Your Fictional World Needs a Setting or Location
Characters and plot are essentials in creating a fictional world. But that world also needs a setting or location. Location is as important in fiction as in real estate. Our characters don’t exist in a vacuum. They need a place, so to speak, to hang their hats. And readers expect a certain amount of reality in that setting. The Sticks Hetrick series is set in Swatara Creek , Pennsylvania , a fictional town of my creation near Harrisburg , the state capitol. There is a Swatara Creek and even a township bearing the name, but the town is my invention. It’s representative of many of the older Susquehanna River towns which have become bedroom communities for the more metropolitan areas of the commonwealth. The town, which sits on a promontory in a bend of the stream for which it’s named, owes its existence to one Jacob Koontz who acquired the site circa 1754 after immigrating from Germany . Koontz opened a tavern in a large limestone building which stands yet today on t...