Writing About Places You’ve Never Been To

Writing about cultures you don’t know personally and places you’ve never visited is a hard task. Some people say you shouldn’t even try, that getting it wrong is the fastest way to loose readers and ruin your career before it even begins. Just dodge writing about places you’ve never been. Who wants that grenade to blow up their writing life, right?

Calm down, sergeant.

It’s important to try to take the pressure off yourself if you’re the type of writer who doesn’t do well under perfectionism. The majority of people aren’t going to have visited everywhere you’re writing about, so there is some degree of creative license you can take. Don’t be afraid. This post is here to show you how to create places you’ve never been to, or have only walked on google streetview.

Paint a Picture

Like a historical writer, you need to know what you’re talking about. Assuming you don’t have the budget to travel where you’re writing, your only experience of the place will be as a reader. Luckily, we live in 2020 (bet you never thought you’d hear that, huh?) We have the internet and social media: two big transporters. Via things like google streetview, we can go down the same roads as our characters and see minutae of buildings and sidewalks, how locals dress, etc. Sites like Flickr are also useful for painting a picture of where you want to take your readers.

Youtube is a valuable resource full of people who will take you around their hometowns and show you the sights and the finer things in life there via vlogs and reviews.

Over social media, you can contact people who live in the place you’re writing about. You can make friends and generally put questions out to people on sites like Reddit and Quora.

Know How to Sidestep the Truth

No matter how well you research a place, natives will know you’re an outsider. Sorry to break it to you. But, have no fear! There are ways around this.

You can name the region you’re writing about, then just make up a city or town name, and it’ll be fine! Charles Dickens did this in Hard Times, inventing a city called ‘Coketown’ which was an amalgamation of Preston, Leeds, Manchester, etc. It was meant to reflect the general feeling of the North of England at the time, more than any one place.

Another way is the classic fish-out-of-water technique, where you write from the perspective of an outsider exploring the setting for the first time. This way, any local reading your writing won’t be as offended if you get things wrong, because it fits the perspective of your story.

Be a Tourist

Yeah, you heard me. A digital tourist is what I mean- you go on all the touristy websites looking for advice about Airbnbs (great for seeing what homes are like in your chosen location), local hotspots, how people behave in public, etc. You absorb all this information as if you’d lived it, through reviews and such. Note down any small details you want to include in your writing, and internalise the rest.

Be a Local

Not literally. But there are some things you can find out without actually growing up in the place. You can learn slang terms, how people talk, etc. Personal blogs, books written by locals, video interviews of people who live there, it’s all helpful material!

You can’t describe an accent you’ve never heard. So go and find what you’re looking for!

Think Small, not Big

Smaller details set off the tone of the setting far more than big things do. For instance, when writing about London, your urge might be to write about Big Ben or Buckingham Palace, how all the locals speak with posh accents and wear suits and such. A Londoner will clear this up for you nice and simple: London isn’t just what you see in the movies. Big Ben isn’t that big (it’s actually kind of underwhelming now it’s surrounded by skyskrapers); Buckingham Palace is in the middle of a VERY busy intersection that everyone tries their best to avoid; and most Londoners are pretty impoverished due to the fact every expense there is ten times what it is in the rest of the country.

If I were to write about London I would describe the street performers from all over the world, the way the roads go from ancient cobbles to asphalt with no warning whatsoever, and how it gives you that big city buzz in your brain that tells you you are absolutely going to get lost at some point, and don’t bother trying to fight it.

Use the Media

What’s on the news? What shows do people watch? Even when you read a book or watch a show with the same setting you’re researching, you should be taking in the little details of what’s in the background. Watching the plot might teach you what everybody else is saying about this place, but watching the background will give you enough creative whitespace to say something unique about your setting, while still keeping things authentic.

Use What You Know from Places You Have Been To

Now, not every city is London or LA, but every city is like London or LA. If you’ve been to a city, you have experiences of the different types of people you see there. You know the basic kooky cafes and bars down the side streets. Most people have ridden the subway at some point or another, and subways are essentially the same everywhere. It just falls to you as a writer to figure out the smaller details that make this place or this city unique. There are a lot more motorcycle noises in Mumbai than London, for example. The streets of Miami carry different sounds and scents than those in Manchester. Even architectural differences between places like Edinburgh (which is fairly modern) and Glasgow (which is basically Harry Potter with skyscrapers) are interesting enough to give places fun personalities.

Avoid Stereotypes

Now, most stereotypes have some kind of basis in reality, or a harmful history that it’s worth being aware of as you write. There’s a fine line between telling a truthful story and telling Disney’s version of Pocahontas.

Stereotypes are simplifications of culture, and while this can be useful in early stages, they’re usually cliche and will not make your writing stand out. You can take a stereotype and build on it, for instance, in BoJack Horseman the titular character is a stereotypical LA-style asshole-celebrity who drinks, womanizes, drugs himself up, and is a great candidate for a narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis. How many times have we seen a binge-drinking celebrity on screen? But what’s different about this show is they describe the backstory of this character, they build on their side characters and eventually (SPOILER ALERT) send BoJack to rehab, which doesn’t even fix all his problems. They’ve added an extra layer of realism onto a stereotype we’ve all seen done a million times before, but because the world is so fleshed out with detail and realism, we don’t mind that much.

The most important tip I can give you? Make sure you fall in love with your setting. At least a little. If you love what you write about, you’ll do ten times the research and your writing will be a hundred times better for it.

Do you have any other tips on how to write a location you’ve never seen? Let us know in the comments below!