Writing Blog Number 2

20240207 Using Pseudo-Real Settings

Using Pseudo-Real Settings

The second of my indeterminate number of posts about settings! This time I'll be looking at pseudo-real settings.

A pseudo-real setting is a place that has been created by the writer, but exists amongst genuinely real places. The famous two that spring to mind are King’s Derry region and Lovecraft’s Innsmouth. This way, the writer has a real setting in a country or region they know well, with real people, but the town or towns they have created are purely creations of the imagination.

I’ll use a town I made up for one of my published novels as an example. I live on the Yorke Peninsula in South Australia, and if you follow the east coast of the peninsula the towns in order are Clinton, Price, Tiddy Widdy Beach, Ardrossan, Port Julia and so on. So, I placed my town of Wills Creek south of Price, at the southern end of the Wills Creek Conservation Park. In reality, there is nothing there. I based the set-up of the town on a section of Clinton plus a chunk of Dowlingville, drew a map (including a small caravan park, a deserted shop and an old church), created the natural surrounding geography – extra trees and cliffs – and then set the big final battle in the town, destroying half of it in the process.

This has all the advantages of a real setting with the added bonus you can put things where they need to be. Again, my recommendation would be draw yourself a map, and then take Google maps, print off the area you want, and work out how to fit the town in. Personally, I find it best to put my made-up town where nothing exists; renaming and changing an existing place has some issues of its own (like Gotham and Coast City in the DC comics), but can also be done. However, there is a little more freedom in going the way of complete invention.

Remember to map the entire place, and make it fit in with surrounding geography, comparable towns. Your story will not use everything you create, but so long as you have created it, it will be completely real in your setting. This does not mean map out every single block of land and what is on it, but make sure you have major landmarks and homes of characters that are important. Like I said, I based Wills Creek on bits of other towns, and my map had the church, shop, caravan park, a dozen homes, a disused CFS station, the boat ramp, the cliff-top look-out, the jetty and the picnic park at the entrance of the national park labelled. Only half of them appeared in the story.

When looking at historical settings, this can actually be easier, because finding the real geography of a town a hundred, two hundred or more years ago can be very difficult unless you have access to a large library in the area concerned, but you know someone out there will have a map and call you out if you make a mistake. So, instead of setting your Georgian romance in Cardiff, set it in the much smaller Car-Wynn-Eld, a day’s horse-ride from Cardiff. You can have all the historical detail you need, without panicking over whether this street existed during the reign of King George III.

Of course, this is, again, my opinion. You are writing, in the end, a work of fiction. So long as you put your disclaimer at the start, it is fiction. Having said that, it is often best not to change famous sites. Does it matter that the streets Broadway and Amsterdam in New York City don’t meet, but you have that as a major intersection? Yes, it does. Does it matter that you have the roads Montague and Wright in Valley View meet, when they are actually parallel? Probably only for the people who live there (and that could upset your audience). Does it matter that your made-up streets of Lincoln and Washington meet in your made-up suburb of Peterborough? No – you made the streets up, and you have a disclaimer.

Of course, it is your story, and you can do what needs to be done to make your story work. But the points about distances travelled with time mentioned in the previous post still hold true. The laws of physics and the size of countries do not change.

But, really... MAPS!