Writing Blog Number 2

20240206 Using Real Settings

Using Real Settings

Setting is where the story takes place. Obviously. In many stories, setting almost becomes a character itself. Think of Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings trilogy (J.R.R. Tolkien), the Derry setting in many of Stephen King’s stories (or especially the titular Pet Sematary), or H.P. Lovecraft’s Innsmouth. In longer works, the setting is vital to give the story a sense of place, grounded in the reality of the story.

So, what I am going to look at here is using real settings for stories, and some things to watch out for.

Just in case this is confusing, real settings are places that exist in our world, either now or historically.

The “write what you know” dictate is vital here. If you make mistakes in the geography of a real location, a huge chunk of your audience will know and they will come down on you in this age of hyper-connectivity. For that reason, many writers set their stories in the locations they are familiar with. They might have grown up there, live there currently, have relatives living there, or something else.

The major advantage of using a setting you know very well is that you have the geography in your head already. This means your preplanning for settings is done by your lifetime of experience. Sure, you might change a street name here or there, put a Church where the hotel is, put a cemetery where the shopping mall is, change the name of the place, but if it is your town, you know it, and that familiarity will come through in the characters, and that in turn will be conveyed to a reader.

However, be careful with these little changes, and if it is a book that gets published, indicate that changes have been made for the sake of a work of fiction in the notes section near the front, or in that bit that tells readers that “…all characters are fictitious…” This will generally keep critics at bay. I had to do that in Invasive Species, where I changed the layout of the school.

Most of my stories are set in Australia, and that really does help set the characters as well, and ground them in my reality. I also find that if I take the stories to rural Australia, where I live now, the sense of isolation makes the horror (my preferred genre) all the more tangible. It does also tend to mean that, for an overseas market, they apparently have the feel of somewhere different (almost exotic), which is a selling point, which is how I have managed to sell two of my novels.

But this does mean geography is important. An author from the USA had written a horror story set in the late 1800s I read years ago. At one point, the characters come to Australia. They travel by horse and cart from Melbourne to Adelaide in a night. Say it was the dead of winter, that'd be maybe 12 hours. So? you may ask. It takes 7 to 8 hours by car nowadays with decent paved roads, travelling at the current speed limit of 110 km/h (70mph). Therefore, his timing made me go, "Huh?" I put it down to not understanding how big Australia is for some-one in another country (we're talking pre-Internet days here, the 1990s).

A few years later I was reading a book in a different genre to my usual by an Australian author. She had a couple drive from Perth to Sydney in a day. That's about 4000km (2500 miles), so averaging 165 km/h (100mph) without stops for petrol, without slowing for going through towns, without eating anything, without going to the toilet, without getting caught by the over-zealous NSW police, after the car had already been described as "20 year old second hand Datsun" (or words to that effect). That is not happening.

Recently, in one of my stories, I had a family travel from Manchester to Hastings in the UK, a country I have never been to. It's about 450km, so, thinking Australia, I said it'd take 3 to 4 hours. Then I was chatting to a friend online, and asked her. She said it would be closer to a 5 or 6 hour journey because of the speed limits, toll roads, towns to go through, everything else. Those extra 2 hours actually changed what I needed for the story, so I had to do a complete rewrite of the events.

These may not seem like much, I admit, but in this modern global world of writing and publishing, you need to ensure all your readers are going to understand the reality of what you are writing. And setting will be one thing people can point to and go, "Hey! That ain't right!"

On a side note, and this is something that I think older writers do forget: in settings, don’t forget things like cell phones, mobile phones, smartphones. They're so pervasive that to leave them out or ignore them makes the work feel like it's too unreal, or that it’s set 20+ years ago. Keep up to date with technology and what is a part of the wider world. Again, the setting of the real world.

I'll take this into other setting types in the next few entries!