Some Thoughts on Writing Setting as Character; or, No, You Can’t Book a Vacation There: A Guest Post from Author Kate Milford

Kate Milford is the Edgar Award-winning author of the enchanting mystery Greenglass House, which is set in Nagspeake, a charming fictional port that would be an enormously popular vacation destination if only it existed. 

I have always loved books in which the settings feel more like characters in the story than simply backdrops for it. No surprise, then, that that’s how I approach setting in my own books. Possibly this is a contributing factor to one of my more dubious accomplishments: having received occasional angry mail from readers who were shocked and disappointed to discover that Nagspeake, one of my go-to locations (the setting of Greenglass House, The Left-Handed Fate, Bluecrowne, and next year’s Ghosts of Greenglass House and The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book) can’t be found on a map. I have also had hotel booking sites email me, urging me not to wait any longer to list Nagspeake hotels on their site because the holidays are coming up fast. I figure this maybe makes me sort of qualified to talk about writing places, and I thought I’d share some thoughts on how I approach it.

Whether I’m writing in a fictional setting or a real world one, research and history are key. The more I know about a place, the better I’m able to bring it to life. For me, the entry points are usually geography, history, and folklore. Every place is molded by its history and how it remembers that history, and by studying (or building) a location’s past you can track the factors that caused it to develop the way it did. The geography and architecture of the place will bear witness to these factors, too, whether in sympathy or in opposition to them. Ditto the setting’s economy and culture. Folklore becomes incredibly important here, too, because it’s through folklore that we understand how a culture understands itself and its past on an emotional level. Folklore can also tell you how a culture wants to see itself. But this is perhaps a good place to note that no place is monolithic in any aspect. This is as true for the smallest small town as it is for a city the size of New York, so it’s important to be aware of variation and sharp turns, for different neighborhoods and different subsets of the population and the past that informs their interactions with each other. To be on the lookout for conflicting tales and conflicting histories.

Now, not every book will require the same kinds of information, obviously, and not every writer will care about the same stuff, either. But in my experience, the more research or foundational building you do for your setting, the better. Although you won’t be able to use everything you learn, your depth of knowledge will show in small ways. The two Greenglass books take place in a single inn in Nagspeake, but you better believe I could draw you a detailed map of the entire city if you put paper in front of me. I could tell you the history of the inn and of the land on which it sits. I know the basic history of the different transportation options in the city. Nagspeake has a unique economy that relies on a barely-concealed smuggling community, and I could write you a dissertation on the history behind that and the differing perspectives of the citizens, law enforcement, retailers, and the smugglers themselves. For The Left-Handed Fate I had to become an expert in life aboard a privateering schooner in 1812, which took literally years of intensive study. Only a small percentage of my research makes it into the actual book I’m writing, but the fact that I know it seeps in and makes the setting—whether it’s a smugglers’ inn or a letter-of-marque—feel more fully realized and immersive.

Weirdly, as I noted above, I don’t usually do this kind of work on characters. I know plenty of writers do like to work out the life of their characters before they even let them walk into a scene, in much the same way that I like to work out the details of a city or a world. I don’t, for the same reason I don’t like to outline a story before I write it. I like discovery—I like for the process of writing the book to surprise me along the way, to lead me on a merry chase and throw a few twists and turns my way to keep things lively. It tends to be the characters that accomplish this for me, and if I worked out all the details of their lives in advance, I think they’d maybe surprise me less.

Or I suppose it’s possible that maybe places just interest me more than people. Don’t think I haven’t tried to figure out how to write a book without people in it at all. I have.

Greenglass House is now available in paperback.