"Creating a World - and Living With It"
A Workshop for Writers
by Rachel Lee

Why create a world? Rachel Lee

Setting

To begin with, it’s important to note that no novel is set in the real world. Even the Office 119 series, which used real cities and even real buildings, and mentioned real historical persons and events, was not set in the real world. I know that because I never read about any of the big events of the series in the newspaper. I didn’t read about them because they didn’t happen in the real world. So every setting in every novel is a fictional world. It’s just a matter of how fictional.

For Office 119, I wanted to make the events seem as if they could have happened in our everyday world, and I wanted to let the reader travel to exotic places, from Glacier National Park in Montana to the jungles of Guatemala, from familiar American landmarks in Washington D.C. to famous cities and sites across Europe and the Middle East. Where I was describing actual places, I tried to be as accurate as I could. But ultimately it was fiction, and I took liberties where I needed to.

At the other end of the scale, the Ilduin trilogy was a fantasy novel set in a completely fictitious world. The maps, places, cultures, histories, legends, and even some languages were created from whole cloth. For that series, I let my imagination roam and only referenced the real world when I needed to. But that was more than you might expect, because while it was entirely fiction, it still had to feel plausible for the reader.

Most of my novels have been set in the not-quite-real world and the not-quite-present time. Conard County could exist but it doesn’t, although Wyoming does. Paradise Beach was loosely based on several beach communities near where I lived, but wasn’t quite any of them. Whisper Creek was woven from memories of the years I spent in Colorado. San Martin was a fictional island, but the ghost story that was the heart of the novel, and some bits of the culture, were based on the real events and my experiences in Jamaica. All of those settings were created worlds that felt like our real world in our present time, but weren’t.

So the “why” of creating a fictional world is simple: you’re going to do it whether you set out to or not, by the act of writing fiction. If you’re going to do it, it’s better to know you’re doing it and take advantage of the choices, rather than letting the choices take advantage of you.

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