When you choose and develop the setting of your stories are you picturing and basing it off somewhere you know? I mean, even if your story takes place is another world, the writer could be picturing the small town he grew up in and using that for inspiration, couldn't he? So, even if you've never been to wherever your story takes place, are you sort of picturing and borrowing from memories of somewhere you are familiar with? I'm curious if other writers do this because it's something I tend to do. Or a lot of the time I will directly set a story someplace I've been, someplace I know. And I think that can work for a lot of writers. Do you do that? However, I'm not always setting a story someplace I know, but I'm always writing it based on someplace I know. What do you guys do? I would love to hear some thoughts on this.
I prefer to set stories in places I know. "Dreams" is set in Portugal. For places I don't know, I reference Google Earth Street View and YouTube. But then it only gives you visuals. It depends on how much detail is required to move the plot along.
Since I can draw, I often do a few reference sketches of important locations and usually I’m thinking of some specific place that I’ve visited. Usually fictionalized versions of them though, I make no effort to be true to the layout of the location unless it’s essential to the story or a well known layout like NYC.
Nothing ive written takes place in a "real" place. My non-fantasy stories.... Even though they take place in the real world, they dont take place in real places. However, i do base them off of places. One of my shorts that takes place as the world is ending, the setting is based off of a military base ive been to as a child. Driving there, it was one long straight road. It was hot. It was a newly developed residential base, so there was no grass anywhere, just red dirt, sand, and cacti. When you get to the base, the some houses were half built, some didnt have windows. So in my story, my descriptions were so vivid because i took most of it from my memories of visiting that base. Another story takes place in a little southern town. I based that off of my grandmas town. When i was a kid, we'd go visit extended family. I have limited memories of spending the night there on the farm, but one memory that sticks out was the the journey there. Cornfields as far as the eye could see. The houses were really old and more like compounds. The roads were dirt. Everyone know everyone. There were chickens running from house to house. I remember sitting on the porch with my great aunt, snapping peas and tossing them into a bucket. There was a small little community church house where we had my great grandmas funeral. Again, those memories contributed to the setting of various short stories i have. The last example ill mention. I grew up catholic so ive been to many cathedrals. My HS graduation ceremony was in a Basilica. So in the manuscript to my fantasy novel, the opening setting is the inside of a cathedral. That was fun to write because it felt like i was actually seeing it all again and made it easy to write.
As Pip posted above, I too use settings of places I know. I'm originally from South Africa so some of the settings I use are from there.
I have places in mind while writing sometimes, but I would say the majority of the time, my settings are figments. They incorporate elements from real life often enough, or things I've seen on TV and movies, but not entire locations most of the time. I'm still able to picture them clearly enough, which is good. How much of that ends up on the page varies from story to story.
I do draw a lot from real world settings. When I travel, I like to take pictures of landscapes and land formations to use on my fictional worlds. I also search landscapes on google images. For scenes set on Earth, I like to use locations I've been to or would like to travel to (and, if I can, I will then travel there; if I can't, I'll make do with Google Earth and YouTube videos). In the my last book, the last three chapters centered on a very Earth-like world. I drew heavily on Trafalgar Square in London (which I haven't been to yet, but hope to someday) for one of the settings, and I used the BC Legislature Building in Victoria for the Prime Minister's palace.
Composites of prior influence properties with inspiration from historical events in an anachronistic arrangement or with a genre spin. I'd say start with a sentence that encapsulates your world, maybe a variation on a theme. an example would be "dark fantasy The 100" or "dieselpunk Witcher" or "WWI-punk retelling of the Odyssey".
I always write about places where I haven't been since I don't like to travel. I only get stressed and worried about doing something wrong and I want to go home again. That also goes for travel within my own country. Thus its either places in RL I've never been or places I've made up in my head where obviously I cannot go physically. Yet I remain conviced that with proper research and a sincere respect and humility you can write stories set in times and places where you haven't gone yourself in RL.
I said I don't usually use real locations in their entirety, but I'm working on an outline for a ghost story novel, and I've placed it in and around the cabin in New Mexico that belonged to a friend of my parents. We took a lot of vacations there when I was a kid. I haven't been there since 1997 (it burned down a year or so later,) but I remember it down to the loft ladders, the calico shag carpet and the balcony back porch overlooking acres of wildflowers in the downhill meadow. I wonder how much of it I can accurately convey, seeing as I have a tendency to sprinkle vivid but minimal details and leave the rest up to the reader's imagination.
