Worldbuilding
Official maps are useful, but cities rarely live on them.
The places that matter most in fiction are often the ones with nicknames, shortcuts, local habits, and that lovely vague instruction, “you’ll see it when you get there.” That unofficial geography does a lot of work. It tells you who belongs, who is lost, and which corners of a city have memory attached to them.
I’m interested in the gap between the named place and the place people actually use. Sometimes that gap is where the story is.
The places that matter most in fiction are often the ones with nicknames, shortcuts, local habits, and that lovely vague instruction, “you’ll see it when you get there.” That unofficial geography does a lot of work. It tells you who belongs, who is lost, and which corners of a city have memory attached to them.
I’m interested in the gap between the named place and the place people actually use. Sometimes that gap is where the story is.
The unofficial version can also be misleading. Locals make up names that flatten a place into a joke or a habit, and fiction can lean on that too easily. A city needs the boring bits as well: the off-licence that closes at 9, the bus stop nobody uses, the stairwell that smells of damp. That’s usually where the atmosphere starts doing real work.