Setting
Deep in the heart of the Amazon jungle…
On the corner of 57th and Broadway…
Walking down the Champs Elysèes…
Why should your story be limited just to the places you know personally?
I live in Vegas… or actually a small city within Nevada near Vegas called Henderson. Never heard of it? It’s easier to just say Las Vegas. For some it’s the picture perfect setting for a story, particularly because after living here for nearly twelve years I know it fairly well. So why didn’t Bridge of Memories take place here? Because I didn’t want it too.
I hate the idea of limiting my book to a city just because I know the city intimately, particularly when technology has made it possible to get a feel for other places without actually leaving your house.
Google Maps/Google Earth: While nothing beats actually visiting a location you’re planning to write about to get a feel for the sights and smells of the area, it’s not always feasible, in the interest of knowing what your talking about and how places relate to other places within the same area, Google Maps, in particular street view can give you a fairly good idea of what the area looks like and where it might be in relation to somewhere else.
For instance, if you’re writing the a character lives on the outskirts of Paris, but they often go into the heart of the city for work you may need to know a few things for the sake of realism. How far away (in terms of miles or kilometers) these two places are from each other, how much traffic one would probably expect to run into depending on the time of day (and therefore how long it would reasonably take to get there) and maybe even what one might see along the way. The great thing about fiction with regards to setting is that if you make up the area in which one lives you can give a general description of where it would be. For instance, when I wrote Bridge of Memories the apartment building where Eric and Chris live doesn’t technically exist, but I wanted to give a general idea of where it might be were it to exist.
It’s important to be just descriptive enough that the area could be imagined, but not so descriptive that people call you out on not being realistic to where certain things are in relation to one another. Because some people apparently feel the need to point out the geological inaccuracies in your book.
