When Fiction Meets a Real Place
Anne Tyler amazes me with how she writes about real places, Baltimore, especially, and yet somehow makes them entirely her own. Her fictional neighborhoods feel familiar, but her corner stores and diners have names you’ve never heard before. You feel as if she’s built a parallel Baltimore just a few streets over from the real one.
In my first novel, set near Cleveland, I renamed the county and invented a town that felt true to the region but belonged wholly to the story. For example, Cuyahoga became Nopiming, from the Odawa/Eastern Ojibwe word Noopming, which means inland, or up from the water.
When I began my novel set on Ocracoke Island, I faced a small but tricky question: how much of the real island should I use? The ferry ride, the wild ponies, the cottages and salt air are all unmistakably Ocracoke. But I didn’t know what to do about the names of restaurants, businesses, and streets.
Where Does Fiction End and Ocracoke Begin?
In the end, I decided to fictionalize the names of cafés, shops, and roads, except for a few key landmarks that would anchor any visitor’s sense of the island: Irvin Garrish Highway, Highway 12, Silver Lake Harbor and the county itself.
This is why: names and businesses come and go, but a story has to live in its own consistent world. Changing the names let me preserve the feeling of Ocracoke without being bound to the literal map. Just as important, I didn’t want real business owners or residents to feel I was writing about them, nor have anyone feel left out. My story is fiction, not reportage.
The fun of creating something new yet familiar
One of the small joys of writing fiction set in a real place is inventing businesses that feel authentic but entirely imaginary. For example, I turned naming the local realty company into a poll. I tossed out a few options on Facebook:
- South Pointe Realty
- Heron Roost Realty
- Inlet Realty and Rentals
- Sound Realty
- Cormorant Realty
In just 24 hours, a winner emerged: Inlet Realty and Rentals. My daughter explained how perfect it was– “If you google Oregon Inlet, it describes how the inlet is a vital part of the Outer Banks economy! How has a realty company not snatched up the name!?”
The spirit of a much-loved island
It was a small detail, but I enjoyed seeing people get invested in this tiny piece of my fictional Ocracoke, a destination my family has returned to year after year since the 1990s.
I hope Ocracoke residents will recognize the spirit of their island in my pages, such as the shifting light over the harbor, the sense of isolation and resilience, the fierce love of place. Fiction lets us bend reality just enough to find a deeper truth, and for me, that truth still belongs to Ocracoke. I hope readers see that love, not accuracy, was what I was writing toward.
It’s a question every novelist wrestles with: how much truth do we owe to the map, and how much to the heart. If you’re a writer, do you fictionalize your setting, too, or stick closely to real-life details? I’d love to hear how you strike that balance.
Thank you for visiting!
My upcoming novel, Love and Other Incurable Ailments, is the story of a heated affair that spirals into an outlandish obsession, leading to the rustic island of Ocracoke, chaos, heartbreak, and the discovery that hope is found not in grand transformation, but in human presence.
You can preorder it anywhere online, but the best source is Regal House Publishing, a woman-owned traditional publisher that’s doing a mighty job among the big publishing houses and mega-online retailers. All books are printed in the US.
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