Picking up on the Bloomsbury thread, but going off at a tangent and not wanting to disrupt that thread...what do people think about using real locations in novels?
My story location is both real and not. Key features are inspired by the Malverns, as would be apparent to anyone reading it who knew them. But I've cheated and taken big liberties, not wanting to be contrained by the real life geographical constraints. Choices, choices. To use a real town, as many authors do, grit and veracity and a local tourism marketing angle thereby, Morse and Oxford now go together for Morse fans, but with the risk of having every error pointed out, or someone deciding that your character is based on them (and is maybe libellous :) ) Or make it both harder and easier on yourself....with a landscape invented from scratch, though there is nothing new under the sun, so unless it's speculative fantasy, people might still try guessing the 'real' location. anyway. More pros and cons, people?
In my YA fantasy novel I have placed a new village into a specific area and look to the real towns in that area to create my village, as well as mentioning other real places. But all the other locations in that particular novel are entirely fictional.
In my other book that I am currently writing all the places are real, including shop names and destinations.
I guess it depends on the story and you have creative license to do what ever feels right.
I have done the same thing - taken a real location but embellishing it with details that suit my characters and plot. I needed the landscape to have a quality to it that was both dreamy and intimidating and I could only find that precise mix in my imagination.
I guess the story itself will dictate how far you can go with such embellishments. If a story line is realistic then I suppose readers may expect the same realism in the descriptions of place and character.
However, if your story lends itself to a more imaginative style of storytelling then I don't see why this should not extend to re-inventing places to fir your requirements.
In my own story the landscape has greatly influenced the characters but I found that rather than being over realistic about the place descriptions (in the sense that I wanted to write an accurate description of the place itself) I preferred to look at the landscape through the experiences of the characters themselves. What the reader then encounters is the characters experience of their surroundings rather than a photographic description of the place.
I enjoyed writing it this way - it gave me the licence I needed.
Also, having never been to Lapland (where my story is set) I kinda had no choice ;-)
Obviously location is an important part to every novel, where you set a story is a hard decision to make. I have two key locations in my story, I have a remote island off the edge of Scotland, which happens to be fictional, I don't live any where near Scotland, so it would be very diffuclt for me to use a real location in Scotland, so I made one up, I made it how I wanted it to be. My other main location is Portland in Maine, and that will be a real location. It is your story, your mind and your imagination, I believe, using a mixture of real and not real locations is absolutley fine and so is using real or not real locations. When I read a book, location is important, but it doesn't matter if it is real or not as long as it is fitting with the story and as long as it written well it doesn't matter! :)