writermag.com • The Writer | 15name must make sense to your home-
town’s region.
Take Missouri, for example. We’re
notorious name-copiers. In the Show-
Me State, there’s a Paris, a Versailles, a
California, a Carthage, a Carthage, a
Breckenridge, a Buffalo, an Albany, an
Amsterdam, and even a Beverly Hills.
So, if I were to name my book’s set-
ting something like Santorini, Mis-
souri, well...it might sound a little
ridiculous, but it wouldn’t be totally
without precedence.
Swanson made a similar choice
when she named her setting Stonekill.
“Kill” is derived from the Dutch word
for “creek” or “water channel,” and
many of the surrounding towns share
the name, including Swanson’s home-
town of Peekskill and the nearby Fish-
kill, New York. She liked the creepy
sound of Stonekill, but the name also
fit the history of the area. Thus, it was
a natural choice.
Komal also spent hours narrowing
down her city’s name in Unmarriage-
able. Although the full backstory of Dil-
ipabad, one of the book’s main settings,
didn’t survive the revision process, she
believes the research she put into the
title was meaningful regardless. She
wanted something that invoked post-
colonialism, one of the major themes of
Unmarriageable. By giving Dilipabad a
name that wasn’t British – and therefore
not stamped by British rule – she could
signal the importance of reclaimed
identity in countries such as Pakistan.
Here, as in most stories, the name is not
just a name. It’s a symbol.
DON’T:
Play with replicas. Stephen Markley,
author of last year’s Ohio, understands
better than most the temptation to
funnel personal experiences and rela-
tionships directly into your fiction. “It’s
something that sort of burns within
every creative person,” he says. “To
offer an explanation not only to read-
ers but to themselves about what they
experienced.” Ohio takes place in New
Canaan, Ohio, a town loosely based on
the cities where Markley spent his
youth. And the book’s dark subject
matter – involving the opioid epi-
demic, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,
and the Great Recession – is heavily
inspired by the death and destruction
Markley witnessed during his child-
hood in Mount Vernon, Ohio.
Still, he says he needed time to
acquire an appropriate amount of dis-
tance. He’d been trying to write a ver-
sion of Ohio ever since high school,
but he struggled not to directly, as he
puts it, “render one-to-one people you
know or situations you experienced
within the context of the novel.” Real-
ity, he explains, tends to be much
weirder than fiction. That isn’t to say
auto-fiction can’t work. But when
you’re creating a fictional place, the
parallels you draw must be carefully
chosen. You must have the distance
and maturity to know what to say
about them.DO:
Draw a map. If you’ve got an artist’s
hand, this can be a blast. For those of
us with handwriting like 8-year-olds,
it’s a little less fun.
Either way, this is your chance to
make your world seem real. You can go
by instincts for the first 50 pages, but
once your city starts to take shape,
you’ll need to abide by its rules. You
can’t tell readers the gas station is at the
corner of Park and 7th when you told
them 30 pages ago it was on Cherry
and 9th. Even if you steal landmarks
from your hometown, you’ll need to
know where they go within the context
of a new world.
Markley started with the basic
geography of his hometown, then went
back and made a map. Komal built a
city around a bazaar, then went back
and – you guessed it – made a map.
Sooner or later, you’ll need to know
where things are.
The joy is, you get to choose what
the map looks like and how to make it.
Some authors love open-source map
generators that exist as downloadablesoftware online. Those more artistic
than I am might make a Narnia-
inspired watercolor. Me, I get by with a
few pencil scratches in a journal, with
the occasional use of a protractor,
ruler, and compass. Just make sure you
invest in high-quality erasers before
you get started.DON’T:
Think your readers won’t recognize
what you’re doing – and react. Feed-
back, especially from folks still dwell-
ing in your hometown, will run the
gamut. Some readers will immediately
lay claim to the setting of your novel;
they’ll swear they know exactly where
it is you’ve broken the ground for your
book. Others might take offense to the
critiques or praises you bestow upon
the region. Inevitably, someone will
complain about what you got wrong.
Your readers will take enormous
pride in what they recognize as home.
Respect this to the best of your ability,
but prepare yourself for a difficult les-
son: You can’t make everyone happy –
even under the guise of fiction. Don’t
be afraid to tell the truth of where you
came from, even if that truth is emo-
tionally or politically fraught. Give
your setting the context it needs and
deserves, but don’t shudder away from
creative leaps because you fear reader
reactions. If the story resonates, then
you did your job.
“It’s important for writers to keep
their bravery about them and really
forge ahead on those first drafts and
really not panic at all the panic,” Mark-
ley says. Choose what is best for your
characters while honoring the reality of
the place that raised you. Once you’ve
found balance on that shaky ground
between fiction and reality, your story
will have its chance to soar.Lauren Pucket t is a magazine editor, freelance
journalist, and fiction writer born and raised in
the Midwest. Her work appears in publications
including Literary Hub, Bustle, Apartment Ther-
apy, The Rumpus and 5280 Magazine. You can
find her on Twitter @laurpuckett.