The Urban Setting Thesaurus

A city is hundreds of places, each with its own atmosphere, and a scene set in a generic urban blur wastes all of them. That generic blur drives me up the wall. The Urban Setting Thesaurus is the city-side companion to the rural volume, and it breaks the urban world into the usable pieces that most contemporary fiction 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.

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 has 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. Writers flatten those all the time, and it’s a lazy habit. A penthouse and a basement apartment are two homes and 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 handle it.

The entries on transitional spaces, lobbies, elevators, stairwells, the threshold between a doorman building and the street, are some of the most useful, because those in-between places are where class friction shows up and where a lot of urban scenes turn.

The same caution as its twin

Like the rural volume, it works best as a prompt. Copy the lists wholesale and you’ll get a scene that reads like an inventory.

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. It’s narrower in appeal than the character books at the heart of the series, but for a story that lives on concrete, I think it’s a damn good tool.

Frequently Asked Questions