I write urban fantasy, which means I write stories that generally take place in real cities that actually exist somewhere. I suppose I could make one up every now and then, but I’m still only on book 2 and haven’t gotten that far. Plus it’s easier to just grab the name of a town that already exists and check out their board of tourism sites and go from there.
One thing I do not do and will never do is read a street map.
I’ve read authors who have done this, and I do not know what in the world the point of all that is. I most certainly do not care that the main character exited their hotel, turned left onto Maple St. South, walked three blocks and turned right onto Mangrove Rd. and went four more blocks to their favorite coffeehouse, passing Missy’s Petting Zoo and Sideview Park on the way. Not one bit.
Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork on Discworld has its districts and its streets, certainly, like the Shades and Sweetheart Lane and the Mended Drum not far from Unseen University, but the names of these places are dropped in passing, or used to help develop a character, as when we learn that Sam Vimes, Commander of the Watch, can tell what street he’s on by the way the cobblestones feel under his boots. That’s a dedicated watchman. We do not know every left and right turn every character makes, and in fact, Mr. Pratchett boasted more than once that he made notes so as not to mess readers up, but he had no maps.
Likewise no maps in Newford, Charles de Lint’s fictional town somewhere in the Midwest — we’re never even sure if it’s in Canada or the U.S. There’s the Tombs, the crumbling part of town where squatters and druggies and the mentally ill kicked out of the Zeb hang out, there’s the Kickaha reservation to the north of town, and the Rusty Lion, everyone’s favorite hipster pub. Again, no maps. Characters walk out the door and go where they need to go, by bus, by cab, by foot or by magic. Aside from giving us a vague idea sort of where these places are, Mr. de Lint doesn’t dwell on maps or travel.
I do not believe that travel moves the story forward. I do not believe that maps contribute to a reader’s experience of place. I believe very strongly in the places in fiction being characters in and of themselves, and that a well-developed setting does add to a reader’s experience of the story, but that means engaging senses and letting the reader know how the park smells, what the sounds are, who’s there at what time of the day doing what, the personality of the park. Not the name of the park and how it got it and that it’s located on Fifth Street between the Harrolson Building and a Starbucks. The reader is not going to the park, they do not need directions. The character is going to the park, and the reader cares why and what will happen there. Not if it even actually exists. The characters don’t actually exist, and the readers cares about them. That’s good enough.
I wrote “In the Dark” and set it in Seattle because the famous rain seemed to lend a proper moodiness to the story I wanted to tell. I looked up some pictures and some events in Seattle and called it good. I actually visited Seattle after the book was almost finished and was pleasantly surprised to find I’d gotten the personality of the town pretty correct. I had to clean up a few mistakes, like the fact that even though it rains, it doesn’t thunder much, the fact that locals call the Pike and Pine area clubs and hangouts the “Pike-Pine Corridor” (Or so I was told by a native; he may have been messing with me, I put it in anyway.), and that the people in Seattle are even friendlier and chattier than I had thought. Otherwise, I did a pretty solid job.
And the only street names I dropped at all were Pike and Pine, because hey, it’s Seattle.
To me, there are just details the reader doesn’t care about or need to know — what brand of shoes the character favors, what kinds of houseplants they do or don’t have, and what street they walk down to get to the big showdown with the bad guy.
