: Re: Troubles with unfamiliar locations and settings based in the real world I have a question: is it hard to write about a foreign country/place? I know that Dostoevsky was Russian, his themes and

@Annie587

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If you set a story in a real place that you have never been, I think it would be easy to get something wrong that anyone who has been there would know -- like what side of the street they drive on or the fact that no one there wears a hat or whatever. To those who do know the place it could be really jarring. Like casually mentioning that a character spent the evening watching television -- but you said he was Amish, and Amish people don't watch television. Or that he was in such financial trouble that he couldn't pay the mortgage -- but you said he was in Saudi Arabia, where the banking system is different and they don't have mortgages. A real example that occurs to me: I once saw a movie about King Arthur in which Arthur and his knights on several occasions talk about making sacrifices to "the gods". Except ... except the whole point of the old stories about Arthur and company was that they were Christians defending Britain against an invasion by pagans. I suppose a re-telling of the story in which they are pagans might be a clever twist, but it was tossed in so casually that I got the impression that the scriptwriters didn't realize what a bizarre twist this was. Now I'm thinking it would be fun to write a story set in Indonesia in which the people there are all Jewish, with no explanation of how that came about. :-)

I think an easy out is to set the story in an imaginary place. You can model it on a real place, but if you give it a different name, then you avoid having to research a bunch of detail. You can then freely take the things about the real place that made you want to set the story there, and just make up whatever else you need as you go along. Also, you can say negative things about the place without offending people who are from there. I suspect this is why lots of stories are set in "a small country in Europe" and the like. Oh, this wouldn't give you total free rein. If you set a story in "a small country in Europe" and then mention the characters going off into the jungle, readers might ask, "The jungle? just where in Europe is this supposed to be?" But you eliminate whole categories of possible problems. You can call the local law enforcement officer "the constable" without having to check on official titles, you can say the hero had to cross a raging river without consulting a map, you can say that the heroine was annoyed that the shoes cost 20 dropniks without having to worry about the actual currency or prevailing prices, etc.

That may not work for you, of course. It may be essential to set the story in France because the whole plot hinges on the legacy of Charlemagne or some such.

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