How do you write about a thick, dark forest if you’ve never been in a thick, dark forest? About London if you’ve never been to London? In this post, we’re going to talk about how to write about places you’ve never been in, and how to make those places feel real instead of embarrassing yourself with really inaccurate details.
Related reading: How to describe places in your writing – Researching settings for historical fiction
Can you write about things you’ve never experienced?
First, let’s just address a very basic question: Yes, you CAN write about places you’ve never been in. It’s allowed and it’s possible. Some people think that just because they’re a college student, they can only write about being in college, but that isn’t true. You can write about all kinds of things.
I know they say “write what you know”, but the point is actually “write what YOU know”, not “write what you KNOW“. You can put your own spin on things and use your own experiences no matter what you write about, because you’re the only person in the world with your unique perspective. It doesn’t matter what the backdrop is – you can always do your research on that.
People often write about times they’ve never lived in and not just places, though there’s the minor difference that if you write about the 1800s, there’s no longer any people who have lived in the 1800s, but if you write about Shanghai, there are currently about 24 million people who could give you their opinion on it, so it’s a little more precarious doing that.
Now that you know that you CAN write about places you’ve never been in, let’s talk about how to do it really well.
STEP 1: Know you want to write about this place
When writing fiction, it’s always best to choose the most effective place for your story and any given scene, and I’m not at all trying to discourage you from writing about places you don’t actually know, but I just want YOU to know why you’ve chosen this specific place. That’s going to help you hone in on what actually is important about it. And when I say important, I mean important to you and to that story, not to me or to some guy, just so we’re clear.
If you’ve chosen to write about the Alps because you think it would be a cosy and picturesque setting for your story, then you’ll want to focus on those things when you’re researching your setting and when you’re writing your story. You might not need to know what type of rock the Alps mainly constitute of or what it’s like skiing there. (At least in my opinion, winter sports are far from cosy.)
So give it some thought: Why is this place the best place for your story? You’ll feel more confident doing your research and your writing when you know it.
STEP 2: Find pictures and videos of the place you’re writing about
Maybe this step sounds obvious, but it IS only step 2 after all, so have some patience. Thanks to the modern time we live in – a shout-out to any time-travelers – you can find pictures and videos of almost any place that you can think of. Yes, you can find books and magazines with pictures, too, but the internet is the place for the most current material.
Think of this place like you’re its biggest fan and create an entire database of material of it. Notion is a good place for keeping all kinds of stuff together, but feel free to use anything that works for you and where you won’t lose all your research materials.
If you were writing about a forest of mainly deciduous trees, you’d want to look for pictures and videos in all four seasons, and you’ll want to know what that forest would look like at night and in the morning and all hours of the day. Even if your story only takes place in summer, you’ll still want to know what it’s like in winter so that you can be like “unlike in winter, the birdsong was drowning out the sounds of our horses” or something.
Also look for content by different kinds of people to get multiple perspectives. If you were writing about a forest, you’ll want to learn from people who are completely at home in that environment as well as people who have just stepped into a forest for the first time. If you were writing about London, you wouldn’t want to just watch videos by tourists, you’ll also want to see what it’s actually like living in London, and that means including people who live in Tower Hamlets in addition to people who live in Chelsea.
Yes, you’ll want to FOCUS on the stuff that will actually be there in your story, but you can’t afford to get a one-sided view of something you don’t actually have personal experience in, you want to go as close to the truth as you can.
From all this material that you’ve gathered, you can start parsing together some pretty convincing descriptions, but you’ll want to go beyond what things look like and think of all the other senses and what people are actually doing in those settings, and some of that you can get in the next step as well.
STEP 3: Find real people’s experiences of that place
There’s nothing that people won’t talk about on the internet, so you don’t have to just settle for seeing them live their best lives in a forest or in London, you can hear all about it. There are also A LOT of memoirs out there in the world, and they’re not all about celebrities talking about their drug-fogged pasts. I can’t tell you how much I know about living in the countryside in China just because I’ve read a lot of memoirs.
What is it really like living in the middle of a forest? Someone will tell you. There might even be a whole Reddit thread: AMA I live in the middle of a forest in Sweden.
You’ll want to get beyond the things that people will ASSUME what the place like, so looking at the misconceptions people have is a good place to start from. And if I, a Finnish person, were to write about living in London, a place where I’ve never lived and never spent any significant time in, I’d want to look for Finnish people who have moved to London, talking about their experience and the differences between these two places, so I can better inspect my own biases. It’s all too easy to think that your normal is everyone’s normal if it’s something you’ve never questioned.
And hey, you could just ask someone. I’m constantly asking dumb questions from my friends who live abroad, and some of those questions actually are relevant to my writing. Sometimes I’m just nosy.
Keep a list of all the interesting factlets that you uncover, even if you don’t yet know how they’ll be relevant. Keep a special eye on any sensory descriptions, like how birds are really loud in the morning in the forest, or how Covent Garden smells of pee. (I don’t know if that’s true – sorry, West End.) And what do people do there? How do you get through the forest, or through London? What do they do when it snows? You’ll have to find out.
STEP 4: Use what you already have experience in
You’ve already got some life experiences, I’m fairly sure. Which ones can you use here?
So maybe you live in a rainforest – do you think you could use some of your existing experiences to understand what it’s like to live in a forest in Sweden? Do you know what it’s like to live in unison with forest critters? If you’ve never been to London but you’ve been to Paris, what similarities could there be between two European capitals? Does the August heat feel the same?
Of course, to know exactly what stuff you can use, you’ll have to do the research detailed in the previous steps. But then, when you know more, you can get epiphanies like “OH, it’s just like that thing I already have experience in. Let me use the feelings associated with that.”
STEP 5: Decide what actually matters
By now, you know A LOT about living in the forest or in that London borough. Do you actually have to use all of that information? The good news is, no. Often, just a few well-chosen details can really amp up the authenticity of your writing and your story.
But also, your readers might not care about all that, or it might not matter as much in your specific story. You’ll need to use your judgement, and maybe read other books in the exact genre you want to write in.
For example, I recently finished the Scholomance Trilogy by Naomi Novik, and I’m not a big fantasy reader, but I really loved the world-building in those books. However, in the last book the protagonist goes to a few different cities in different countries, and to be honest, I didn’t really feel like I was in Beijing or New York with her. And yet, it didn’t really matter, because we were soon back in those magical settings that I could actually feel like I was in, and the books aren’t urban fantasy novels after all, so it didn’t really matter.
Again, read other books in the genre to get an idea of what your audience might be expecting, and decide what your own personal level of detail and authenticity is going to be.
STEP 6: Make things up
I’m putting this in the bottom, because before you can make things up, you’ll also need to know what’s going to matter. If you’re not sure how to write about a specific place accurately, or you just can’t find exactly what you want, you could combine real details of real places and create something of your own.
Maybe there isn’t a street in London that’s exactly like the place you want to write about. Sure, making up a whole borough might feel unrealistic and take your readers out of the reading experience (something you’ll want to avoid) unless you’re writing about the future and you want to be like “Yeah we combined Waltham Forest and Hackney, and just decided to call it WHACK.”
Making up an imaginary street, however, is less immersion-breaking, and you could mix and match things from actual places to still create a fairly convincing imaginary place. Even Dickens, who practically knew every inch of Victorian London, made up the Tom-All-Alone’s slum in Bleak House.
You could also come up with your own forest and model it after a real one, as long as you don’t expect your readers to believe in your made-up rainforest that takes up half the continent because it’s more difficult to suspend disbelief for a big place like that. Likewise, you can make up a village or a small town – that’s actually quite common – but writing a story about a city with millions of people and have it turn out to be all made-up might not be something your readers will like unless you’re specifically writing speculative fiction of some sort.
And don’t be like “well nobody knows anything about Russia so I can just make things up” because that’s just disrespectful to your readers and only shows your personal ignorance. We can also stop inventing African countries and hoping people won’t notice, I think. Have some respect for the place you’re writing about and the people who actually live there.
Don’t get stuck doing research
So now you have a solid to-do list for writing about a place you haven’t actually experienced. You can start doing your research, compile all your knowledge and then start writing.
You WILL start writing, right? You won’t just do research forever in the fear that you’ll get something wrong?
Here’s the thing: In your writing life, you will get something wrong. Embrace it rather than avoid it, because trying to avoid it will stop you from writing, and you don’t want that.
Just do your best. Learn what you can before you start writing and fill in any gaps you find as you write, and try your best to do right by the place you’re writing about and the people in it. You’ve got this.
Protagonist Crafts is a blog about writing fiction, written by a published author and creative writing teacher. You can find more writing tips and inspiration in the blog and you can get the best author tools at Writer Lifestyle on Etsy.
