The Name of the Prose, Part 3: You Are Here

Mill Street, Grass Valley, CA

Asense of place plays a critical role in determining whether a reader “gets into” a story or not. Good place names can lend an aura of reality to even the most fictional of places. Conversely, an obviously made up place name in a story that pretends at reality can make a location that seems perfectly real to the author seem perfectly ridiculous to the reader.

For example, I’ve seen a number of writers set stories in California’s Gold Country, where I resided for th...