On Writing Places You Have Never Been

There will come a point in your writing life when the story asks for a place you have never stood in.

You may be writing a character who returns to Lagos after ten years away. You may need a train station in Seoul, a courthouse corridor in London, a market street in Mexico City, a winter apartment block in Berlin, a ferry terminal in Manila, a desert town in Nevada, or a fictional city built from several real ones. The story needs the place. Your bank account, schedule, passport, family obligations, job, or plain common sense may have other ideas.

So let’s talk about how to write about a place you have never been without faking authority.

The first move is humility.

That humility will save the work. It keeps you from writing the city as a collection of famous images. It also keeps you from treating local life like a costume rack. When I write about a place I do not know firsthand, I begin by admitting that I am outside it. That admission changes the research. I stop looking for “the essence” of the place and start looking for the conditions a character would actually move through.

Here is the distinction I want you to carry: you are not researching a city so you can prove you know it. You are researching the pressure around the scene.

Let’s say your character needs to walk from a train station to a hospital in a city you have never visited. The weak research path goes straight to landmarks, skyline photographs, famous neighborhoods, and travel adjectives. That gives you surfaces. Some may be useful later, but they will not solve the scene.

The better path begins with the character's errand.

What time of day is it? How far is the walk? Would a local walk it, ride, drive, or avoid that route? Is the hospital entrance obvious? Is there a security desk? Does the area change after dark? What weather would alter the trip? What would the character carry? What would make them feel exposed? What would they know automatically if they lived there? What would they misread if they were new?

Now research has shape.

When I cannot travel, I build the place in layers.

I start with maps because maps give me structure. I look at distance, turns, transit stops, hills, water, parks, highways, bridges, neighborhood edges, and the awkward parts of getting from one place to another. I use street-level imagery carefully. I am not looking for a pretty description. I am looking for friction. Where does the sidewalk narrow? Where does a pedestrian have to wait? Where does the street suddenly become louder, emptier, wealthier, more exposed, more residential, more commercial?

Then I move to local voices.

Local newspapers, neighborhood blogs, public radio stories, oral histories, city guides written for residents, community board documents, transit updates, Reddit threads read carefully, restaurant reviews that mention waiting, parking, noise, service, entrances, weather, or crowds. I treat these as clues, not as material to copy. One person’s complaint about a bus route may teach me more than ten polished tourism pages.

For historical places, I look for old maps, fire insurance maps, city directories, photographs, planning documents, and newspaper archives. A Sanborn map, for example, can tell you what kind of businesses were on a block, how buildings were shaped, what materials they used, and how a neighborhood’s practical life was arranged. That kind of research can change a scene. A character walking past a former laundry, stable, theater, clinic, or boarding house moves through a different kind of memory.

I also listen.

Videos can help, especially the ordinary ones. Walking videos. Transit rides. Rainy street footage. Market footage. Commuter videos. A person filming a long walk with no narration may give you the rhythm of a place better than a glossy travel video. Listen for the crosswalk signal, the bus brakes, the width of the street in the sound, the way voices pass the camera, how long people wait before crossing, how much room the city gives the body.

But here is where the discipline comes in: do not dump the research onto the page.

Research should make your scene more selective.

If you discover twenty fascinating facts about a neighborhood, you may use one. Maybe none directly. The research has still done its job if it changes your sense of what the character would notice, fear, misunderstand, or take for granted.

Let’s make this practical.

Imagine a character named Ana, who has never been to Lisbon, arriving to find the apartment where her father lived before he immigrated. I have never sent Ana there before. I could research Lisbon and write something like:

Ana walked through Lisbon’s beautiful streets, past tiled buildings and steep hills, hearing fado music in the distance.

That sentence has researched objects in it, but it feels borrowed. The tiles are there. The hills are there. The music is there. Ana is barely there.

A stronger research question would be: what does Ana need from this address?

Maybe she wants proof that her father’s old life was real. Now the street-level research has a purpose. I might discover that the building entrance is narrow, that the doorbells are worn, that the street climbs sharply, that the ground-floor business has changed, that the sidewalk gives her nowhere comfortable to stand while she checks the address.

Now the scene can begin:

Ana found the number, then lost confidence in it. The doorbells had been replaced more than once, names taped over names, one plastic label browned at the edges. She stepped back to compare the building with the photograph her aunt had sent, but the street was too narrow for distance. A delivery scooter came up behind her, and she had to flatten herself against the wall with the phone still open in her hand.

This passage is still invented, but it has a research logic. The narrow street changes her body. The doorbells carry time. The photograph becomes difficult to use because the street will not give her the right angle. The place is doing something.

That is the goal.

When writing about a place you have never been, your responsibility is not omniscience. Your responsibility is care. Care means slowing down before you claim. Care means distinguishing what you know, what you infer, and what you need to verify. Care means giving the scene a narrow enough focus that you can research it honestly.

If the scene takes place in one apartment lobby, become a student of that kind of lobby. If it takes place on one bus route, study the route. If it takes place at one courthouse entrance, learn what entering that building might actually involve. If it takes place in a fictional city inspired by real ones, keep a private note about which details come from where so you do not create a lazy composite that borrows beauty from one place and trouble from another.

The best safeguard is the character’s task.

A character doing something specific will keep you honest. Buying medicine. Finding an address. Waiting for a cousin. Getting through security. Looking for the right platform. Carrying flowers to a hospital. Trying to park near a house in the hills. Looking for a former storefront. These tasks force the city to become practical.

That practical pressure will rescue you from postcard writing.

Before you write the scene, prepare a one-page place brief. Keep it focused.

Name the character’s goal. Name the exact route or room. Note the time of day and weather. Add three practical details that could alter behavior. Add one local rule the character understands or misunderstands. Add one thing you still need to verify. Then write the scene using only the details that touch the character’s action.

That last part matters. The research belongs under the floorboards. The reader should feel the stability it gives the scene, even when only a few boards are visible.

Your job is to write the character’s encounter with the place, not your research file.

A place you have never visited can still become alive on the page if you approach it through action, humility, and specific pressure. The scene does not ask you to become a local overnight. It asks you to respect the difference between borrowed imagery and lived conditions.

Start with the errand.

Find the friction.

Let the place change what the character has to do next.