Are You Having Trouble Creating Your Fictional Town?

If you are like many other creative writers fictional towns are a part of the fun and the problem…

You’d been planning for weeks, months, or years even, but the setting is still hard to imagine or put into words.

Hopefully, these tips and tricks will give you some ideas to get you moving forward with your fictional town.

Create a mood board.

A mood board is a collection of images or textures or colors. It’s really anything that inspires you about a certain subject.

So in this case you would make a board that you place images of towns and things you find in towns that inspire you to imagine your new fictional town.

It can be filled with different kinds of architecture that could be found in your town. It would have shops; the people dress. It could have dirt roads birch roads.

Another fast way to do this would be to make a Pinterest board dedicated completely to your fictional town.

Google images of real towns.

One of the best ways to get over a creative slump for creating a fictional town is to look at pictures of real towns.

Even just basing our fictional town on a real town can really help.

Stephen King does this with Derry, Maine. Derry is not a real place but it IS based on real places in Maine. Derry is mostly a conglomerate of what a generic, default quaint little town in Maine might look like.

Looking at images of real towns and basing our fictional town on them is one of the best ways to get into building a fictional town in our minds.

It helps because we lose the doubt we feel when we wonder, “does this town seem real?” The answer would become, YES, because we took real towns and used that inspiration to make a fictional one.

Create a map.

This is almost without question a necessary step in creating a fictional town. You’ll want to be able to map out where events in the story transpire. If this part gets muddled up it could lead to serious plot holes.

Plus once you’ve mapped out the layout of the town this will be a step that gives you a lot of confidence to move forward with your writing.

You’ll be able to see clearly where things are happening and what the setting looks like with your main characters in it.

The layout of a town is important for the plot and it’ll help you as a writer, in the long run, keep things consistent.

Play some world-building games.

There are certain games that revolve around the idea of worldbuilding.

You could play “The Quiet Year” where you take time building a town and drawing it out as you go to get some ideas. And another game called “Kingdoms” is a great way to think about building towns and kingdoms.

Play some video games.

A great way to think about structuring a fictional town is to look at the way that video games do it. You know that games like COD and HALO have maps. By looking at these maps and seeing their layout you can deconstruct how the developers laid out the towns.

Take some time to draw out a couple of small areas that your characters could run around in. Then draw out some bigger mapped-out areas. Then combine some of them and you can really construct a dynamic layout of a fictional landscape.

Google Earth.

Use tools like google earth. Pick out a small town outside a city limit and deep dive into every nook and cranny of it.

If you can draw out a layout similar to the one you’ve explored you know you’re on to something helpful.

The layout of a town or kingdom of even large lands is extremely pivotal to the overall plot of some stories.

In Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s layout of the fictional world was extremely important as it dictated the trials the characters would face as they journeyed from one end to the other.

Your story might have similar problems to solve. These problems might be solved by just figuring out the layout of the setting your characters are in.

Do they travel far and wide or are they confined to a small area the entire story?

That’s up to you, but the amount that you have travel and why will bring different moods to different parts of the story.

Traveling to a different place can bring with it certain emotions, excitement, sadness, longing, adventure, fear, etc. Depending on where they are going and why is up to you. But when and how much they travel changes the mood of a story.

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Are You Having Trouble Creating Your Fictional Town?

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Are You Having Trouble Creating Your Fictional Town?

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That’s all for now.

Hope this helps!

Happy writing!

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Are You Having Trouble Creating Your Fictional Town?

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Are You Having Trouble Creating Your Fictional Town?

Enjoying Are You Having Trouble Creating Your Fictional Town? Take a moment and consider sharing this social-friendly image to say thanks and feel free to comment with your thoughts below! 🙂