There are bonuses to creating your own setting: the lack of confinement when you not only get your own sandbox but get to build the very sand and tell everyone how it behaves is a tempting proposition. Obviously there's some work involved, but the biggest disadvantage of starting from scratch with your own setting is not always clear from the start.
The power of the cultural consciousness goes without saying so often that most people don't quite realize that it exists.
What I'm referring to is the common bank of information, understanding and emotion that all members of a culture (or at least a large portion of them) regularly draw upon. They can be iconic moments in a common history, normative veins of ambition, popular misconceptions or even just widely-used memes and well-known references.
It's difficult to notice when you're in the thick of it because these things have become the backbone of our everyday communication, especially in entertainment. Nods to beloved movies, famous people and other parodies make up a significant portion of how we convey what we're hoping to say.
Simple jibes like "Thanks for the tip, professor," may not be consistent across every setting. You have to consider that for a remark like that to make sense, there must be professors, which means there must be colleges and universities, which means there is higher education, a relatively recent concept (and one that may not have a long future, depending on how current trends develop). A dark-ages fantasy novel may need to think of a better quip (and the cut-and-paste method only gets you so far).
Basing your novel in a setting you know lets you call upon real events and idioms that your readership connects with naturally and won't need explained. When the bruiser in a band of thieves reacts to his leader's new cooperative approach with "Great plan, Gandhi," your audience has a good chance of simply 'getting it' without any effort.
It allows you to allude, to be subtle, to jokingly juxtapose common conception with what your characters and narration are saying. You can relate local impact to the larger concepts that touch the hearts of more than just your character's small-town neighbors. To wit:
This was his last chance; the thin line between Leroy and a crumpled heap of a man was his late-night job at the gas station. The Stop 'N' Go had become his Alamo.
In one word, a kaleidoscope of concepts comes to bear: a last stand, proud men, old soldiers, and the cause they were willing to die for. The brutality of the Alamo became a flag around which the remaining revolution rallied. All that implied with a single word.
Tapping into the power of the cultural consciousness allows you to say more with less, but it also just allows you to say more. To call Leroy's situation dire, desperate or futile is all well and good, but any such words are absent of scale. Leroy's "desperate," and your "desperate" as an author may in no way compare to the "desperate" your readers perceive.
The cultural memory can attempt to set the bar. Such icons have an intrinsic and understood value, and while it's not a guarantee, much of your readership will value such events with a relatively similar gauge. At the very least, comparing a dead-end job to a battle in a revolution is a powerful metaphor regardless of the value of that particular event in time.
More than that, choosing the Alamo versus the more generic "a battle in a war" adds an additional layer: the failure of the defenders at the Alamo mission, or the fact that it was fought on what was once holy ground, add more meaning to Leroy's struggle than just "he's a soldier in a war."
Now he's a soldier defending a religious-site-turned-fortress, and the odds are against him. He will fail, and it will not be a graceful loss, but perhaps the fires of his defeat will inspire others to carry on with what he had hoped to do from the start.
When you pin another well-known moment to your story, you give the reader a whole new web of sub-meanings and implications, and I don't just mean the inter-linking labyrinth that is Wikipedia.
We pin our emotions, our dreams, our hopes, our take on our own past to these moments and figures, these people and places and slivers of time. Tapping into that vast and varied array of cultural icons can lend more power, more humor and more depth to your work than a story isolated in space and time.
Hitch your hippogriff to the ongoing conversation of the larger world around you and watch as it rides off in directions you never thought possible. After all, one day, someone may be hitching their flying wagon to you.
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