Setting (5 page)

All such reader expectations about a story's setting may require you to deviate considerably from the actual truth.

ARTISTIC LICENSE

Are there other instances when you can safely deviate from the facts about setting? Yes. Here are some examples of what you can do.

Invent a town or area, within reason.
Your story situation may make it necessary to invent a town or area rather than placing your story precisely in an actual one. Most of the reasons you would do this are mundanely practical. You don't have access to every small physical detail of the real town in Bavaria you want to portray, for example, but you have general memories of the area, and access to guidebooks which show pictures of several towns similar to the one you vaguely remember. In such a case, making up your own town might keep you true to the spirit and feeling of a real place, but free you from worry that you might get a street name wrong or a bit of history garbled. Or you might be basing your story loosely on actual events —a murder, say, or grand theft that really took place. Placing your story in the actual town where the crime was committed would lead every person in the real town to look for themselves in your story, and thus naming the actual town might open you up to misidentifications (or real ones!) —and lawsuits. Far better in such circumstances to make up your own town, similar to the real one.

Invention of a town or area as setting may free you creatively and legally, too. But a proviso must be added, and that is this: The invented place must be true to the general area and time in which you invent it. It simply won't work to set a story in 1976 and have your railroad line using mostly steam locomotives; these were generally phased out of use in favor of diesel power in the 1950s. Similarly, just because you happen to make up your particular small town in upper New York state, you can't have everybody speaking in an accent or with slang totally out of keeping with that general geographical area —then plead that you can do whatever you want because the town is imaginary. The rules of credibility apply even in a wholly fictional setting, and most writers who make up a town pattern it closely after a real, known one —or well-researched one—in order to avoid gaffes like having considerable oil drilling taking place in modern-day Oklahoma, where the oil business has declined radically in recent years, or putting a mountain anywhere near Oklahoma City.

Put actual historical (or contemporary) personages in your fiction.
Writers often worry greatly about when they can and cannot put real people in their story settings and plots. A rule that perhaps errs on the side of safety is that you can put actual people in cameo roles. It's a fairly popular device, one I've used myself in a series of novels about an international tennis player I call Brad Smith. There is no Brad Smith, and he is made out of whole cloth. But as part of the story setting, any number of actual tennis stars, from Bjorn Borg to Chrissie Evert, show up in cameo speaking roles.

Such a setting device tends to add verisimilitude to the yarn and to make the reader believe in the wholly fictional characters. Generally there is nothing wrong with this, even though making up dialogue for real people, and even minor actions in the plot, is clearly a departure from reality. Again, however, you shouldn't stray too far from the truth: If you put Jimmy Connors on the tennis court in your story, you can't make him right-handed; readers will notice that and chalk it up to your ignorance, thus diminishing your credibility as a storyteller.

The legal ramifications of using real people in your fiction are not complicated. The basics have not changed in over a half-century. In both civil and criminal libel, three elements must be present to establish libel has taken place. The words used must be defamatory; they must be published; and the person libeled must be identified. (Fredrick Siebert,
J.D.:
The Rights and Privileges of the Press-,
Appleton-Century Co., 1934.)

Beyond this, courts have generally held that the alleged libel must have been written and published "willfully." That is to say, the offended party must prove that the accused writer meant to do harm. This is a very difficult allegation to prove, as many failed libel suits have proven. However, all writers should remember that there have been rare cases where a judge ruled that the writer printed a damaging falsehood, and should have been more careful. In such cases, a "reckless disregard for the truth" — the terminology often used in journalism school lecture halls — may be interpreted as proof of an indifference to fact so sloppy and brazen that the resulting falsehood can be considered "willful."

Also remember that truth is its own defense. If you are sued for libel and can absolutely prove the veracity of what you wrote, you cannot be found guilty of libel. (Of course you might go through a great deal of emotional torment and expense before you are vindicated in a court of law.)

Public figures such as elected officials are almost impossible to libel when the writer is writing about official duties. All such comment, including newspaper editorials, is considered "fair comment."

The published material must bring the subject person into disrepute and actually damage his or her reputation, and you can't libel the dead.

Beyond these basic points lies a swamp of legal nit-picking. Great, fat books have been written on libel. Occasionally a court renders a libel ruling which subtly alters the body of "case law," creating some new precedent every subsequent judge may have to consider in rendering a verdict, but all of these fine points take us far beyond the scope of this chapter.

In addition to libel laws, the writer must be concerned about laws protecting citizens' right to privacy. These are far broader and less specific. If you put a real person in your story, and if he or she doesn't happen to like your portrayal, you might find yourself sued for invasion of that person's privacy.

Such cases might be filed virtually by anyone on any pretext, and there are a lot of people out there eagerly looking for a chance to sue somebody and make some easy money. A writing friend of mine was once sued for millions by the family of a dead official with a shady past. The story mentioned some of the dead man's alleged shady dealings. The family sued for invasion of their privacy by the writer's mentioning the dead man's chicanery, and while they ended up losing their case, my friend spent more than two years in agony as the case dragged on, to his considerable expense in legal fees.

The moral here is that you should be extremely careful in matters involving real people, living or dead. That rule —and the always-present need for the greatest possible verisimilitude in your stories — guides all the observations that follow here.

My own rule is to use real people only in harmless cameo roles, and to reduce even the use of actual historical personages to a safe minimum. I generally make up my specific locales —at least the restricted area of a known city or state my story may play in —and use real people supersafely.

An actual example might further illustrate the last two points about making up a town and putting real people in cameo roles. In his novel
The Night Hunters,
mystery writer John Miles opens with a prologue that begins as follows.

In the summer of 1962, the President of the United States flew 2,000 miles in order to cut a ribbon and open twelve miles of two-lane asphalt highway. The new road followed the ridged crest of a wooded hill system —steps to the Ozarks —in the most desolate and beautiful section of southeastern Oklahoma.

The President's aides spoke of his abiding interest in projects designed to preserve natural beauty and stimulate pride in the nation, and the President himself, standing tall and young with the brisk Oklahoma wind in his sandy hair, spoke movingly of our heritage. . . .

It was by all odds the biggest day in the history of the town of Noble in Archer County, Oklahoma.. ..

This segment combines historical and geographical fact with invention. It is a fact that John Kennedy went to Oklahoma in 1962 to dedicate a short stretch of scenic highway. But the town most directly affected was not Noble, but Big Cedar. Newspaper accounts do not reflect remarks by the president that day about "our heritage," but about development of natural resources. Further, there is no "Archer County" in Oklahoma, and although there is a real town of Noble, it is located in Cleveland County, faraway from the story locale, in the middle of the state.

Miles's deviations from actuality were not the type that readers would "jump on" as inaccurate. Clearly, he was taking liberties with actuality in order to lay out the background setting for a story to be played out in and around a fictional town in a fictional county —much like a real town in a real county.

The plot of Miles's novel has to do with a hidden story involving a plot against the president's life on that visit long ago, and the long-hidden aftereffects of that murderous scheme. Far better to make up a town and some character dialogue so that the main plot might be believed, than to try to put the story in the actual town of Big Cedar, Oklahoma, where many readers would know that such a series of events never, ever, took place.

Invent dialogue
for real people, even historical personages. What you can't do is try to prettify your setting by having actual persons, contemporary or historical, saying things clearly contrary to everything actually known about them. This is not a legal question but one of simple accuracy and verisimilitude. In a historical novel about Lewis and Clark, for example, you might reasonably show the two explorers discussing the wildlife and day's activities; you could extrapolate conversations like this from expedition journals, and possibly even allude to real past events. On the other hand, it might be going a bit too far to have Lewis telling Clark how frightened he is out here in the wilderness without his night light.

Change the location or timing of real events.
You can also mildly alter other established facts, if the changes are not glaringly wrong. In one of my Brad Smith novels, for example, I changed the venue of events leading up to the Wimbledon tournament, making up a couple of warm-up tourneys that don't actually exist, and changing the dates for some others. Why? The different timing and placement of these parts of my fictional setting made my plot work better and more smoothly. In addition, had I used real locations in all cases, I would have had to spend another $10,000 visiting all such locales and tournaments in Great Britain in order to make sure I had every detail about the actual place perfectly accurate. In another Brad Smith book, set around Lake City, Colorado, I sent a car chase south of town and onto a creek-canyon road that does not really exist. Two other creek-canyon roads do exist south of town, but neither exactly fit my needs for the chase.

I don't think anyone objects very strenuously to changes like these. In both cases, the deviations from actuality remained true to the kind and spirit of the real setting. Only details were altered for convenience.

Invent period jargon or slang.
You can even write in such a way as to "fake" the sound of a period. This is especially true in historical fiction. It may be quite impossible to know exactly how the common person spoke in the England of 1700, for example. But writers depict the period setting's language peculiarities and cadences all the time. Sometimes, as more than one novelist has admitted, certain slang expressions were simply made up because they "sounded right," true to the cadence and feel of journals and other written documents of the time. Similarly, writers of science fiction often invent pseudotechnical doublespeak for characters to spout as part of the general technological setting of the story. But again, common sense must prevail. You simply can't have an Elizabethan character saying words like "groovy" or "okay," or starting sentences with the contemporary misusage, "Hopefully. . . ."

Imagine the clearly impossible.
The setting of Michael Crichton's
Jurassic Park
is a theme park where prehistoric animals have been returned to life. My own novel
Ariel
was set in a computer lab featuring a large mainframe computer which began making its own telephone calls, and then "came to life." The key to making all such improbable or impossible settings work for the reader lies in making the impossible imaginable and acceptable —making the setting enough
like
something that
does
exist so that the reader can "buy it." The copious use of actual facts in presenting the setting is mandatory to get the reader to suspend disbelief. Crichton, for example, provides heavy detail on real scientific developments in biological engineering—cloning, and the like. I heavily researched work in artificial intelligence, computer design and childhood-learning theory before writing
Ariel,
and put heavy doses of facts about such real aspects of science in the novel as part of its setting.

The moral of this, perhaps, is that even when you make something up out of whole cloth —or perhaps especially when you do so —it's even more crucial that you know what the real facts are and present many of them to make your departure from actuality more credible. There seems to be no escaping the need for careful attention to detail—and research.

In all the cases mentioned in this chapter, the use of a vivid bit of setting that never really existed might be better than use of the real thing, even if scrupulously researched. But in every case we have seen the need for factual information lying behind the make-believe, as a point from which it can take off and still be believed. There are advantages, sometimes, in making up part of your setting, but that doesn't relieve you of the need to be accurate and true.