And I think the small town smacks of family, friends and comfort but LOL, we all know small towns have many hidden skeletons and obnoxious people. Gus couldn’t go anywhere without encountering someone he knew or who knew him. That said, I have noticed a trend of city settings in historical romance, especially turn of of the century era. Vociferous (from Latin vociferari, ‘to shout, yell, cry out’). Any location can be Sin City. In The Secret History, Tartt first describes the overbearing character Bunny thus: ‘He wore the same jacket every day, a shapeless brown tweed that was frayed at the elbows and short in the sleeves, and his sandy hair was parted on the left, so a long forelock fell over one bespectacled eye. I’ve written both a small-town series for Harlequin’s Love Inspired (called Dry Creek) and a 4-book urban series for them (Sisterhood of the Dropped Stitches). One was gritty downriver Detroit, home to many a fine hockey player; the other was the scruffy rural area around our family cottage. Having lived in both, I feel I can explore both and use them in my writing comfortably, with the possible exception of pure downtown. I guess I’m saying that this is more like a stereotype. I love this because I write about people in big cities… usually running from the smaller towns looking to blend in/become invisible… and finding they can’t lose their pasts/problems by becoming lost in the city. All rights reserved, often describe people by their eye colour, best articles on character description on our character writing hub, Learn how to describe characters and places more acutely. Briefly describe the town of Maycomb in To Kill a Mockingbird.. Instead, I think readers associate many romantic traits with historical cities, despite the reality that during much of history, cities reeked of garbage and animal waste. My wife and I live in Chicago city proper, but we plan to retire elsewhere to escape the endless winters and ever-rising taxes. What are the disadvantages of writing about a small town? Hi Tamela. The heroine might consult the cook about dinner, but does not stand over the fire herself. Not especially. But the juiciest stuff was pure small-p politics: personal rivalries, hidden agendas, and petty vendettas that had little to do with the broader matters at hand. The comment about the man’s car made me smile. Filtering description via characters’ viewpoints gives you a way to sketch in and develop characters’ personalities and outlooks without explicitly telling the reader what a character thinks or feels. Here’s her description of an opulent, sprawling country home: Walking into the library, I took in my breath sharply and stopped: glass-fronted bookcases and Gothic panels, stretching fifteen feet to a frescoed and plaster-medallioned ceiling. Quite the contrary. ‘No,’ I said. . I wrote for the local paper, taught swim lessons every summer and regularly went to the local shops. The town is loosely based on Saugatuck, Michigan, along Lake Michigan. Learn how to describe characters and places more acutely with the help of Now Novel’s tools and guides, and get feedback on your descriptive writing from the Now Novel community. I’m surprised someone told you that Chicago is “Sin City” since I thought that was a designation for Las Vegas. The book never saw publication for many reasons, but suffice it to say, travelogue is very tricky to write. And they see small town settings / farming communities as quiet, and perfect for an escape. Pew is a novel about an unnamed character with no identifiable characteristics and the character's impact on a small town. Unpaved roads, often muddy, didn’t help buggies or pedestrians. But when I decided I wanted to write about historical New York City at the turn of the Century, in what I hoped would be an on going series, it took a while to figure out how to give it that small community feel. This is not the same as reading about how someone scrapes by month after month. The idea for the Describing Words engine came when I was building the engine for Related Words (it's like a thesaurus, but gives you a much broader set of related words, rather than just synonyms). Hill City had fired its crappy telephone service provider and recruited a new one. History can be useful but isn’t critical. I prefer bigger cities myself… love being lost in the city’s noise…. A smart-aleck colleague urged me to write, “Hill City is neither.” I chuckled but ignored his advice, partly because I was new to the Journal, but mostly because I didn’t think Hill City deserved the disrespect. What his heirs did with the fortune bequeathed them is crucial to the central narrative about the kidnapping of autistic, 15-year-old Danny Peters, himself a Bleak descendant. I think there’s a place for both. It might be tempting to share every detail with us on surroundings. In a city, a character can wander into all sorts of places without being recognized. I had four friends (young women who were cancer survivors and had formed a knitting club to discuss their issues as they could not bear to be in a cancer support group).