Finding a Place for Your Characters

I talked in an earlier blog about how you can find names for your characters by using internet baby name sites, random name generators, and telephone directories. But this week one of my students said she has trouble finding place names for her stories and asked if I had any advice about how to go about this. So here goes...

The most obvious sources of place names are an atlas, a guide book, or an internet site which deals with geography. But the range of places available is vast, so it might be useful to find some ways to narrow it down. Here are some questions you could ask yourself:

• Is my story set in a rural area, in a large city or in a medium-sized town?
• What sort of landscape do I envisage for the story? Is it lush? Tropical? Arid desert? Heavily built-up and industrialised?
• Is a sense of tradition going to be important for my characters? If so, what sort of place would have the traditions that will affect them?
• What sort of character traits will my main character(s) have? Are they traits that are particularly associated with certain nationalities?

If you still feel stuck, you could try the old trick of opening the atlas at a suitable country or continent and sticking a pin in it.

Sometimes there is something in your character's description that leads you to give them a certain home town. In a play I was writing with my partner, Kimm, we had a character who wasn't interesting enough, a young woman who had fallen into prostitution in London. Kimm wanted her to come from a middle-class family and to make peace with her parents at the end, but I was against this.

It seemed we had come to an impasse, but the solution came very unexpectedly when I was at a writers' workshop one evening. The task we were given was to list some items a character would have in his or her bag or pockets and then work out what that told us about their character.

A couple of items gave us a new insight into our character and led us to give her a completely new identity, name, and place of origin, and also added a totally new dimension to the drama. The items were a brightly coloured embroidered belt and a pair of sandals (even though the play was set on a snowy Christmas Day in London).

From those two clues, our character became an educated girl from an Eastern European country who found herself working as a prostitute in London because she had been tricked into going there to find a new life by some human traffickers.

To find a town and a name for the girl we did some research on the internet into the phenomenon of human trafficking, found out where lots of girls in that position came from, then researched to find a country which was in the European Community as we wanted her to have the chance to make a new life in Britain once the play was resolved.

So if you're feeling stuck in a rut with your characters, try doing some little exercises or playing some games to discover more about them, then do some research to give them an appropriate identity. If all else fails, try conversing with them. Ask them who they are and what their life is like where they come from. You'll be surprised at what you might discover!