The realistic fiction constructed world

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Constructed worlds are common. Some people sit around all day jerking off thinking up constructed worlds without even writing about them.

What I find interesting are constructed worlds that are set in the real world. Specifically, there is William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. As a disclaimer, I never read any Faulkner outside of school. I tried and I thought he sounded like a giant wanker. But I like the IDEA. See, Faulkner had this one fictional county that he set most of his writing in. He'd have characters that appeared in different books (otherwise unrelated), lore. He didn't set out to do this, but it just came about naturally from him writing in a fictionalized version of his corner of the Mississippi River Delta.

The County Highway, a throwback physical newspaper of Americana, describes it like this:

The name County Highway is inspired by what we believe is the perfect-sized place for the enhancement of life and art. A county is a chunk of earth big enough to allow for a variety of human types, but small enough to get to know a decent number of your neighbors, where they come from, what they’re proud of, what they fear, what they smoke, what they drink, and what they love. Counties are the right-sized places for telling stories. Mark Twain had Calaveras County, which is a real place in California. William Faulkner had Yoknapatawpha County, a made-up place in Mississippi. Edmund Wilson had Hecate County, a seductive place in Connecticut. Philip Roth had Essex County, New Jersey.

Another thing similar to this is Stephen King's Maine. Leaving aside debates about if Maine even exists in real life, King didn't have a specific stretch of imaginary land, but he does frequently reference fictional places and peoples again as many of his writings are set in Maine. So Shawshank Penitentiary will be reference outside of The Shawshank Redemption, Derry outside of IT, and so on.

 

[We Are The Witches]

Today I had a dream about one of those, and it's obvious why dreams would make the best of it.

You're using memories from real life, and then adding that sparkle of mystery and beauty, that something is not quite right, but that can make it better. All the while keeping enough resemblance for it to be called whatever city/country you dreamed of.

 

[murmurbee]

Thomas Hardy’s novels take place in “Wessex,” which is meant to be southwestern England. It worked well as a marketing technique.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Thomas Hardy’s novels take place in “Wessex,” which is meant to be southwestern England. It worked well as a marketing technique. Ver archivo adjunto 6639569

Does Wessex not still exist (as Sussex and Essex do) as a geographical term in common use? Is it like Dixie where it's so outdated that it would only ever be used as a deliberate affectation?

 

[murmurbee]

Does Wessex not still exist (as Sussex and Essex do) as a geographical term in common use? Is it like Dixie where it's so outdated that it would only ever be used as a deliberate affectation?

Looks like that is the case. Outdated as in medieval.

 

[mindlessobserver]

One of the best constructed worlds that is "our world" but different is the world of Strangereal from the Ace Combat Series. All the names are made up, all the geography is made up, but you could hit the story beats with a hammer. The Osean Federation is the USA. The Yuktobanian Republics is Russia, Belka is Germany, Emmeria is the United Kingdom, Estovakia is an amalgamation of Warsaw Pact Eastern Europe and so on.

Its certainly not a 1 to 1 comparison to be sure, but it hits just close enough and allows nerds to live out their fantasy of having F-22's duel SU-27 when out of nowhere a Gripen shows up!

 

[Paul Ryan]

I am not well informed about Jorge Luis Borges, but I read several of his short stories that used this device. Peter Straub as well.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

One of the best constructed worlds that is "our world" but different is the world of Strangereal from the Ace Combat Series. All the names are made up, all the geography is made up, but you could hit the story beats with a hammer. The Osean Federation is the USA. The Yuktobanian Republics is Russia, Belka is Germany, Emmeria is the United Kingdom, Estovakia is an amalgamation of Warsaw Pact Eastern Europe and so on.

Its certainly not a 1 to 1 comparison to be sure, but it hits just close enough and allows nerds to live out their fantasy of having F-22's duel SU-27 when out of nowhere a Gripen shows up!

Full fantasy style constructed worlds (no connection to reality) in realistic fiction settings is something we need more of.

 

[Hey Johnny Bravo]

I have a constructed world that I've worked on for over a decade. It has gone through many revisions and, right now, it exists in a "modern" low fantasy setting separate from our reality. I integrate older content into the current world's legends and histories. The world has its own societies which I created using real-life research as a sort of guide rod. There's even a basic constructed language for the country that I've written the most about.

I do it for funsies and nothing more. The 10+ years I've worked on it have not been a constant effort, but something I work on in spurts when the mood strikes. Most of the people I have shown this stuff to find the behavior autistic and, thus, I keep it to myself.

 

[millais]

Lovecraft Country (the setting created by Howard Phillips Lovecraft and not the TV show made by the people who were named after his cat). It is a fictionalized version of New England. I don't remember all the analogs exactly, but the town of Arkham is modeled after Salem, Massachussetts. Miskatonic University is modeled after Brown University. Kingsport is modeled after Marblehead, Massachussetts. etc etc

I don't know if they really count as constructed worlds, but there is a lot of fiction that takes place in parts of the globe that were still unexplored at the time of writing, and writers used the lack of information to create their own fanciful settings to suit the requirements of their stories.

The final act of Edgar Allan Poe's "Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" takes place in a fictionalized version of the Antarctic islands, which is fleshed out with an entirely fictional native culture, ecology, and geography. Though at the time, it was still a barely explored "blank spot" on the map, he tried to incorporate a lot of the info that did exist from the early Antarctic explorers and make it seem believable.

H. Rider Haggard's "She" and "King Solomon's Mines" both feature fictionalized versions of a stretch of Subsaharan Africa roughly around Angola to Rhodesia, fleshed out with fictional native cultures and history. Similar to Poe, Haggard tried to work in a lot of what was known about the unexplored region in his fiction, and Haggard's work has a real sense of verisimilitude to it since he actually spent much of his youth in the region.

Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" ostensibly takes place in the Far East, but with little attempt at grounding the different fictional satirical societies and civilizations.

 

[August Levasseur]

Russel Hoban's Ridley Walker is set in a post-apocalyptic England. I'm not sure if that really counts for what you're going for, but I felt like it was worth mentioning anyways because it's always worth mentioning Ridley Walker.

 

[HyperboreanRightsActivist]

My worldbuilding project which is TOTALLY REAL (I will never release it to the public thobeit )

 

[Idiotron]

I'll nitpick a little bit.
I wouldn't call 99% of what King wrote as "realistic".
Sure, it may take place in a real location but nobody really behaves like a normal person.
To me, realism in fiction has more to do with how the characters behave.
You can have dragons and aliens and zombies but it's all about how the characters and the world in general deals with those things.

For example, Pacific Rim has humans create giant robots to punch kaiju in the face because that looks cool but in reality, we would try and success by using a million other things that would take less money and resources to create.
That's not a realistic world.
All of Shayamalan's movies (aside from the Last Airbender) take place in Philadelphia and I dare you to convince anybody that those movies are realistic.

What you're describing is an author being really familiar with his hometown/state, just uses it in all of his works because it's easier for him to imagine all the scenes when all the locations are already ingrained in his head.

 

[Hazel Motes]

John O'Hara had Gibbsville, which was Pottsville in Pennsylvania. John Updike, also from Pennsylvania, had Olinger, which was his hometown of Shillington. The authors, both publishing under the New Yorker, would use those settings primarily for short stories. It saves a lot bother on planning out certain stories when you already have a world premade. That, and nobody complains about how one might portray a fictional world.

The novels of Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting) and Bret Easton Ellis use their own universes. For the latter it works quite well as Ellis often appears as himself as a dickhead author character, and then he also comments on his self-insert (Clay from Less Than Zero), usually negatively. For those who like American Psycho, the film of Rules of Attraction has a deleted scene with Patrick Bateman, who is the older brother of Rules main character, Sean Bateman. You can find it on YouTube. Sean also appears in the novel of American Psycho in which he makes Patrick look like a tool.

Trollope had Barchester. In his opening lines of the first Barchester novel, The Warden, Trollope justifies his reasoning for creating his county:

The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the cathedral town of ––––; let us call it Barchester. Were we to name Wells or Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester, it might be presumed that something personal was intended; and as this tale will refer mainly to the cathedral dignitaries of the town in question, we are anxious that no personality may be suspected. Let us presume that Barchester is a quiet town in the West of England, more remarkable for the beauty of its cathedral and the antiquity of its monuments than for any commercial prosperity; that the west end of Barchester is the cathedral close, and that the aristocracy of Barchester are the bishop, dean, and canons, with their respective wives and daughters.

Far more than Dickens, Trollope best captures English sensibility. It is why, unlike Dickens, he is only popular in England (and with David Mamet).

Someone mentioned Hardy. I quite like Wessex and Hardy's asides to other characters and events. There's a moment in the Mayor of Casterbridge when the narrator mentions a character from Far From the Maddening Crowd, which reads more like a book plug than anything else. Of all authors creating worlds, Hardy's are the most like Marvel films.

Balzac had his own world, which I assume made writing far easier for a man who basically wrote none stop.

Will Self likes to use a psychologist, Zack Busner, to feature in most of his novels. Occasionally the character dies in them. Once he was an ape.

Conrad, Joyce, Sterne, Flann O'Brien, Philip Roth, Salinger, Waugh all have characters that reappear in several different novels or stories. I know I am moving away from constructed worlds, but it is worth thinking about the reasons people keep coming back to places and characters. In simple cases, it is easier. For Conrad's Marlowe or Roth's Zuckerman, the point of creating a new character seems pointless when the author would be writing the same character under a different name (often these are autobiographical characters). In other cases, like Shakespeare's Falstaff, who features in several of his plays, there is obviously some attraction to the character, the idea that not enough has been said of him. I think Shakespeare just quite enjoyed writing that character. Evelyn Waugh, another great writer of character, I think wanted to show how much his opinions had developed when Put Out More Flags was published.

Updike had a couple, the Mapels, that he kept coming back to over the years. There was something about them, in the fact they mirrored his own failing marriage and the pleasures he still found in it, that made him sympathetic to the characters. That's the odd thing about what authors write about, it is like children to them: they characters grow out of them and we can see how they reflect the author's own character, but to be a genuine character, the authors can't force them to be different or act in the way they might want them to. This might seem silly, anybody can write anything, but the characters we remember are the ones who seem above the author and his own surface level opinions. Certain characters even seem to contradict the author's own life. Graham Greene is an obvious example. He's seems to derive more pleasure from the evil than the good. A great deal of poetry is like this. Blake famously said Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it. That is because Milton wrote a Devil that is captivating and romantic. Milton's God, on the other hand, is a lot harder to sympathise with, for Milton was trying to stay true to the Bible and so he had less freedom to play with. His God lacks a human touch. Poetry, though it is far more technical than people who don't write or read poetry think it is, is filled with spontaneity. A poem is often built on one line that comes to the mind. Something is reaching towards us from our regular working day, asking to be mulled over. I always remember the line from McCabe & Ms Miller when McCabe, infatuated with Ms. Miller, mutters to himself that he has "poetry" inside him. We are all a little McCabe now and then.

One last one. There is a famous novel by Thomas Hughes, called Tom Brown's Schooldays. In it, there is a minor character, Flashman, who torments young Tom Brown until Flashman is kicked out of the school for being a drunk.

Years later, George MacDonald Fraser wrote a book about what happened to Flashman, detailing his life and many adventures. For those who love historical novels, Flashman is the gold standard, mainly because Flashman is such an amoral coward that it is hard not to root for him.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I'll nitpick a little bit.
I wouldn't call 99% of what King wrote as "realistic".
Sure, it may take place in a real location but nobody really behaves like a normal person.
To me, realism in fiction has more to do with how the characters behave.
You can have dragons and aliens and zombies but it's all about how the characters and the world in general deals with those things.

It's not realistic fiction, I just got to typing and forgot my original prompt.

What you're describing is an author being really familiar with his hometown/state, just uses it in all of his works because it's easier for him to imagine all the scenes when all the locations are already ingrained in his head.

That is not the same thing as having a setting that you build up and share across works.