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Creating a fictional world for your characters to inhabit is as important as creating the characters themselves.

Without a world to live in, your characters float aimlessly around. They need a background to stabilize them, and link them to the world of the reader.

To create a fictional world that is realistic and believable, you need to spend some time getting it right. You might choose a present-day location, a historical time or a fantasy world. All these need to be thought through carefully before you let your characters loose in them.

PRESENT DAY

If your novel is set in the present day, you need to be very careful about the locations you choose. People will know them, and nothing puts a reader off more than incorrect details. If you are going to use a current location, you should really visit it and take notes. See it at the time of day your characters are likely to visit. It's no good going to Central Park in the daytime if your characters only go there at night. The lighting and atmosphere will be completely different. The people who are around will be different. If you use the wrong descriptions you will alienate your readership. This is especially true if you use a well-know location like The Statue of Liberty, which a large proportion of your readership will know.If you use a tiny town of sixteen houses, you might be able to get away with a few mistakes, because not many of your readers will be able to dispute it. Your only problem might come if someone chooses to go to the papers with 'Susan Hibberd's new book says my house is a slum', for example. Take a camera with you, and a notebook and get all the information you can. You can then use this as you write, and check things as you go along.

HISTORICAL

If you choose a historical time-period, you have a lot of work to do. You will need to research the period thoroughly. You will need to know what they wore, what the roads were like, how the communicated, what they ate, the social structure, what their day was like, what jobs were available etc. Of course, you will only have to give a flavor of these things in your writing, you won't have to describe their day in detail, but you will need to mention details to give your writing a flavor of the time period. It might be very important to know that Lady Chatterly wouldn't routinely be expected to eat dinner with the gamekeeper, or that the scullery maid had to use the back stairs so the mistress didn't ever see her. Once you start to understand things like this

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