Locating the Story

Every story has a place, a setting.

Rex Stout’s detective, Nero Wolfe, lives in a luxurious brownstone on West 35th Street in New York, although I’ve never been there and can’t tell you whether West 35th Street has, or once had, luxurious brownstones.

Anne McCaffrey’s dragon series takes place on Pern, a planet so well described you may feel you actually live there.  When I first read it, I almost started searching the sky for dragons and dragon riders.  You may feel that way about The Hunger Games.

Mitford, North Carolina, is a completely mapped town you’d expect to find on a State map, but the Mitford books are fiction.  Mitford is the setting for Jan Caron’s stories about Father Tim, the boy Dooley, the dog Barnabas…

I either choose places I know for my fiction, or I do extensive research with maps, photos, and reading what others have written about that place.

You could find where Derek and Nate live by studying the text for nearby towns which I name, but there’s a reason why their home towns are not named.  I may use maps of the areas and actual street names (how many towns have Fourth Street or Maple Street?), but you won’t find the Bradford’s farmhouse or barns by following Derek’s path to town, and the layout of the high school, while I could draw you a diagram, won’t match the building you would see. There is a park with a pond where Derek hides when he skips school, but I’m not sure about the cattails that screen him from the street.  I start with a template based on a place I know, or knew in the years in which the story is set, but the story constructs the town.