Where the Roads Go: Tips for Creating True-to-Life Settings in Fiction
By Emilie-Noelle Provost | April 26, 2023 |
Therese stepping in for just a moment to officially introduce author/editor Emilie- Noelle Provost to the Writer Unboxed team as our newest regular contributor. Welcome, Emilie!
I like writing about places almost as much as I like visiting them. For much of my career, I worked in the travel industry as a writer and editor. For almost fourteen years, I wrote articles, reviews, and marketing content for and about destinations around the world. Over time, using words to illustrate the characters of historic cities, seaside villages, and sweeping natural landscapes became almost second nature to me.
When it comes to writing about places in fiction, there’s a lot of good advice out there. The majority of what you find online is both practical and useful, such as the importance of basing fictional places on actual ones to make them feel believable. Not writing about real places unless you know something about them, either through research or from personal experience, is another good tip.
Pointers like these can help writers create settings that feel real enough, but I think there are some things fiction writers can learn from writers in the travel industry. Below are a couple of techniques I’ve used, both in my career as a travel writer and as a novelist, that have helped me make the places I write about feel vibrant and tangible.
Remember that places are dynamic. Depending on the weather, the time of year, and the actions of storms, people, and wildlife, a particular location can sometimes be unrecognizable from one day to the next.
It wasn’t until I started hiking that I began paying attention to the ways places constantly change. A trail I’ve used a dozen times can occasionally feel like someplace I’ve never been depending on variables like vegetation, snow cover, leaf litter, or even the time of day. To help orient myself, I started making mental lists of the changes I noticed in the forests and mountains I regularly visit.
Eventually, I started doing this everywhere I went. I began spotting things I hadn’t noticed before, like architectural details on buildings and decorations on storm drain covers. Doing this also helped me gain a better understanding of the ways that conditions in various locations tend to evolve over time, such as the characteristics roadside snowbanks take on after the temperature has been above freezing for a day or two, or the crystalline patterns ice makes when it begins to form on moving water.
Using a few carefully chosen details like these can mean the difference between creating settings that feel authentic and ones that readers won’t soon be able to forget.
Know where the roads go. Horror writer Stephen King is credited with saying, “A place is yours when you know where all the roads go.” Good travel writing explores “where the roads go” in interesting places and shares the experience of discovery with readers. Some of the best travel writing goes even further, introducing readers to little-known places through the eyes of locals who are intimately familiar with them.
When adapting this idea to use in fiction, I’ve found it easiest to break it into two concepts. The first is that the more familiar a character is with the hidden aspects of a place, whether it’s a building, a city, or a region of the country where they live, the more animated the location itself will begin to feel.
The second, which is closely related, is having an intimate understanding of the settings where important experiences have taken place in characters’ lives and what meaning those places hold for them as individuals. In her 2015 guide to writing about places, The Soul of Place: A Creative Writing Workbook — Ideas and Exercises for Conjuring the Genius Loci, author Linda Lappin refers to this idea as “genius loci” or “personal geography.”
Even if you’ve never heard of it, personal geography is most likely a concept with which you’re familiar. For example, someone who got into a car accident on particular road might have a very different view of it than a person who uses it to commute to work every day, or someone who only drives on it occasionally.
Describing fictional settings through the lens of a character’s heart and mind helps infuse them with meaning and mood, making the places in your stories feel more intimate and dynamic to readers.
Have you read a story where a character’s personal geography affects the way the story’s setting is perceived? Have you written one?
David Guterson’s 1994 novel Snow Falling on Cedars offers a good example of a dynamic fictional setting that feels real. Can you think of any others?
What are some of the ways the landscape changes from week to week or month to month where you live?
Emilie-Noelle Provost is a writer, editor, and author who lives in a northeastern Massachusetts mill town with her husband, daughter, and three crazy rescue cats. She is an avid hiker and a fan of European crime dramas.
Emilie-Noelle has worked as an editor for four magazine titles and has written and published hundreds of articles. She is the author of two novels. The Blue Bottle, a middle-grade adventure with sea monsters, was published by North Country Press in 2018. Her second novel, The River Is Everywhere, the coming-of-age story of a Franco-American teenager, was a finalist for a 2023 National Indie Excellence Award, a 2023 American Fiction Award, and a 2024 American Legacy Book Award. The novel was published in March 2023 by Vine Leaves Press.
She is currently working on a series of novels set in Île d’Orléans, a historic island in the Saint Lawrence River near Québec City.
[coffee]
Timely article! I’m about to spend a few days in Nuremberg, Germany where my WIP takes place. I will try to observe small details (that my character would notice) as well as the large picture
Curiouser and curiouser!
A lovely reflection, Emilie. Place has always been another character in my stories, perhaps because I’m always writing about home (losing it, finding it, belonging). Where we come from shapes who we are as well as where we’re going. Many thanks as I prepare to go to Ave Maria, FL. I fell in love the first time we went during Spring Break to check it out and the air was filled with the scent of orange blossoms. Ah! Truly a slice of heaven.
Setting, as you discussed, is important – it sets moods, governs physical actions, adds to the plot.
It’s on the list of prompts for scenes that I use, because I’m a visual writer, trying to put on the page for a reader the movies I see in my mind. A scene is affected strongly by WHEN it starts, and timing is chosen exactly for that effect.
But then I have two prompts, 4. Weather and 5. Landscape, which The Fire in Fiction (Donald Maass) uses as two of the ways to build microtension in a scene. I think about – and write on the prompt – both what I have as the defaults, and what I can DO with them. There are so many possibilities – even the fire in the fireplace can go from so spare it barely warms to hot enough to roast you if you don’t move back, from friendly to menacing, quiet to roaring – that I can enhance any mood with a few words which also set or emphasize the scene’s goals.
I like having the prompts, because then I think about just these features, separate from everything else, and make the choices I’ll use when actually writing, IN writing (with words I may or may not end up using but which are there if I need them).
Without going through the questioning process, it’s easy to forget to even think about what you can see outside the windows that might develop the scene – and the tension – because something else is bigger or more important is in the forefront. I’ve done this in writing for so many years that it doesn’t take long to identify how I should use the results of filling in the prompts – for a particular scene – and then the mind throws those bits in almost automatically as I write.
I know where the roads go – and the best places to stop for a panoramic view.
This may not be a response to your specific questions, but wanted to comment on this post as I spend so much time researching settings for the novels in my mystery series. My stories are set on or around various North American highways in the mid-1990s. These are places I may or may not have visited personally around that time and that I am obviously unable to visit today. Needless to say, I spend a lot of time on Google Maps or Google Earth to make sure I have my highways, towns and the surrounding topography right!
To make sure I’m being as historically accurate as possible, I print out a calendar from the month and year the story is taking place, and visit the Weather Underground site (weatherunderground/history) for an idea of what the weather would have been around that date. I often also visit the Wayback Machine for additional historical information that might have affected my characters’ thoughts and actions at that time. (e.g. major weather events or natural disasters, etc.). I find that this research often gives me ideas to enhance the plot.
Thanks for posting!
R.E. Donald, I love the idea of checking the what the actual weather was. I also LOVE maps. I could look at them all day. Thanks! 😊
Thanks for the heads-up about Weather Underground, R.E. Unless it’s historic or needed for the story, the weather at the time of a narrative that’s set in the distant (or not so distant) past is one aspect that’s often overlooked.
Current piece has forty men on an eighty foot sailing ship in the early nineteenth century. Character’s personal geography is hard to avoid and the seascape changes by the minute. Limiting the view by the vast ocean is quite a writing challenge.
Wonderful observations. Thanks, Emilie, and welcome to WU.
thanks for mentioning The Soul of Place — I hope you found it useful for your research.