Sunday 1 September 2019


Location, Location, Location
If you read my July blog post Reading 'in Situ', you will know that a sense of place is very important to me when I'm reading and I especially like reading a novel in the place where it's set. But what about my own writing? There is always a decision to be made whether to choose a fictional or a real location. For me, I prefer to imagine a fictional place based on a real or an amalgamation of real settings. This allows me to use my imagination and create a location where my characters and their stories take place. I try to make it vivid enough that readers will be transported there with the characters. Because it's fictional, they will not bring any preconceived ideas of what the place is like and I will be introducing them to the location for the first time. They may have been somewhere similar and they may have visited a place it reminds them of especially if real main towns, rivers or landmarks surrounding the fictional place are mentioned. Beforehand I like to collect images and collate my own photographs to help me imagine the places I shall be describing.

In Whispering Olive Trees, most of the novel is set on a fictional island in the Peloponnese, Southern Greece. It's very roughly based on the island of Spetses where my aunt and Greek uncle had a summer house and where I visited a number of times. You will find the solitary olive tree that plays an important part in the novel growing in the sand outside my cousin's house on the mainland opposite the island. However, it's a long time since I've been to that particular island and I'm sure things have changed so my island of Péfka is a mixture of the islands I've visited more recently. The Guikas taverna and Yiannis's wood turners workshop are based on ones we visited in a Cretan village, for example. Apart from Athens, Kranidi and Ermione, all the place names are fictional. Location is more than place names, of course, and the climate, landscape, cuisine, the character traits of the local people all can add authenticity. By setting a fictional island in a real area, readers will hopefully get a sense of place. 


From the  'White Almond Sicily' blog
Because I've been to the area where Whispering Olive Trees is set and have collected many photographs on the holidays spent in there, it was relatively straightforward to create a believable setting. But is it possible to set your novel in a place you haven't visited and achieve the same sense of authenticity? The novel I've recently been editing, Keeping Her Secret, involves the main character, Jen, traveling to Sicily in search of an Italian PoW who was imprisoned in a camp near her home during WWII. Not having been to Sicily (yet!), I have had to rely on researching places on Google, looking at maps and talking to my lovely neighbour who is from Sicily. I am grateful to author Jo Thomas, whose latest book My Lemon Grove Summer is set on the island, for recommending an amazing blog White Almond Sicily  In my novel, Jen concentrates her search around the area of Cefalu on the North East coast. Imagine how pleased I was to find a whole blog post about visiting the resort together with lots of photos just a few weeks ago. By the time editing is finished, the location will have a fictional name and be an invented area near Cefalu but based on a real area in Sicily.

Thank you for reading. Do you set your novels in real or fictional locations? Maybe you combine the two? I'd love to hear how you choose settings for your stories and how you go about researching them.

You may also follow me on Twitter @JanBayLit and on my Jan Baynham Writer Facebook page.

11 comments:

  1. Hi Jan. My first novels were about two people travelling the world so all the destinations were real and largely googled, although I took great pleasure in visiting Barcelona afterwards and seeing all the places my characters had seen. They eventually ended up on a fictional Fijian island based on very real islands, but I just invented everything they needed to make it a gappers' retreat. The truly wonderful thing is that when I wrote the book, the famous Grand Hotel in Suva had been abandoned and I wrote how sad it was that it was sat there doing nothing. I googled it recently and it's been refurbished and is a working hotel again - I actually cried when I saw it! Their hometown in Surrey was also fictional, but based on my hometown in Essex.

    My most recent novel was set in Maida Vale and Bloomsbury. I invented a few buildings in roads and squares which actually exist. I'm a huge fan of google earth for this purpose. And the featured Yo! Sushi is my favourite one in the Brunswick Centre near Russell Square.

    I think I started mixing reality with fiction when I read Me Before You. JoJo Moyles lives near the town I grew up in and some of her fictional places seem to be based on the town. For instance, the castle I think is called Stortfeld, which is a play on the next nearest town Bishop's Stortford, but the castle itself I think might be based on Framlingham Castle, although they apparently used Pembroke Castle in the film. And the walk out to the job interview at the mansion in Me Before You is very reminiscent of the walk from Saffron Walden town past the battle ditches to Audley End House, which is a walk almost every resident of the town has done walking out to the summer concerts at Audley End. I really enjoy reading this mix of reality and fiction, so I always write that way.

    However, if there was ever a cautionary tale about writers writing about places they've never been to, it's the film, The Decoy Bride. It's written by Sally Phillips and stars David Tennant as a writer who gets taken to the island he's claimed to have visited many times by his bride to be, only to be shown up as a bit of a googling fraud. Good film! Vxx

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    1. Thank you for your comments and observations, Victoria. Google Earth is a wonderful resource and I hadn't used it for researching places to use as settings. I certainly shall from now on. Thanks. I love the fact that you recognised where some of the fictional places Jo Jo Moyes has created are based. Mixing reality and fiction is working well for you.

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  2. It's possible, dear Jan, we have had this conversation before! But first - my one & only visit to Greece (Kefalonia) left me with a nostalgic affection & you make me even keener to read your book!

    I use real locations laced with made-up bits! I expand & play with reality. And I never identify them as such. People familiar with the part of the Welsh world my books are set in may well work out which 'village' or 'town' I'm referring to. The village in Ghostbird is based on one I know very well; the house in Snow Sisters is borrowed from a house near Aberystwyth. And the inspiration for the garden in my current WIP came initially from a visit to Juliet's Greenwood's gorgeous one in north Wales. The final version bears little resemblance but without the initial inspiration, I'm not sure I would have got there quite so satisfactorily.

    I don't believe, in fiction, it matters if we take liberties with locations. I do believe we need to have a good sense of the places we write about & if possible, a physical knowledge. That said - meticulous research is a good second best!

    Great post as ever! Thank you! xXx

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    1. Thanks, Carol. I agree that the inspiration for a setting is often a real place but in the end may bear little resemblance. Taking liberties with locations works best when we have a physical knowledge of the real place, I agree, so although I'm relying on research at the moment I'm hoping a trip to Sicily could be on the cards!

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  3. I suspect it's location that inspires me to think up a story to attach to it, rather than starting with a story and finding somewhere to place it. Even if a writer imagines a totally fictional place, he or she is going to be constructing it from images already embedded in the brain, even if it's sci fi or fantasy. Tolkien's Middle Earth was fictional but it's easy to identify elements that inspired it. I spent 30 years in Luton and use it as the basis for the fictional Lyford in a couple of my books, but what I did was shuffle all my images of the town and area I knew as a child and deal them out as a completely different jigsaw... er, slight metaphors, but heh. People might recognise individual details, but I have knitted them together to form a town of my own creation. Same with my houses and villages in Pembrokeshire. I could find just about every image that I use, but not all in the same place. I picture it all like the Sirius Black safe house in Harry Potter. If you have the magic touch you can squeeze between two bits of the real place and find the fictional one nestling between them.

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    1. I mean slight mixed metaphors. Of course.

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    2. Thank you for your comments and observations, Thorne. I find it interesting that, for you, it's the location that inspires the story. I can relate to the shuffling of images. I always have the story and the location comes second. In the Greek novel, I needed a location to inspire Elin the artist and in the Sicily novel, the PoW was Italian so I chose the island where Jen's uncle had been killed in the battle of Messina in WWII.

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  4. I mix and match. Some stories are set in actual locations, but writing historical, I can get away with more - at least I hope so!

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    1. Mixing and matching works, I think, Natalie. Writing historical must be different but I would think that you have to check the changes over time in actual locations meticulously. I'm sure you do get away with it, though. Thank you for your comments.

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  5. Great blog post again, Jan, also provoking some excellent comments. My current wip is set in a small seaside town in Wales and in my head I can see exactly where my characters are, though I've changed the name of my home town. Like Thorne and Carol, I use aspects that come from other locations and are inspired by my characters. This novella is a historical one, though back in 1957 I never dreamt I'd be using that term for a book set in that era!

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    1. Thank you, Sandra. I think as writers we can relate to your comment about using aspects that come from other locations inspired by your characters. I love the last sentence and can definitely relate to that!

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