Does the main setting have to be in an existing country?

Apart from scifi and fantasy novels, does the fictional main setting of your story have to take place in an existing country in the world?

I know scifi and fantasy stories don't necessarily have to take place on planet earth. But for a genre such as the mystery story, if I create a fictional setting in which my story takes place, does it have to be situated in one of the countries present in the world today?

Also, do I have to somehow make it known to the reader through the narration as to which country the story is taking place?

I bring up this question, because as an author you have to conform your characters, local customs, local food, cultural or social trends etc. to the country and the time period in which your story takes place.

 

I've struggled with this myself. I've always wanted to write a road novel set in America, but due to my lack of geographical knowledge of the country hoped I could do it without specifically telling the reader, and instead leave them to make the assumption themselves. I used fake place names and 'Americanisms' like hood instead or bonnet, trunk instead of boot, etc.

Essentially, though, it held me back because I was so pre-occupied with disguising the setting, the story was never allowed to flow. I also became worried readers would call me on it.

I think it's probably better to do the hard work of researching a country. Of course I have no idea what your reasons for wanting to use a fictitious country are.

 

It can be anything you like. No one makes you set it i n a real country.

Plenty of mystery stories take place in a fictional location. You simply have to make it clear that if there is anything extraordinary in your fictional location, what its limits are.

 

In a way, unless you're aiming to evoke a specific cultural feel/spirit in your writing, I'm not sure it particularly matters in all honesty. I suppose if you force in a bunch of contradictory cultural foibles, references etc, things will jar and not work, but you'd have to go out of your way to do that.

With the fiction I tend to enjoy most, the important things are the actions and interactions of the characters, so just a long as the setting is the right 'type' to naturally faciliate these, they need be no more specific than 'a city' or 'a small village in the middle of nowhere'. Even if they are a named location, I generally find the specifics to be largely irrelevant, even if it's a location I'm reasonably familiar with.

I imagine a lot of people probably find these details more important than I do, though

 

Nope, especially if you have piece of fiction where it is an alternative timeline: if France won the Napoleonic wars the maps would be different and with that much change, other countries would be impacted, some would thrive, others would fail, split or merge.

 

Thanks for the replies. Here's the issue I'm having: Normally, a real regional town or city usually conforms to the people, culture, social trends, food, customs, slang, holidays, fashion, etc of the country it's located in. So if I create a fictional town or village, then it stands to reason that it has to conform to the country that it's located in, even if that country's name is not mentioned or alluded to in the narration. My point is that a town or village is a miniature version of the country that it's located in which mirrors the overarching characteristics of the people, culture, society, customs etc associated with the country. You can't avoid it.

So naturally, the main setting, even if it's fictional, has to be in an existing real country, right?

FYI, I'm writing a cozy mystery taking place in a small fictional town in the USA in 2019.

 

I am interested in the replies to this thread as well, as I have somewhat similar problem. My story takes place in an existing area, but I am going to create my own national and international entities around it.

A lot of gears/gadgets stay the same as in our own Earth-timeline though, mainly because I don't see how I'd make up technical/mechanical gadgets/machinery that works the same as in our world (without pages and pages of backstory that has no good reason for being there and runs the risk of boring the reader).
Making this kind of stuff up would require me to invent corporate and international standards different from our own, which wouldn't make sense because there is good reason why we have specific standards. So why would I change that?

But I'm afraid that the reader will be pissed that I'm drawing on existing machinery/standards when I'm writing in a fictional world. I don't see a way around it, though.

 

The bolded (and for what it's worth, it wouldn't bother me) is definitely the lesser of two evils in my opinion.

Your concern about "pages and pages of backstory that has no good reason for being there and runs the risk of boring the reader" in spot-on, I feel. I think if you're going to explain why a fictional nation or organisation exists in-world, it's entirely possible to do that in a more natural manner, with details dropped in as and when they become relevant, in a way that would be harder to achieve organically if trying to explain why a piece of technology is what it is, because an organisation can be a character in a story in a way which a simple piece of kit can't. Plus, I think for a lot of people, backstory for a fictional nation/organisation will inherently be more interesting than for a piece of technology, although that's probably my personal bias speaking here.

 

Dr. Doom comes from Latveria. Some of Tintin's adventures take place in Syldavia.

 

tist

I understand exactly what you mean. Everyone's saying it's fine to invent cities, or even countries, but unless you're going all-out fantasy you will have to settle on some kind of generalisation of a country. I'd say a fictitious town/city in any country would be fine - and of course you don't need to make that county known to the reader - but the point is you the writer needs to know what country it's set in, and once you've decided you need to be consistent. You've gone for the USA, so now I'd say you need to decide what part of the USA (in broad terms, I mean; NESW). What I mean by that is you can't have someone using New Yorkinisms, and another talking deep south without people wondering why.

 

Thanks again for the replies, very informative.

So, as I understand it from the replies, as an author writing a non-scifi/fantasy novel, you have the freedom to use in your story a real or fictional town in a real or fictional country. And as long as you're consistent in how you present the characters, local culture, regional social trends, local customs etc, which is often associated with a regional, local identity, then the overarching country in which the story takes place is quite transparent.

 

I think no matter the genre you are writing, consistency is the biggest criteria to keep your readers attention. If something is a certain way, it needs to always be that way unless you can give a damn good reason why and it is not just an asspull because you wrote yourself into a corner.

 

Have you ever watched Schitt's Creek? It's not a book, I know, but the writers worked very hard to do exactly what you're asking about. The show is 100% Canadian. Almost all the actors are Canadian, it's written by Canadians, I believe it's paid for by Canadians, and it's filmed near my home town in Canada. It's Canadian. Americans watch it and think it's American. They hear an American accent, they talk about things they have in the States, they have a similar climate. However, the writers didn't want it to be 'Canadian' or 'American' and actively wrote it be vague. They wanted both audiences to see their own country in it and not think for a moment that it was set somewhere 'other'.** The way they made this work was to use the basic framework that any small town would have, regardless of country. They created a local identity that could mostly be slotted in anywhere and somehow made it unique.

I would recommend watching a few episodes to see what I mean.

**Before anyone says Americans and Canadians are the same, we can tell the difference.

 

To answer your specific question, yes . . . pretty much . . . .

I advise that, considering you want to put it somewhere in the USA. To do that successfully, your setting at the least has to feel like a place in North America, even if you don't say specifically where. The US and Canada are pretty darn big and have distinctive cultures and histories. It would be pushing things to imply there's some other country in the northwestern hemisphere where your town might be.

I'd run with the USA thing, if I were you. Take that part for granted.

The romantic suspense series I'm working on is sited primarily in a made-up medium-sized city someplace in the lower Midwest, meaning anywhere from Ohio to Missouri. I never mention the state, however, though I've made it one where the southern end was thick with Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War. In Book 2, my current WIP, I give the state capital a (fake) name. I may reconsider that as I edit, but so far nobody who's read the first book and talked to me about it has complained about the fabricated setting.

So you, as someone else has said, can decide what region you want for your town. Approach it in terms of geography, weather, seasons, etc., then find a place on the US map that fits. You're not going to get regular snow cover deep in the heart of Texas, and mountains are scarce on the Kansas plains. Do you want your town to have been around for ages, relatively speaking? Put it on the eastern seaboard. Or was it founded only in the early 1900s? Try west of the Mississippi.

Oh, and what ethnic heritage groups are predominant in your town? English, German, Italian, African, Jewish, Scots-Irish, what? Migration patterns mean a lot in the development of America.

That kind of thing. Have fun with it, and if you're not sure about aspects of the setting, come back here and ask. Members from that part of the US will be happy to help you out.

 

Agreed, though I think this only really applies to North America. There's exactly three countries there, and everyone in the English-speaking world is pretty familiar with them. Add a fourth and it upsets the balance pretty thoroughly. (adding another state/province to any of them might be doable, though) In contrast, adding one more unassuming European, Asian, African or South American country can probably be done without bothering anyone who isn't a major geography or history buff.

 

I agree with this--- provided one makes the fictional country generally Scandinavian, or Baltic, or Balkan, or whatever. In other words, don't have people acting like Frenchmen in Lower Slobbovia.

 

I checked out the show and it's refreshing, funny, and, in my case, it does invoke an automatic identification with an American feel to the settings and characters. This is of course due to me having an American background. But I can see how at the same time, Canadians can identify with the show. Nice example indeed. But this works only between two or more countries that are, at least on the surface, similar like the U.S. and Canada. For obvious reasons, this wouldn't necessarily work between say America and a European country or Africa for that matter. So, from this I get it that directly or indirectly mentioning the country of your novel's main setting is trivial and unimportant as you leave that up to the reader and at the same time satisfy a wider audience.

I might not mention the state that my setting is in since leaving this out can garner a greater appeal among a wider audience, i.e. the typical American, Canadian, or any other ethnic group associated with these two countries can identify either America or Canada as the country depicted in my story. Of course, this means that my story can't include political, social, cultural or geographical details that specifically identify with either of these countries. For example, I couldn't necessarily mention that Lady Gaga was born in my fictional town or that it was the home to one of Andrew Carnegie's steel mills.

In my mind at least, the setting is going to be in Pennsylvania, USA. My fictional town is a prominent university town which has a comparable and complimentary population groups of students, university staff, working professionals, and retired people. It's a relatively small town and its dominant Caucasian social group blends seamlessly with its Asian Indian and European minority groups. It's inhabited primarily by the middle class. My story takes place in a mansion located in a suburb that is sprinkled with isolated homes. I also want to engender an old world feel in the depiction of the setting, but not overly done to the point of travelling back in time.

Do you mean that my fictional setting can automatically blend easily between these countries so as to have the reader identify the setting with their respective country?

 

Agreed. It needs to blend into an existing category of some sort.

Well, more sort of so the reader accepts that it's somewhere in that general area without being any specific existing place in that area. Like... if you put a new state in between Virginia and Kentucky, it doesn't change much for the USA as a whole, and you have an excuse to not be too fussy in how you describe the life and culture there. If it's like Virginia in some ways and like Kentucky in some, and unlike both of them in others but still sort of vaguely USA-like, well, that's about what you'd expect.

 

That makes sense. Thanks.

 

One exercise I do regularly, is to create a small fictional city, and describe it according to places I know very well. It becomes easier to contextualize the narrative.

 

State College, PA?

Sorry, joking. If you want your fictional city to be a Pennsylvania college town, you've got a wide range, as there are a lot of them. Lots to work with.

The next fun thing will be deciding if the town is in Philadelphia's orbit, or in Pittsburgh's, or if it's in the "T" that comprises the northern part of PA from east to west and the section in the middle, north to south.

Be sure to check a topo map, because a great portion of the state has some glorious hills/mountains/ridges (the Alleghenies and the Appalachians run diagonally through). If you want something flatter, look at southeastern Pennsylvania, like Lancaster County on east. That's Amish country, too, by the way.

I'm a transplant to Pennsylvania and can't claim to be an expert on the state, but if you've got any questions, don't hesitate to ask.

 

It's your book, place it wherever you want! All of Sarah Dessen's books take place in the fictional town of Lakeview.

 

LMAO... Instead of making it a college town, I might actually just make it a small rural town in Pennsylvania -- not too remote and isolated but just enough to give it a country-side life feel.

I don't want to include any identifiers that indicate it's obviously in the U.S. let alone in Pennsylvania though.