Now you can go with a realistic route and take a name that would fit the region of the country you’re talking about (Spanish sounding words if you’re in the Southwest, more French and British words or names if you’re in the colonies). The name: Your town’s name says a lot about it. So what are some things to think about when creating your town? And when you’re a soon-to-be-famous-young-adult-author, people can’t flock to the town in your novel (hello Forks!), because it doesn’t really exist.
You don’t have the luxury of going TO your town, or looking up pictures from the town, if you need visuals.
It’s also a little more thought – if you say the town only has 5,000 residents, odds are your high school isn’t going to have 1500 students. Since you can’t just go to Wikipedia and look up your fake town, that means you have to keep all your facts straight. If you’re telling a story about superheroes, on the other hand, the Fake Megacity is a staple of the genre – Metropolis, Gotham, etc. Creating your own town means starting your own town myths and legends. Small towns are the perfect breeding grounds for paranormal stories. These are all things that can be fixed by creating your own location. Or maybe the town in your head is just like this town you drove through in Delaware, but your novel’s supposed to take place in Western PA. Who cares if there’s not an island west of Seattle, or there’s already a town called New Paltz where you were planning to locate your story. It has whatever history you want it to have. The pros are obvious: you can build up the town however you like, and whatever’s going to make your job easier. But if you create your own town, you can just make it all up as you go. If you use an established city, then you’re expected to do more research. I think the main benefit is the ease with which you can write. So what’s the point of crafting your own town to set the story in, versus using an established city. So one of the things I’m a fan of in novels is the “fake town.” Also known as the “fictional city,” the “imaginary inlet,” or the “hypothetical hot spot.” Or maybe I’m the only one who thinks of them like that? Ahem.
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