Where oh where?

Carla Kovach, a friend and fellow writer raised an interesting question this morning. Where should an author base his or her work? Should it be a fictional place or somewhere real?

The question arose because my friend has just published a novel. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet but having read her previous work I have no doubt it is excellent. The book is a crime story and she wanted to put an ad for it on a certain Facebook page but the page admins objected because they thought the fact that it was of the crime/murder genre might put people off visiting the place where the story is set.

I wouldn’t dream of criticizing their decision of course, it’s their page and they can say what should, and should not, be posted on it but it does raise the question of where to base a book.

Stephen King invented the town of Castle Rock, Maine, and more murder, mayhem, hauntings and nightmare occurrences have happened in that small town over the years than any other place else on earth yet he never has problems advertising his books. Would it have been that easy for him if he had chosen Bangor, Derry or any other small Maine town that actually exists and which might object to the depiction of blood on their streets?

Personally I base my crime stories on the tri-state area of West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky. My hero’s office is in a little shopping plaza off the road where I live. The office is fictional but the plaza is there and so are almost all the other places I mention in my novels. The villages and towns in my historical novel “Weoley” are all there too. In some ways the way they developed over the centuries is different to the way I depict them but each exists and the book is a work of fiction so no one has complained that I have uncles murdering nephews in the middle of the Bristol Road as yet.

A lot of my research when writing a book involves my spending time on Google Maps, Google Earth and other websites. If one of my protagonists ducks down an alley you can be fairly certain the alley exists and that most of the surroundings are exactly as I describe them. I may put in the odd door, tree or clump of bushes but that is artistic license or simply because I think those things should be there and aren’t.

As I said at the start of this musing, whether to use a real or a fictional place is an interesting question. My friend tried to advertise her book on a site pertaining to the place where the novel set. She could not do so but equally, if she had set the story somewhere that doesn’t exist there would not be a site to post on anyway so she has lost nothing. Personally I intend to keep using real places in the belief that nature and the hand of man are probably more creative than my imagination. I’m not sure what my friend will do but if you want to check out her novels you’ll find them at:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_9?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=carla%20kovach&sprefix=carla+kov%2Caps%2C204