We Call This Writing

Now Where the Hell Am I?

Alternatively, I could've picked Dexter as the actual setting of Natalie's Diary and stuck to the details. However, I don't know actual Dexter well enough. I feel a little better trying to capture the flavor of a place than staying precisely true to it. There's also no need to reinvent the wheel. You don't have to make up everything with a fictional setting, even if it's fantasy (unless, of course, you want to build it entirely from scratch. That's cool, too.) Read up on history, get inspired by the way cultures ran their monarchies and approached family dynamics, politics, work, et cetera. Use reality as a guide line and flourish it a little to serve your story. 

Real settings can also be great. There's something about a well-written book in a different city that makes me want to travel there. The tricky part of a real city is making it seem real if you've never been there. These kinds of things need honesty and color, I think. Bring in a setting real tight. Focus on the Brooklyn pizza shop around the corner instead of the view of the Empire State building. When I think of real settings, I think of Indiana in All the Bright Places. There are a ton of weird Indiana landmarks, like gravity-propelled rollercoaster and a giant ball of paint, but there is also a simple bridge you need to get to one side of town to the other and dirt country roads. I like seeing the hometown version of any place. 

The Street Was Full of Brick Buildings, Red and Brown with Signs Hanging Over Doorways...

So, you've picked your setting and now you want to show it off, but listing paragraphs and paragraphs of detail to show everyone how much you thought about your setting down to the grout color between the tile. You know I'm not serious. I hope you know I'm not serious.

The art of establishing setting is in brevity and in specificity. I strongly believe that if you need to characterize a one-off character quickly, you describe their shoes. If you want to characterize your setting, you describe the cars driving around in it.

He jammed the hybrid between two mud-speckled F150s in the parking lot.

In a sentence, you know that he is not from around there. It's not likely a big city. There's mud, and there's a presence of guys who drive muddy pick-up trucks. In a sentence, the setting is implied without describing mud puddles on the ground or the view from the parking lot. Cars is too general a term. If I replaced those Fords with glinting sedans, it would be an entirely different setting. If I said they were a pair of electric cars, you might guess it happened on the west coast.

Drop in the detail. Drop in the specifics. Fight in as much detail in as few words. The ox-cart rattles over the cobble stones. The 4x4 shudders over a washboard range road. A roadster zips over asphalt. Summer tires skid over pack ice. Snow chains crunch through 7 inches of snowfall. The import bottomed out over the speed bump. The Grand Am clunked over the pothole.

The car drove down the road. Two nouns and a verb get you a setting, yeah? Optimize your sentences. Squeeze the last drops of usefulness out of them.

Familiarity

These are the kinds of details people groan over because they know the drill. It taps into memories. It fills in the location details for you. My best tip for creating fictional locations relies on that. Let memory do the work. Invoke something familiar. As an example, everyone's been to a bowling alley. I'd hope. I love bowling alleys, partly because you can drink at them and partly because they are always these nostalgic places with outdated decor. Mention the cartoon pins dancing on the monitors and the glow of black light and the reader will fill in the rest.

There are some things that have a kind of universality. Team Spirit is set in small town readers and beta readers for the other stories in the collection say of fictional Murphy, Alberta, it's just like [insert home town here]. And the town varies. It's just like my home town. It's like every small town across the prairie provinces. There's the graffitied water tower, the designated smokers spot in the backwoods behind the high school, there's the lake everyone kills their summer in.