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Saturday, April 19 2025

Last month we blogged about using real settings for our stories and how to keep them authentic. This month we are exploring how to make our fictional settings feel real.

I’ve enjoyed setting stories in places people can actually visit, which offers readers a chance to either walk down familiar streets, or revisit places they’ve been, but my Camerons of Tide’s Way series is set in an entirely fictious town on the coast of North Carolina. I was pretty new to the published world when the first book in that series came out and I really was clueless about a lot of things more seasoned authors already knew, but I got lucky. My readers love Tide’s Way and tell me often they wish they could go there.

The original story in that series was a stand-alone book set in Anytown USA. Then I met the acquiring editor at Belle Bridge Books at a conference. She liked the premise and contracted the book, but she wanted it to be a series and asked for ideas for follow-up books. The first thing I realized was that I had to get a clearer picture in my head of this town; How big was it, and what kind of landscape? My first thought was that I wanted it to be more than just a small town with a book store and a bakery and perhaps an old house converted to a B&B. My second thought was where?

Being a lover of the ocean, I chose to put it near a beach. Being an East Coast girl, this ruled out California or Washington. I ended up choosing North Carolina, roughly between Wilmington and Camp LeJeune. That second location was because the heroine of the second book I tossed around ideas for was a Marine and the Marine base being close by somehow felt right. I had that second book half written when I decided to spend a couple days in the area, scouting out stuff like the climate and the terrain. While driving around I saw the sign for the airport and decided, why not check that out, where I discovered the building was all on one level. That side-trip was a lucky decision: I’d already written the scene where my heroine’s husband is waiting at the foot of the escalator for her to arrive home. I quickly rewrote that scene. I also visited Wilmington proper to get an idea what the city close to my fictional town looked like and what the amenities were, just as I’d have had to do if I had a town named Driftwood Cove on the Massachusetts coast north of Boston. I’d have wanted to get the known surrounding cities right when my characters visited them.

But what about Tide’s Way itself? First, I needed to know how big I wanted my fictional town. That kind of dictated what needed to be there, like a town hall, a library, perhaps a police station. Although some small towns are policed by the county sheriff’s department and won’t have a police force or station, I decided my fictional town would have a police department, but it was small enough to share quarters with the town hall. Any place but the end of no-where needs a convenience store and gas station? But, what else?

I started with a hand-drawn map. I needed to know where things were in relation to each other and where my characters lived. And I didn’t want to have them next to an assisted living facility in one book, then behind the grocery store in the next book. No matter how good your memory is, it’s easy to make a mistake unless you have a concrete image and a map is the best way to do this. Since my fictional town was in coastal North Carolina, I needed to have access to the beach, as well. My map was an evolving thing as I wrote. If I needed to have my character visit a cemetery, then I needed to add it to the map. Or a childcare center. A church or churches.

That was the start of the image in my mind about Tide’s Way. I did, as I mentioned, visit this area of the country to get an idea on flora and climate as well. Now I knew what kind of flowers I might see along the side of the road or in people’s gardens. I knew that it would be cool enough in winter for my characters to wear warm coats and hats, yet warm enough in summer for flip-flops and tank tops.

While you are creating your fictional setting, don’t forget not only what kind of things grow there, but what kind of birds and animals might be seen. No village or town on the ocean would be real without seagulls. Any village in Maine could have sightings of a Moose, and in the dessert out west, there would be coyotes and ground squirrels. In a city park you’ll always see pigeons, but in other places you might see crows or eagles. Your fictional setting needs to have flora and fauna appropriate to the area you have chosen to set your story in.

So, now you have your layout (map) with physical structures, beaches, ponds, roads, parking lots and shops. You have an idea of the animals and plants you want to see and can feature encounters with. Now let’s get the rest of the senses involved. Since we know what kind of plants there are, you can have the scent of blossoms, or the scent of fresh mown lawns. If it’s near water, make the scent of the water fit the scene: swampy, salty, etc. Do you want your setting somewhere in Alaska? Make sure you include how long it stays light in summer and how short the days are in the winter. The closer you are to the equator, the less difference there is in the length of the days, or for that matter, the changes in temperature from one season to another. Suburbia and cities will be light even after dark with streetlights, stores and traffic – the country will be dark, often with no streetlights for miles. A city will be noisy with traffic, perhaps even the sound of airplanes landing at the nearby airport. The country will have the soft, often startling sounds of animals foraging for food at night, or a dog barking in the distance. Nearby streams or the ocean will add the sound of water to your setting. Did you put a school or a park in your setting? Don’t forget the sound of children playing.

The best part of a fictional setting is you can make it whatever you want. What best fits your story, or your characters. Does Sam love to ski? Put him in a mountain town in a chilly climate with lots of snow. If Barbara hates the cold, move her further south. Jenny loves to fish, so a river, or a lake or the ocean will all give her skills a place to be used. The most important part is to find all the assets that not only fit the character, but the general area of the setting. Your heroine might work in NYC and commute, but chances are, unless she has a lengthy commute, she won’t be living in farm country, and if your hero is a cowboy, then the city isn’t his best setting unless you want him homesick and miserable. (Although that is an option if it fits the story.)

All my historical writing has happened in real places, but even those needed to be researched for what existed at the time. But if you are writing a sci-fi set in the future, you have all kinds of freedom to create whole new worlds. For those folk, I’d only suggest you keep physics in mind and make sure that your science and innovative creation is physically possible – unless, of course, it’s another planet or outer space where anything goes.

My last bit of advice would be to keep in mind to treat your setting like another character. Give it as much time and thought when you create it because you want your reader to fall in love with the place. You want them to feel like they’d be eager to take a vacation there or even buy a house and move in hoping to become neighbors for your characters. You want to draw your reader in to care as much about the setting as you want them to care about your characters. Give it quirks that add spice and interest. Maybe a holiday that only the folk in this little burg celebrate due to some event in the past, or a unique way of celebrating the holidays we have already. Or an annual event unique to this fictional place. (Boston has the annual Patriots Day Marathon and New York City has the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade so why shouldn’t your fictional town have a special day as well.) Maybe there is a monument so old all the wording has worn away and no one is really sure what it was for thus a myriad of tales have grown up around it. Maybe there’s a house or other place that is rumored to be haunted. Every setting, current, past, or future, has a history. Give your fictional setting some history to add to the fun.

Another bit of advice – I know, I already said one last bit, but this is important too. Now that you’ve created your fictional setting, you know it so well, you can just plop your characters down and let them start living their lives and coping with all the problems you are throwing their way. But you DON’T need to include every detail you have created in the story. Your knowledge of the place informs your writing and the lives of the characters you’ve created, but the reader doesn’t need to know every detail until it becomes a part of the story. If your character is visiting that cemetery in the dark, then you can mention the hooting of owls because that’s part of the setting, but you didn’t need to tell the reader that there were owls living there until then. I personally have stopped reading books by one of my one-time favorite authors because she includes reams of details that I don’t need to know and don’t care about, turning a 300-page story into an 800-page book. I found myself flipping pages, skipping whole sections that I found boring. Too much unnecessary detail slows the pacing and the action and turns the reader off.

As always, I’m sure I’ve only covered some of the possibilities so why not hop on over and check out the rest of the posts and see how they go about creating fictional settings.

Posted by: Skye Taylor AT 12:02 am | Permalink | 4 Comments | Email