Fantasy Vs. Reality

I spent a brief stint cruising around writing and fan groups, trying to gather popular and unpopular beliefs in everything from writing to content to subject matter. While there is little of it that can actually be substantially helpful in a themed post, I was thinking about one subject in particular that solidified why I like to focus on made-up places.

Even I had the faux confidence of a world traveler, researched a place top to bottom and/or wrote about any place I've actually lived, people seem to trip over the fact that any perspective is still an experience limited to that person. Rather than taking it as such, I've seen people over-dissect writing to confuse the lines between fact and opinion. You might remember a trip to a deli on the corner of 7th and Elm in a town you lived in five years ago, but write a present day piece, not knowing that deli either closed or relocated somewhere in between. Someone will always fixate on it to the point where you try to steer clear with a polite thanks but it's not the feedback you're looking for.

These examples aren't personal, but the and again, a writer looking for specific feedback on style almost always needs to type up a paper on what they're actually looking for. A fictional story, even set in a real place, however badly remembered, tends to attract the geographically obsessed. Immensely helpful if that's what you're looking for, but when the comment thread blows up in a million wrong directions, sometimes I just can't blame a writer for deleting the thread and starting anew with tighter requirements.

Really, it's okay to just loosely base most fiction on real places. The Simpsons never specified which Springfield it was supposedly based off of, so it's no wonder fantasy so often uses crazy naming convention to avoid real-world distractions, so to speak. Even so, I've still seen enough fantasy forums where people conspire over what parts of Europe a map resembles or what Russian family certain characters mimic. While some of an author's parallels are deliberate in which models they use, sometimes they can't say for certain where they drew the logic. It's just as likely that they watched another fictional movie based off of a real history. Histories, especially the most intriguing events, seem to inspire many an artist to exaggerate over an exaggeration many times over.

While I certainly use deliberate models, they tend to be isolated to a place or a person while any extending parallels happen to be a natural coincidence of the logic. Psychology and human potential is not limitless and there are simply actions that are more likely than others. Even the unlikely follows a natural logic.

There's no real way to wholly avoid speculation (and as a writer, it is certainly flattering to inspire a talking point at all) but I like the freedom of not being restrained to recorded fact. I do have some stories that touch down on Earth from time to time to time, but I try to steer away from current settings or politics because I find those shouldn't be confused as central to the stories I'm writing. Once people can nail down a place or person, the race to find the flaws begins.

Fantasy is never immune, especially when you pull in a mainstream audience. Though I can certainly understand why popular writers often avoid these forums or even come into Q&As with a specific list of questions they aren't going to answer. By all means, speculate away but in all honesty, most prolific writers have moved on to another story, another world, and even when they're still working on a spanning series, there's very little chance they're going to backtrack over a perceived error, no matter how big. There are few things that survive a long editing process that weren't skipped over time and again for a reason. 

I don't do fantasy just to avoid researching real world places. Rather, I don't use real world places so I can focus more on the themes. There plenty of times where I have to leave scenes thin until they are better researched or thought out. That isn't truly minimized even in total fiction. However, I find it more fascinating to focus on the potential of a place rather than a prefab one.

That's not to say I'm not up to the challenge of that someday. My Dreampunk Chronicles dance between this world and another. As a fairly new published author, I'm not niched into anything just yet. However, I still like this playground and, considering the amount of work that goes into each book, I could very well be in fantasy land for at least another five years. I'm not aching to use our world as a primary setting and even then, I'd have more fun with historical time periods rather than anything too current.

There is no serious book effort done without challenge. I'd never assume fantasy or reality or their hybrids are somehow on different difficulty levels. It's just different and the main difference, the reduction of established parallels, is my main temptation.