Location, In Perspective

About five years ago, I lived in Mystic, Connecticut (population 4,000). It’s an adorable New England fishing town, with an excellent maritime history museum. It’s also the place where I witnessed the tail end of a bank robbery by some crooks who didn’t think things through. The reason for the bank robbery (a surprisingly regular event, as one unfazed bank clerk told me while we were standing around waiting for the FBI) is that Mystic is a short drive away from New London, a crime-heavy urban centre, and the seemingly easy target for criminals. The ‘seemingly’ part kicked in for our robbers a few miles down the road. The aforementioned Mystic bank sits on a peninsula bisected by the local motorway. On one side is a drawbridge, on the other, a regular bridge which is very easily cordoned off, and no other ways to leave town (except by water). It took the police about fifteen minutes to make the arrest. Actually, there are two lessons to be learned from the shortsighted criminals* which can be applied to fictional settings. First, no matter what your main setting is—an Inuit hunting settlement, a London dive bar, a cargo ship in the Pacific—it has connections with a larger world which are important. It makes a big difference if your idyllic farming village is a twenty minute drive from a high-crime industrial centre, or if it is surrounded by thousands of acres of sheep pasture. It will have a bearing on who shows up, who lives there, and why.Second, think about how people come and go in this setting. A village which is only accessible by foot travellers or pack llamas will have a very different level of connection with the outside world than a settlement of the same size which is next to a busy canal. A port town attracts a different crowd than a scenic city built around the tourist trade, which is different than a manufacturing city. Think about how the larger world interacts with the immediate setting of your story, and you can open up new possibilities for conflict, all while enhancing the story's realism. [image error]