As I’ve dug into writing my Pizza Delivery Mystery novel, Thirty Minutes Or Less, one of the fun things I’ve been able to do is create my own fictional setting. Although based heavily on places I have lived, this setting is a mixture of enough of them that I’ve fictionalized it.
My novel will be set in the relatively small city of Hope, Wisconsin. There is no such place (that I know of), but it is based on nearly five years of living in small rural towns in northwestern Wisconsin as a journalist. While Hope is, by necessity, a bit bigger than several of the towns I knew, the flavor and character of those towns will all be found, part and parcel, throughout Hope.
From the Packers-loving retired elementary school teacher selling cheap auto insurance, who I introduce early in my novel, to the suddenly-single-parent county Sheriff who is featured throughout, all of my characters are tiny bits and pieces of people I actually knew, reassembled into a pastiche of all of them.
Getting to know the character and flavor of an area can be a great training ground for building a believable fictional world, based on but not exactly reflecting the real people you encounter while living there.
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