country.'

Places are characters, as with Rebus: http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/edinburgh/rebus/
I saw him being interviewed once; he was talking about a pub he used in his Rebus books, though for obvious reasons, he changed its name and the name of the landlord...


http://www.urbanghostsmedia.com/2013/04/the-10-greatest-fictional-cities-of-film-literature/

 

[flootzavut]

One thing I do like about setting stories in places I don't know well is that it's a lot of fun doing the research. So far the only times I've done that have all been for fanfic (my guilty pleasure) and mostly people don't bother to do even the basics of research for that (things like figuring out how long it takes to fly or drive across a country, even though these facts are readily available, is just too much hassle ) but I'm a perfectionist - I don't by any means do a perfect job, but I do do my best, and actually I find it's very enjoyable. I now, for example, know several hiking trails, hotels, neighbourhoods and tourist attractions in Oahu. One of these days I might even get to go there and try them out but I have really enjoyed reading and watching videos and all that kind of stuff.

I think it helps, as a writer, if you just find the world in general an interesting kind of place. I guess there will always be a certain amount of grunt work and boring stuff for any kind of research, but I think it makes it a lot more enjoyable/less of a chore finding out facts and figures and random titbits of information about a place you've never been to or a person you've never met.

It will probably sound really odd, but because my fiction has usually either been set in places I knew (or slight variations on places I knew!), or else in entirely fictional towns in my own head, I probably do more actual research of this kind if I'm writing in an American fandom Being constrained to actual places where people can tell if I'm just fudging it, and when I've never actually been to any of the places the shows or books or whatever are set in, means I have to do more homework than if I'm writing original fiction set in a British town that's half made up anyway

 

[Carol Rose]

I make up locations for my series to be set in, but I use names of real places around where I've located it. Racy, Indiana is in Benton County, where miles and miles of wind turbines dot the landscape. In fact, those wind turbines are what inspired both that series and the town. The town is fictional, but I reference real roads and towns around it as my characters travel.

Passion Peak, Colorado is fictional, but again I reference real places on the western side of the Rocky Mountains for my fictional town. And its spin-off series, The Alpha Legend, has three totally fictional towns where shape-shifters live and work.

For this current series, my setting is an island one hundred miles off the Louisiana coast, in the Gulf of Mexico. But again, I use the names of real places on the mainland for reference.

When I'm writing about a tourist attraction, a city, or a state I've never been to, Google is invaluable. But I keep those to a minimum, and I don't include any information that can't be found on the Internet.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

The research is fun and instructive quite apart from the requirements of the book. The novel that's going out on its travels is set in a semi-fictionalised Worcestershire....The Malverns across to Upton on Severn. I don't take liberties with topography but a few details are invented or fudged for wriggle room. For the new novel, I've been out hunting for a suitably remote and atmospherically located sheep farm in Lancashire's beautiful forest of Bowland. At school I found map-reading rather alarming. Love them, now.