Thread: Ever use your hometown?

Have you ever used your hometown as the setting for your novel?

Nope, it's too boring! Lol!

I've set a couple stories in my hometown (as much as you can call it that: I grew up on a beef farm), but always changed the name and altered the location. A lot of writers set their stories locally. Hell, look at Stephen King... I'd wager that over 50% of his books are set in Maine, and probably 70% of his short stories.

Just be careful that you don't start including people you know in your stories. You're usually protected on the legal front, but you may come to regret the social damage.

What I'm working on is fictional with a touch of fantasy, so no one I know would be caught dead anywhere near it I'm a very visual person, so it really helps to physically see the layout of a location, rather than just going on research alone. I've hit a road block until I can set my story somewhere. Actually, it's more like a dead end road that isn't even paved yet, not so much a road block.

That sounds fine! Writers are always drawing on their experiences, their environment, and the people they know in order to instill life into their work. It's the synthesis of several disparate elements into a new, novel whole that makes writing fiction so much fun!

The novel that I am currently working on draws heavily from my own experiences as a teenager growing up in a southeastern US location (Oak Ridge, Tennessee) but it is not autobiographical. It is a fictional story. I actually considered having the story take place in Oak Ridge at one point, and thought that on the plus side, it would give me keen insight into the environment. But I quickly decided against it. It would've just seemed odd for me to write the events of my fictional story in a real place, especially one that I lived in.

I thought about picking another real city elsewhere in the southeast, because then it wouldn't seem so literal in my mind, but then I started feeling like if I did that I would still be obliged to reflect the environment accurately, and I don't want to get bogged down in those types of logistical details. It's not that I would've minded researching and even visiting the city that I would've set my story in, but there wasn't really anywhere in particular that seemed "right" and I didn't want to just pick somewhere arbitrarily.

So, now I have a fictional city in Alabama as the setting. I figure that this locale is close enough for me to still have decent knowledge of some details common to this area of the country (for example: what the landscape looks like, patterns of speech, people's general attitudes and opinions, etc.) And the fact that the city is fictional also gives me a tremendous amount of leeway in how I convey the setting to my readers. I've also deliberately made the exact location ambiguous enough in Alabama to where someone that actually lives in that state isn't likely to say, "hey, that city's supposed to be 5 miles from where I live!"

Sure, I do and would. If I don't - who else will?

I've decided on doing a fictional setting modeled after my hometown. I sat down and sketched out a rough map with the main places the story will take place (home, school, etc.) and I know enough about the area I live to know the small details- population, type of businesses that thrive, climate, dialect, etc.

Using my hometown wouldn't work too well with my chosen Genre (Sci-Fi). Eureka! is already a TV series, and I'm sworn to secrecy on the really cool stuff that goes on here.

Seriously, Debbie Macomber draws heavily on my hometown for her Cedar Grove series. There were a few changes, to be sure. Every real town has enough interesting nuggets to mine and refine. It takes a real artist to turn an otherwise boring town (like mine) into an intriguing setting. Usually, this is easier and creates a more authentic setting that trying to pull a town out of your hat.

Following on from this, I would like to "depersonalise" a map perhaps from Google maps, so that the roads and terrain can be seen but no road or place names. Has anyone any tips on how easiest to do this? I'm hoping someone else has done it already.....

Originally Posted by Aderyn

Nope, it's too boring! Lol!

Mine too.

I just published a book that was written as a sort of a 'love song' to my current home. One of my reviewers commented that she was able to "smell" her hometown. Another said that it made him want to move there. The only advice I'd offer is to limit the use of specific names of businesses and/or locals. Change is constant. You don't want readers to show up in your town 10 years from now looking for Bread in My Jar only to find out that it went belly-up five years before.

Originally Posted by KarlR

I just published a book that was written as a sort of a 'love song' to my current home. One of my reviewers commented that she was able to "smell" her hometown. Another said that it made him want to move there. The only advice I'd offer is to limit the use of specific names of businesses and/or locals. Change is constant. You don't want readers to show up in your town 10 years from now looking for Bread in My Jar only to find out that it went belly-up five years before.

That makes sense! Thanks!