Some years ago, while I was teaching writing at a community college in rural central Washington state, I began to notice a fat book with a distinctive black-and-red cover tucked under the arms of my students. Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (Little, Brown, 2005) is set in a fictional version of Forks, I learned, a logging town in the upper left corner of the state, and had something to do with sparkling vampires, overcast skies, hot people, and, somehow, sexual purity. So many of my students had been bitten by the Twilight bug that soon the pilgrimages began: road trips across the state to the Olympic Peninsula and the real town of Forks.
I’d always liked Forks for its diner and forests and the grocery store where bananas and beer were shelved not far from the chain saw oil. But my students were visiting for the Twilight-themed gift shops, the public signs reporting the daily “Vampire Threat-level” and demarcating the “Treaty Line,” as well as Bella’s battered red truck, parked at the visitors center.
When they’d return, I’d ask how it went, and their typical response was mild: “It was really cool. Just not what I expected.”
And this is one reason Meyer has earned her millions of readers: She created in them a jarring moment when the world they’d read about met the world as it is, and reality took a spill.
When fictionalizing real places, creating this reaction in readers—this moment of slippage, when the mind wrestles to reconcile the imagined world of the page with the blunt force of the real—should be every writer’s dream.
Throughout the course of writing two novels set in real places, I watched them gradually lift off the map and become something else entirely: both tethered and ethereal, reliant upon the real and autonomous unto themselves. In my debut, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore (Scribner, 2017), this setting was an indie bookstore in Denver, based on the Tattered Cover, where I worked for years. In my most recent novel, Midnight in Soap Lake (Hanover Square Press, 2025), it was a colorful little town on a mineral lake in the rural Pacific Northwest, where I lived when my kids were babies. Both books are defined by dark crimes that occur in tight communities, but my initial goal was to capture and reinvent real places that had deep personal meaning in my life.
This process begins with choosing a real place that holds enough gravity to warrant returning to it throughout the process of writing a book. Just as we might begin our fiction with a real person or situation, it’s helpful to remember that from the first word, we are already funneling and filtering that reality into a new version of itself—a process similar to what happens as we revisit, and therefore reconstruct, our memories. As we write we can curate the details of the place, heightening and erasing, not attempting to represent it as it exists, but to shape it in service of story. A real childhood home might move from one end of town to another, add dead grass or a vegetable garden, lose decades of its life or become plagued by rats and ghosts, and even become unrecognizable. But for the writer, as it transforms into something new on the page, the original reasons we were drawn to it—its emotional and conceptual charge—should continue to propel the piece. Readers, ideally, will feel that too.
For generative purposes, and to spark more narrative potential, it might help to think about this core location as a place that not only holds personal meaning for us, but also acts as a point of convergence. In a place where many threads intersect, many stories are born. In addition to those qualities of place we typically consider—the details that make a unique imprint on the story—we can also consider what else converges in that location, aiming for a hotbed of tensions, often just beneath the surface.
While they might have fun on a journey to a place like Forks, readers don’t need to know the specific location that is the basis for a writer’s world-building to sense its emotional weight and to see the threads that make it a compelling hub for the narrative.
For example, the sweltering Southie of 1974 in Dennis Lehane’s novel Small Mercies (Harper, 2023) isn’t a stage on which his characters perform, but rather an embodiment of the racial and economic tensions that exist in the city of Boston and the United States of the time (and remain dismally relevant today). In its opening pages, in an apartment crowded with ashtrays, in a neighborhood without power, we are introduced to a bigoted Irish American mother, her teenage daughter who is about to end up dead, and a connected thug rallying residents for an anti-busing protest. This apartment and the surrounding neighborhood contain such a tight knot of tensions—historical, sociological, psychological, and economic, for a start—that they act as a blueprint of the whole book and a depraved version of the American Dream. Just add murder.
There are countless examples of centering on place like this in fiction. At the contemporary Louisiana plantation of Attica Locke’s brilliant crime novel The Cutting Season (Amistad, 2012), cane is harvested by undocumented workers and tourists watch oblivious reenactments of plantation life. Here, the property acts as both a hub for a murder investigation and a demonstration of how the diabolical past might appear different, but it hasn’t gone away. Similarly, the Irish village of Tana French’s western–crime novels, The Searcher (Viking, 2020) and The Hunter (Viking, 2024), is a living map of broken families, pervasive power, gender roles, contemporary economics, and the many ways that secrets can grip a community. With every dark wink in the corner of the pub, another thread is born.
From a writer’s perspective, one benefit of fictionalizing a place of many converging threads is that it can steer us when our storytelling veers off track. The Bright Ideas bookstore of my debut novel—and the Tattered Cover it was based on—was housed in a historic skid row building that was a maze of shelves packed with books. In life and in fiction it was a vibrant intersection of bibliophiles, booksellers, unhoused people, and other neighborhood residents, so there was no shortage of narrative threads, especially with some dark crimes tossed into the mix. But during the years it took to write the novel, it veered off track many times—usually in proportion to the number of essays I was grading—but typically righted itself when I returned to the nucleus that was the bookstore. Everything alive in the story, everything I wanted to capture of that world, surfaced between its shelves. Circling back there always made sense.
The spooky town in my new novel—Soap Lake, Washington—held a similar capacity for convergence. On the surface, this was an isolated burg of fifteen hundred people on the shores of a healing mineral lake. When I first moved there with my young family in 2003 for a nearby teaching job, every day I encountered some detail of the place that set its hooks in me, adding layers to a novel I wouldn’t write for seventeen years. The place had a long history of people coming to cure their afflictions in the lake, and at its peak it had become a thriving spa town. As the place fell into decades of decline, a campaign was started to build the World’s Largest Lava Lamp as a way to bring in visitors…not unlike the vampire signs in Forks. No book writes itself, but it helped to have these ready-made threads to follow into the story.
Something useful that writers can do when setting fiction in a real place is to leave. Choosing projects that allow us to write about a place after we’ve moved away from it can provide a liberating pattern and help us to create settings that echo the real yet feel more vibrant and can exist on their own. Maybe this is because distance creates permission. Rather than being directly fed by the spaces in our daily lives, when we see them through the rearview, we rely on memory and create a sort of “greatest hits,” one that best suits the story, less encumbered by reality.
After several years away from Soap Lake, during which time I completed my novel, I had the experience of returning to town for a quick visit. It was a dreary autumn day, midweek, and the downtown was quiet except for a pickup truck at the gas station. When I looked up the vacant sidewalk—the same sidewalk where I used to push my babies in their stroller—I had that jarring feeling of disconnect and mild disappointment. On some subconscious level, I must have been expecting the version of this street that I’d spent years creating to supplant this real one—like the feeling my students must have had when they visited the real Forks, expecting Twilight. The reason for this momentary glitch was clear: I’d spent more time lately in that imagined version than in the real place it was based on…a telling commentary on the escapism of our vocation.
A writer’s dream, of course, is that readers will close their book and look around the room, blinking as they sink back into reality, whether they want to or not.
Matthew Sullivan’s debut novel, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore (Scribner, 2017), was an Indie Next Pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, a Goodreads Choice Award finalist, and a winner of the Colorado Book Award. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Daily Beast, the Spokesman-Review, and elsewhere, and his stories have been awarded the Editor’s Prize from the Florida Review and the Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize. He grew up in Aurora, Colorado, worked as an indie bookseller in Denver and Boston, and taught writing for twenty years at a community college in rural Washington state. He is married to a librarian, Libby, and now lives in Anacortes, Washington. His new novel, Midnight in Soap Lake, was published by Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins, in April.
Thumbnail credit: Heather Young