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For me, at least, the place of place — the setting — can be incredibly important to a story. In PARK RIDGE I worked hard to get the description of the senior center as accurate as possible. With one exception — a small wing toward the back which I styled as a lounge area. I needed somewhere far enough away from most folks that the murder could happen out of shouting distance. The other details like St. Juliana’s in Edison Park, the Park District, downtown — all were as accurate as I could make them.

I’m currently working on a sci-fi novel that didn’t have a location. I finally decided on Boise, Idaho. We went there on vacation years and years ago and I’ve always harbored a secret desire to run away there and start a new life. Whether I will be able to pull off the fiction piece — make the location believable, even to someone from Boise — well, we’ll have to wait and see.

In the meantime I posted to the Chicago Writers Association about the place of place in our writing. Dorien Grey responded:

Interesting issue, where to set your novel. When I began writing my Dick Hardesty mysteries, I very deliberately did NOT specify where it was set, simply because it was a place that exists only in my mind. Over each succeeding novel in the series, I have carefully worked to make Dick’s city…which has never been given a name…as real to readers as possible.

In each novel, Dick drives down the same streets, goes to the same bars and restaurants, visits the same parks. Slowly, I hope, the reader feels totally at home there.

In my recently-completed new novel, I use Chicago as my base, and frankly I find it a little intimidating. I’m always afraid someone is going to say: “No, Magnolia *crosses* Sheffield, it doesn’t parallel it!” Or “there’s no such building like that on Granville just west of Broadway.” Trying to get everything right is, frankly, pretty confining.

It’s easier to write of a specific place if the action takes place in the past, especially if you do a little research on the town/city of the era, since it is unlikely anyone will be around now to raise objections to a few errors.

Dorien Grey:

• http://www.doriengrey.net/
• http://www.doriengreyandme.blogspot.com/
• http://www.doriengrey.blogspot.com/

Jeanette Clinkunbroomer had this to say:

Just my own thought — I think place is important, even if it’s a
fictional place. It anchors a story and makes it feel real. You can do a lot with it to set the tone — sinister, serene, etc etc.

Wrote a novel set in the Civil War and relied heavily on old photos and maps of New York City and Washington, DC. Parts of Charleston, SC, haven’t changed one iota since 1860. Also had to find out who had things like sewers and paved streets. Visited all the battlefields, though many of them look very different now than they did during the battles. My character was a journalist, and I thought it was important to figure out where he might have been observing on a battlefield and what he could have seen from there. (Included traipsing through sort of a swamp at Manassas and getting chewed up by fire ants in Georgia.)

Another novel is set mainly in contemporary Chicago, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, cornfields of Central Illinois, the North Woods in Wisconsin. In all cases, the places allow for different types of activity. That was fun and a lot easier than the Civil War.

Jeanette Clinkunbroomer:

• http://www.alloutofheart.com/