Choosing where to set your (non-other-worldly) novel is complicated. Sometimes it’s easy to make a decision, like when your story more or less makes it for you – a small town girl meets the big city novel would be pretty silly set purely in rural Kentucky, for example.
You may choose to set your novel in a place with which you’re intimately familiar. The town in which you grew up. The city where you went to university.
You may want to set it somewhere you’ve never been. Somewhere you’ve always wanted to go. Somewhere you’re really glad you’ve never lived.
You may not want to set it in a real town or city at all.
So how do you make that decision?
Well, first of all… where SHOULD your novel be set? Small town? Big city? The boondocks? An ocean liner? Location isn’t necessarily ALL important, but it is PRETTY important.
Think about how you want your setting to affect your characters.
Do you want everyone knowing your MC’s business? Small towns work pretty well for that. So do apartment buildings where generations of the same families have lived. So do close-knit burbs. Which makes sense for your story?
Do you want your MC to be relatively anonymous? Well… he/she/it/they could have just moved to said small town (remember, though, that if you choose this setting, you have to consider the way in which said small town reacts to new people/outsiders). The MC might live in the type of apartment building where you might say ‘hi’ to your neighbor in the hall, but you certainly wouldn’t invite him in for a cup of coffee and a chat. He/she/it/they might live in the type of suburbs where people judge each other for the state of their lawns and the class of BMW they drive.
Basically… anything’s an option, but make sure you have a reason for choosing it!
The next thing to consider is whether you want your town/city to be a REAL town/city, an alternate version of a real town/city, or a made-up town/city.
REAL has advantages and disadvantages. The advantages include not having to think about layouts and street names and shops and houses and parks, etc.. The disadvantages include being limited by reality (you NEED your character to go bowling on 32nd? Bummer, because there’s no bowling alley on 32nd) and the fact that people who know the town/city will notice (and probably point out) EVERY SINGLE DETAIL you get wrong.
ALTERNATE REAL has the same advantages of real, with one fewer disadvantage. You can put that bowling alley on 32nd. However, you can also bet that someone is going to call you out on the fact that there ISN’T a bowling alley on 32nd.
MADE-UP allows you to do whatever the heck you want/need to do. The bowling alley can be wherever you want. You can insert little inside jokes in your street names and create as many punny restaurant names as you want. You’re not going to offend anyone if your main character hates it there. The disadvantage? You’ve got a lot of planning to do.
If you’re going the made-up route, I (HIGHLY) suggest grounding your town/city in reality. Your made-up town in South Carolina is going to seem a lot more real if it’s got roots in a real town in South Carolina. It may seem silly to have to research real towns just so you can make up your own pretend one, but trust me, it’s worth it.
For example, the town in my first novel is 100% imaginary, but it is VERY similar to several small towns near the university I attended for a year in South Carolina, which I researched before writing the book. The layout’s similar, the demographics are similar, the town dynamic is similar. All of this ensured that the town was believable, and also avoided offending anyone or having people complain about a shop being on the wrong street.
Plus, I really like making up this kind of stuff up. It’s kind of the literary version of SimCity.
How do you locate your novels? Do you prefer to set stories in real places, ‘real’ places, or invented places?
-Sarah