TL;DR
7/10. The city-side companion to the rural volume: dozens of distinct urban spaces with the sensory detail and built-in conflict to make each one specific. Most valuable for crime and contemporary writers. Same caution as its twin, use it as a prompt, not a quarry.
A city isn’t one setting. It’s hundreds, each with its own texture, and a scene set in a generic urban blur wastes all of them. The Urban Setting Thesaurus is the city-side companion to the rural volume, and it breaks the urban world into the specific, usable pieces that most contemporary fiction actually happens inside.
It ranges from crowded streets, subway platforms, and office towers to back alleys, parking garages, abandoned buildings, and the cramped interiors of apartments, bars, and corner shops. The breadth is the point, and it’s the first lesson the book teaches: a city scene has dozens of distinct locations available, each with a different feel, instead of one interchangeable streetscape.
What does an entry in The Urban Setting Thesaurus give you?
Take the entry for a subway platform. You get the sensory load, the rush of warm air ahead of an incoming train, the squeal of brakes, the smell of metal and bodies and old grease, the grime on the tile. You get the moods it can carry, the loneliness of a near-empty platform at night versus the crush of rush hour. And you get the conflicts it can stage, a mugging, a missed connection, a stranger who won’t stop watching.
A subway platform is a pressure cooker of strangers in close quarters, and the entry helps you use that instead of treating it as a place a character merely passes through.
Keep reading
World building for fiction writers: geography, culture, and story: a city is a world. How urban setting earns its narrative keep.
Especially built for crime and the contemporary
This is the volume crime writers and contemporary novelists will open most, because their stories live among concrete and crowds. A city offers a particular kind of tension the countryside doesn’t, the friction of strangers packed together, the anonymity that lets bad things happen in plain sight, the class lines drawn block by block. The book is alert to all of it, and the entries repeatedly point to the conflict a given urban space naturally produces.
The volume is also good on the vertical and economic dimensions of a city, which writers routinely flatten. A penthouse and a basement apartment aren’t just two homes; they’re two worldviews, and the book draws out what each setting says about the people in it and the gulf between them. A scene that moves a character from one to the other is doing characterization and theme at once, for free, if you let the settings carry it.
The entries on transitional spaces, lobbies, elevators, stairwells, the threshold between a doorman building and the street, are quietly some of the most useful, because those in-between places are where class friction surfaces and where a lot of urban scenes actually turn.
The same caution as its twin
Like the rural volume, it works best as a prompt, not a quarry. When a city scene reads as nowhere in particular, the entry pulls me back to the details that would make this corner of this city real. And as always, the craft is in selecting the few telling details instead of transcribing the list. Paired with the Rural volume it covers most of where fiction goes.
On its own it’s the reference for the urban storyteller, and a strong one, though slightly narrower in appeal than the character books that anchor the series.
Keep reading
Imagery in writing: 7 secrets to captivate readers: sensory detail only works with restraint. Here’s how to choose it.
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About the author
Other Books By – Angela Ackerman
Other Books By – Becca Puglisi