In a post on CrimeReads, Adria Bernardi discusses the challenges and opportunities of creating a fictional setting for your characters. “An imagined landscape that does not correspond to any extant map, cannot be google-searched or map-quested, presents a unique opportunity to explore and experience that which is not understandable, in part, because the writer of these kinds of work begins with a premise of not knowing,” she writes.
In Bernardi’s case, imagining a fictional setting in an unnamed city in an unnamed country gave her the ability to more freely imagine herself in her characters’ lives and to explore complex, traumatic experiences that might have been too terrible to contemplate if the setting were more concrete. “These kinds of investigations in the imagination can assist us to find some kind of understanding when what is before us is incomprehensible and when it is unutterable,” she says. When events in the real world don’t make sense, creating a new world can help put them in order. “The invention of fictional worlds…offers the possibility of telling a story of a world that no one else has imagined. In this, there is liberation for the writer, and the reader, to explore that which might otherwise be impossible to explore,” Bernadi writes.
