Many novelists create fictionalized representations of real places. They do this for a variety of reasons, but I suspect the most powerful reason is the license to make shit up. It’s an important license to hold.
When you fictionalize your setting and base it on existing towns or cities, you have the best of both worlds. You have landmarks that you can use to anchor you to the place while not having to abide strictly to the real place’s politics or roads or schools. You can fictionalize the populations, increasing or decreasing it as it serves your writing. You can make up streets and businesses, juxtaposing them against known landmarks in the real town.
The creative freedom of fictionalizing a town also comes with creative constraints. Let’s say there is a popular landmark (mountains and the University of Arizona tend to be mine) and you want to include them in your story. These landmarks are tied to a city people might know, so using them in your fictionalized town can be jarring. I’ve struggled with this. Often, in my short stories at least, I simply choose not to name the town. It’s in Pima County. It’s in the Sonoran Desert. It just doesn’t have a named town.
However, in my novels, I’ve used the fictionalized version and used the real city. In my last novel, I made up a town named Nakisha—based heavily on Tucson, AZ but with a smaller population. I mention the University of Arizona but only in the context of it being a popular choice for Arizona residents, not in the context of location. In my most recent novel, I chose to frame everything in the real city. In Tucson. This was a challenge because now I am placing readers in the city where I grew up. It’s a city they may have heard of or visited. They can research it and find gaps in how my story uses the city versus the reality. But for this story (at least for this moment), Tucson felt like the right choice. I wanted to use the Tucson newspaper, I used the mountain ranges around Tucson for important pieces of the plot. I also use the small city of South Tucson, which makes it hard to fictionalize my main setting.
As I edit this novel, I still wonder if I made the right decision. There’s something so powerful about a fictionalized setting. I want my characters to live in Nakisha, not Tucson. Because in Nakisha, I can do whatever I want. Yet there’s distinct beats in my novel that lean into Tucson’s complicated history and how that history impacted the shape and demographics of the people who live there.
I don’t have great advice about how to decide if and when to use a fictionalized setting versus not. It’s largely a feel thing. But as I’ve illustrated above, even the feel can be borderline. What I can tell you is that I am not alone in having to grapple with this decision. Nor are you. So many of the authors I have had to decide between fictionalized and real. It’s easier when you set your stories in very large cities (New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, etc). However, when you’re writing Southern noir or Southwestern noir or Appalachian lit grit, it’s much harder.
David Joy fictionalizes the towns in his novels (mostly) but uses the real characteristics of the county in which these towns are set. He uses the Appalachian mounts as his anchor. Jess Lourey uses both real towns and neighborhoods in Minnesota as well as fictionalized ones. Her book, The Quarry Girls sets much of the story in the very specific (and real) neighborhood called Pantown. However, she has a couple of novels set in the fictional Minnesota town of Lilydale. J. Todd Scott’s first three novels (his Big Bend series) was set in a fictional town in West Texas. It allowed him the creative freedom to move between the fictional town and real West Texas towns easily. Some of his later novels focus on real towns, real places, real histories.
Surely, these authors struggle the same way I do. The same way you might. Does the creative freedom of a fictionalized town outweigh the verisimilitude of setting your story in the real town or city? That’s a question that often doesn’t get answered until you’re well into the writing of your story. My current novel started with Nakisha—my fictionalized town—but switched to Tucson. Even as late as a few weeks ago, I considered changing it back.
All I think this means is that setting is important, but it’s not as important as the story. If you tell a great story, the setting amplifies it. But the difference between a fictionalized locale and a real one may not carry as much weight as you think.
(Or maybe that’s just me coping)