Building a Castle

Every fiction writer has to create a set for their characters to live and their action to take place. Most choose real places which are already mapped out and have the added advantage of being familiar to readers. If I mention the great pyramids beyond the city skyline, you know you're in Cairo.

For those of us stupid enough to take you to a place beyond human experience, then we face the task of not only building a reality for our adventure, but also to make it familiar to you when you read it. If Giza is on the horizon we can't have you straddling the pumice moons of Ix, now can we?

Where I'll be living for the foreseeable future....

I've used real cities, cruise ships, refitted submarines and space fleets lost in deep space to tell my stories. Each  time, I got so familiar with the surrounding that I could walk them blindfolded. During the writing of a mystery set in Chicago, my wife and I went there to see the places I'd written about. I'd studied maps and travel books (long before there was an internet) so thoroughly, I navigated the streets as if it were my home town even though I'd never been there before. Shocked the hell out of us both.

The task I face this time is inventing a city from thin air. I need a real place, but it can't be somewhere anyone has been: an urban 'anywhere USA'. I took a Mapquest street map of a real city neighborhood, reversed it, stretched it out, deleted a couple of interstate exits, etc. and then renamed all the major streets.

That was just the first step. Time to populate it with buildings and schools and churches and housing projects - the backdrop to things that happen. I can't make these places up as I go along: the Hotel Grenadine can't be on Staple Street one day and Lexicon the next.

So here I am building schools and housing projects like a regular town planner. Where is the 'downtown' in this place and what is the median income? Are there homeless? Where is the wealth and historic center? Is there a factory or business core here, or is the city center elsewhere? I've named all the surrounding neighborhoods, too, and know exactly how what streets to take where the traffic is lightest.

Once I have this down, like I know my own craggy face, I can drop my hero in watch him run wild. Oh yeah...I better give him some other people to play with.