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Setting




Question: I'm having trouble deciding the setting for my story, I want to set it by a well known river in the UK but I don't want to use an existing town. Can I make up my own town or should I just not make reference to the name of the river?

Answer: Sounds like you just want enough ambiguity to prevent a reader from knowing which real town your setting is based on. If it's a long river, with many small towns along it, then sure, name the river and create a fictitious name for the town. If the name of the river gives away the name of the town (for instance, if there's only one town it could be) then you could change the name of the river too.

By the way, you are always free to make things up. It's only when you say bad things about real people that you can get in trouble.

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