Location, Location, Location: 6 Stories That Couldn’t Happen Anywhere Else

When I started writing North of Nowhere, I knew that setting would be important to the story. Small plane crash during a snowstorm in the mountains — I needed a rural area where help wouldn’t be fast coming.

I could have set the story in a variety of places — in fact, the first draft of the book took place in the Adirondacks. The problem? I’ve never been there. I can research and learn a lot, but because the setting was critical to the story, I wanted an area I could comfortably write about. I moved the story to Big Sky, Montana.

North of Nowhere is one of those stories where, while setting is important, there are several locations that could have worked.

Not all stories need to be told in a very specific location. Many police procedurals, for example, could be moved from one big city to another, and small towns are more or less the “same” for story purposes. There’s nothing wrong with this — sometimes, location is incidental to the story — the characters or crime sets the stage. My Lucy Kincaid series, which is set in San Antonio, could have been told in almost any city with and FBI field office.

But there are some books that simply can’t be moved. The location itself is part of the plot.

Joe Pickett could be a Game Warden in any western state, but most of the stories depend on the unique weather, terrain, laws, and animals in Wyoming. I couldn’t imagine him working anywhere else.

J.D. Robb’s In Death series is similar — it’s set in the future, which is as much part of setting as location, which for this series is the 2060s New York City. The mood of the series is very much NYC and not, for example, Los Angeles or Dallas, and the way she builds an atmosphere that makes you feel like you’re in the future is masterful.

A debut author that used both time and place as a stunning backdrop to their story is Bruce Borges with The Bitter Past. The story takes place partly in rural Nevada in the 1950s, and in the same place 70 years later. Part historical fiction, part police procedural, the use of past and present took this story to the next level. It was seamless. Because the story was partly about nuclear testing in rural Nevada during the Cold War, it literally couldn’t have been told anywhere else.

Riley Sager is an author who uses fictional setting to maximum advantage. He’s a master in using the smallest of locations — a lake, a house, a historic building — to evoke strong emotions and thrills. He uses the familiar to scare the reader. These are places that seem very normal at first — something we would all recognize — but as the story develops, the ordinary turns ominous and it’s that familiarity that makes these stories so deepening chilling. While the Adirondacks summer camp in The Last Time I Lied is fictional and could have been moved to any remote area with a lake, Sager created a setting that was so real you believe it was actually there.

J.T. Ellison’s Her Dark Lies pays homage to Rebecca on a remote island. The story couldn’t have been told anywhere else, and the atmosphere is practically intoxicating. The island may have been fictional, but it sure feels real.

Die Hard is one of my favorite movies, and the story takes place entirely in one location. The setting is plot-critical — the high rise under construction is integral to the story. But did that high rise have to be in Los Angeles? Probably not. It could have been in nearly any large city — though it was fun to have a Christmas movie without snow.

Setting can be a vast winter landscape like in my North of Nowhere, or a foreboding house like Sager, or a time and place that is unique like The Bitter Past.

For me, setting shouldn’t stand out — it should become part of the story so you, the reader, feel like you’re right there with the characters, that you can feel the cold, smell the salt air, sense an ominous presence.