Real vs. Fictitious Settings

by Sharon Marchisello

When I was writing my first published novel, Going Home (Sunbury Press, 2014), I set it in Tyler, the small East Texas city where I grew up. In one of my early critique groups, a member asked why.

“It’s my home town,” was my lame reply. Inspired by my mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease, Going Home opens when the protagonist returns to her childhood home for a brief visit and finds her mother hovering over the bludgeoned body of her caregiver. Alone and unable to explain what happened. Naturally, the mother becomes a suspect. The protagonist must remain in her hometown, step into the role of caregiver and amateur sleuth, and try to prove her mother’s innocence. Since my mother lived in Tyler until the end of her life, that was where I set my story.

But my critique partner asked me, “How long has it been since you’ve lived there?”

Decades had passed since I left home, only returning for an occasional visit (like my protagonist).

“You might want to rethink it,” she advised. “For every reader who’s excited to buy your book because it’s set in her town, you’ll hear from others who’ll accuse you of getting something wrong.”

“You can’t turn left at that intersection!” “There’s no store on that corner!” “They changed the name of that school years ago!”

Not to mention the readers connected to local law enforcement who are offended that an amateur sleuth solves the murder mystery.

I took my friend’s advice and created a fictitious East Texas town for my setting. And what freedom! I could put the buildings and streets wherever they best fit the story and call them whatever I wanted. I made up a history that enriched the backgrounds of some of my secondary characters. Two Wells (my fictitious town) even holds an annual rose festival “almost as famous as the one in Tyler.”

When I started writing my current series about DeeLo Myer, a woman who rescues cats and finds dead humans, I had no doubt that I would set it in a fictitious town. There are a few similarities to the community where I live, but Pecan Point, although also a suburb of Atlanta, is definitely not Peachtree City. For one thing, unlike in Peachtree City, there are no ubiquitous golf cart paths in my novels about Pecan Point (at least, not yet).

One thing I did not fictionalize was the county’s animal ordinance, which DeeLo aims to change. Unfortunately, Fayette County (and its alter ego, Pecan County, in my books) is not alone in its draconian animal laws.

Trap, Neuter, Die (Level Best Books, 2024), the first in my DeeLo Myer cat rescue mystery series, opens with DeeLo sentenced to community service with an animal rescue group. She works in their Trap, Neuter, Vaccinate, Return (TNVR) program to control the overpopulation of free-roaming cats and is surprised to discover that TNVR actually violates the county’s animal ordinance. Because the ordinance considers all cats to be owned, someone who traps a feral cat and gets it spayed is considered to be the cat’s owner and is thus guilty of “abandoning” their pet when they return it to its outdoor home.

DeeLo vows to get the antiquated law changed to recognize TNVR, exempting feral cats and their caretakers from the provisions governing “ownership,” but she finds it’s not as easy as she envisioned. I drew some of her struggles from my own experience with a local rescue group trying to update our county’s animal ordinance. The murder part, however, was fiction, and none of the characters are based on real people. I promise.

Have you ever set a story in a fictional location? Or if you use real places, how do you ensure your descriptions are accurate?

Sharon Marchisello is the author of the DeeLo Myer cat rescue mystery series from Level Best Books, starting with Trap, Neuter, Die (2024). Book #2, Trapped and Tested, is scheduled for a September 2025 release. Her other mysteries were published by Sunbury Press: Going Home (2014) and Secrets of the Galapagos (2019). A sequel, Murder at Leisure Dreams – Galapagos, will be released later in 2025. Sharon has also written a nonfiction book about personal finance (Live Well, Grow Wealth - 2018), travel articles, a blog, book reviews, and short stories. She earned a Master’s in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California and is active in Sisters in Crime, the Atlanta Writers Club, and several critique groups. Retired from a 27-year career with Delta Air Lines, she now lives in Peachtree City, GA, and serves on the boards of the Fayette Humane Society, Hometown Novel Writers Association, and the Friends of the Peachtree City Library.

Website: sharonmarchisello.com (https://smarchisello.wordpress.com/)

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