Letting Places Grow Like Characters: Transforming Your Hometown into a Fictional World

On a recent trip back to my hometown, I stood beside a freshly dug hole in the pouring rain. My family and I were gathered at the cemetery to say goodbye to a relative none of us had known very well.

It was a short service; only a few words spoken. As my niece snuggled up to me under an umbrella, I ignored the pastor’s generic prayers from a religion I don’t believe in and stared at all the headstones surrounding us. Many bore familiar names, but there were plenty of strangers there, too, underneath my feet.

So much gets buried, I thought, as my cousin and uncle laid the urn in the ground. So many stories go forgotten, or never get told at all.

Before we left, I took one last glance around the cemetery, wondering how it could be so different from the place I remember and the one I have written about. In my mind, the plot of land sweeps down a long, sloping hill, evergreens falling away to reveal rooftops, a shining river, distant valleys and far-off mountains. But in reality, the land stopped abruptly at a line of mixed deciduous trees.

Maybe if it had been a clear day, we could have seen our entire town, and all the thousands of acres beyond it. But in rain like that, all we could see was what was right in front of us.

*

How do you build a town with words?

How do you create a written world that honors the spirit of the place that inspired it while still allowing it to become its own universe?

These questions arose often while I was writing The Road to Dalton and its sequel, Where the Forest Meets the River. For novels centered on characters whose motivations and secrets are influenced by their isolated environment, it was essential to me that I evoke the environment correctly, especially as I wanted to draw from the real landscape where all my own stories began.

I was raised in Aroostook County, the crown of Maine that tends to get overlooked when people conjure up images of the state. The County, as locals call it, is hours north of the ocean, far removed from coastlines dotted with picturesque lighthouses. A destination for hunters and snowmobilers rather than tourists looking for a lobster roll, the County is a world of farms and fields, wilderness and lumber mills and not much else.

Dozens of miles and millions of trees surround towns like the one where I grew up, Ashland, where everyone knows each other and conveniences like takeout or twenty-four-hour-anything do not exist. The land is bucolic and gorgeous, but lives are built and destroyed around the whims of nature and a lack of opportunity.

For me, building Dalton began with the recalled textures of Ashland and Aroostook as I experienced them. But the more time I spent writing and talking about The Road to Dalton and Where the Forest Meets the River, the more these memories—and these places—morphed into something new and strange.

*

As I was touring bookstores and libraries with my first novel during the summer of 2023, an odd thing kept happening: I often found myself referring to my hometown as Dalton, not as Ashland (furthering the confusion was the fact that Ashland was, briefly and long ago, called Dalton). I would forget the names of streets I had walked thousands of times, momentarily swapping them out for the names I had given them in the novel.

This displacement was likely the result of being deep in the process of writing Forest while I was traveling around Maine to talk about Dalton. As my husband drove us all over the state, I stared out the passenger window barely registering the varied scenery of my home state as it passed us by.

Instead, I found myself obsessing over the imaginary lives of Dalton. I wondered about Nate Theroux and Rose Douglas, if the spark between them was authentic or simply convenient. I reveled in the beauty of a garden planted by Greg Fortin, sank into compulsive grief with Annette Frazier, took delight in witnessing Trudy Haskell and Bev Theroux love one another without shame among shelves of library books.

This habit of Dalton-based reverie further blurred the lines between real and imagined—in other words, by bringing my Northern Maine hometown to the page, it seemed I had inadvertently altered it to become something else.

While writing the first novel, much of my focus went into rebuilding Ashland and Aroostook in a way that felt true to my own experience and as true as I could make it to the actual place. I wanted to emphasize the County’s remote beauty while also drawing attention to the physical and emotional boundaries such a setting imposes on the people who live there. I felt an immense amount of pressure, mostly self-imposed, to get the County “right” on the page.

In some ways, these pressures were more intense as I began writing Forest. Not only was I up against the anxiety of crafting a worthy sophomore novel; I was also keenly aware people from all over the country were suddenly reading Dalton, recognizing their own hometowns and personal experiences in this narrative that, for so long, had solely belonged to me.

More unnerving was the idea that people who still lived in the places that inspired my fictional world were reading the book and, intentionally or not, checking my work for accuracy—searching for familiar railroad tracks and water towers, wondering if I meant to name the bar in Dalton after a real person (I didn’t).

When I first went on the road to talk about Dalton, I felt compelled to defend each of these mistakes. But the longer I toured and the deeper I went into writing the sequel, the more this compulsion, much as the landscape of Dalton itself, shifted. Lifted.

*

As I wrote Forest, the landscape of Dalton started to expand beyond the borders of my hometown. Sometimes these adaptations were intentional but most evolved organically in the writing process.

Perhaps I first drew inspiration for Nate’s farmhouse from the hillside property I had coveted as a kid, but as the sequel evolved, his house merged with another, half-real and half-imagined, perched on the banks of the Aroostook River. The Dalton Library, once a mirror image of the library of my youth, began to warp into a patchwork of others I have had the privilege to visit or work in as an adult.

As authors, we collect fragments from our lives and blend them into an amalgam on the page. Characters are not born from one specific person; rather, they take on various traits of several people we know—a grandfather’s gravelly laugh, a stranger’s nervous shoulder tic, our spouse’s habit of forgetting to drain the dishwater. The same thing was happening with Dalton—the more time I spent there, the more it adopted its own personality, reminiscent of Ashland yet wholly its own.

For me, the greatest joys of either writing or reading a book are the constant small yet revelatory marvels of place, character, and dialogue. Most of my favorite scenes and interactions in Forest (and, for that matter, Dalton) sprang into existence after I stepped back and allowed the characters to lead me where they needed to be.

It was only by sitting in a constant sense of discomfort—never knowing exactly what would happen with Dr. Haskell, or Greg Fortin, or Nate and Rose—that each book was able to expand past the limits I had first placed upon it. To move beyond getting the landscape “right” and into a realm where rightness was determined by something far more nebulous and intangible than physical boundaries on a map.

In other words, it was only by letting the fictional landscape of Dalton and the County stand on its own that this world could become something so much bigger and more beautiful than I ever imagined. By allowing Dalton to become its own character—living and breathing in ways that move, frustrate, and astound me—I have allowed myself (and hopefully readers) to be continually surprised by this town, and by the people who live there.

And as I write the third book in the Dalton series, I still constantly marvel at it: how a place can be both real and unreal, remembered and imagined, all at the same time. The way both these worlds can exist concurrently, Dalton and Ashland nestled tight under my ribs like birds in a nest, each making room for the other.

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Where the Forest Meets the River by Shannon Bowring is available via Europa Editions.