: I think the main advantage of using a fictional place is what you perhaps allude to in your comment about "adaptability". With a fictional place, you can invent whatever you want that helps

@Annie587

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I think the main advantage of using a fictional place is what you perhaps allude to in your comment about "adaptability". With a fictional place, you can invent whatever you want that helps your story.

I've occasionally heard people really nit-pick details of a story set in a real location. Like, "What?? The author says that the hero ran out of an Italian restaurant and into a newspaper office next door. Now here I have carefully compiled a list of every Italian restaurant in that city and every newspaper office, and there is no case where the two are side by side."

Of course by definition a fiction story is not true. The rational reader expects details to be altered to fit the story. At the very least, people will be invented who never lived in this city, indeed who never lived anywhere. Fictional details will be invented. For most readers, if you say the hero lived at 137 Broad Street in a 3-bedroom house with a green door, etc, they're not going to rush to Broad Street to see if such a house really exists and really fits the description in your story. But if you set the story in New York City and mention the hero driving past the Eiffel Tower, most readers will balk. We expect the big details to be right. Thus, the writer may often find himself wondering whether some detail that he wants to put in the story is "big enough" that he has to make it match reality, or not. With a fictional place, this issue goes away. You have to be consistent with what you said earlier, but you don't have to be consistent with reality because there is no reality.

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