Coming up with story ideas is a struggle. It’s hard to find the right concept that is going to hold your attention along with the reader’s. However, once I have the story, it’s not hard for me to choose its setting.
Suburbia has been the setting for all my books. It’s the single thread that connects them together aside from all sharing the same middle grade genre.
I’ve always lived in the suburbs. There’s a comfort to knowing the ins and outs of my setting, and it allows me to focus on the other elements of my stories because I know that I have its location nailed down. It becomes the maze in which I drop in my characters, and it allows me to maneuver them to different areas of this concentrated space.
It may sound limiting, but to me, the suburbs are not only the clearest setting for me but the most inspiring. Below I share my love for suburbia and how it shapes my creative storytelling.
My history with suburbia
I was born in a small suburban town just south of Pittsburgh, PA. I now live in another small suburban town just south of Pittsburgh, PA. The area is made up of boroughs and townships, most of which were settled in the early 1900’s. So, there’s a blend of old and new structures that make it an ever changing yet consistently familiar place to live, work, and play.
The area is hilly with plenty of trees, not just in front and backyards, but there are plenty of wooded areas on undeveloped plots and along roadsides. Brick and wood frame homes are prevalent in each neighborhood. The newer areas are pretty uniform in style and structure while the older ones are more eclectic. A small, brick ranch house can be positioned next to a rundown Victorian while a twoo-story duplex can sit just across the street.
We have a four-season year with many gray days and less snow than you’d expect. But there are plenty of cold days that can start as early as October and stretch as far into the first week of May.
Each borough tends to house its own grocery stores, banks, schools, libraries, churches, and restaurants. Public transportation comes in the form of buses and trolleys that will shepherd commuters into the city or other nearby boroughs for work, but many of us drive, and most boroughs still bus their kids to school.
I grew up far enough from the city to not be able to see it out my window, but we still carry the Pittsburgh accent around, we root for all of the sports teams, and a trip into the city is a quick drive through one of the nearby tunnels that separates it from its southern suburbs while a more country setting is just as far in the opposite direction. To me, it’s the best of all worlds.
Childhood in the suburbs
Kids make the most of their environment and the freedom that each one brings. For suburban kids, everything that you’ve seen in the movies is true – to some extent. Kids walk or ride their bikes through the familiar streets. There are small businesses that they love to frequent with whatever pocket money they can scrounge up, and there are tons of nearby places to explore.
My suburban childhood in the 90’s was a storybook setting in many ways. As I got old enough to venture out by myself or with my friends, we began to take over certain areas: the woods that bordered a nearby golf course, a creek that ran below one of the main roads, the deli that sold cheap candy and snacks, and, of course, the playgrounds and the library.
I took a bus to school from kindergarten to second grade, though it was possible to walk it in a pinch, which sometimes happened in a one-car household. From third to fifth grade, I walked to school which was just around the corner from my house.
I’m not going to go on about how we were outside from sunrise to after dark every day of the year. There was plenty of downtime at home, but in the summer especially, there were many long days out and about, and there were many nights where we were out until after dark.
Those years where I was young enough to still play but old enough to do it a few blocks from home are the years that I love to write about. It’s the perfect blend of freedom without the responsibilities of adulthood. And that makes for great child-friendly stories.
Friendships in the suburbs
I feel like friendship in the suburbs works the same as it does anywhere. You attach yourself to kids, usually those your own age, who live nearby and who you often run into, even while playing in your yard. Eventually, you all end up in the same school, and that starts a whole new dynamic where you’re thrown in with others your age.
Before I was old enough to go out roaming around by myself or had made friends in school, I hung out with the older kids who lived in the neighboring homes. As a young, impressionable kid, I believed everything they told me, and they often delighted in scaring me or teaching me about things that were way beyond my maturity level.
Once I became one of the older kids in the neighborhood, I made sure to do the opposite of the kids who I had looked up to. Instead, we became one big group. No one was excluded, and we even sometimes knocked on doors to get as big a group together as we could to either play a game, a sport, or some make believe game.
These years, the summers especially, became the concept for my third novel, The Castle Park Kids, which explores suburban life through the lens of my experience. It’s essentially my version of The Sandlot.
The reputation of the suburbs
The suburbs are as complex as the people who live in them. You think of them as full of nuclear families with a comfortable life and small problems. They have to stare out their windows looking for the smallest slices of gossip because they don’t have anything else to talk about, and they all share the same belief systems and politics.
That may be what the billboards of the 1950’s wanted people to believe, and that reputation may continue to remain the myth of the suburbs, but anyone who lives here knows that it is as multifaceted a place as any. A lot goes on behind the walls of each home, and sometimes, the most shocking things can go down and wind their way through the gossip chains.
The darkness of suburbia
We are not immune to violence and tragedy no matter where we go. My neighborhood saw violence, suicides, and drug addiction. There were thefts, fires, floods, and car accidents. Multiple children were hit by cars. Multiple times I attended a funeral for a teen, a parent, or one of the beloved elderly neighbors.
I’ve heard children being beaten on the other sides of their front doors. I saw drunk parents stumble into their homes after work or a night at the bar and go on verbal tirades to their spouses and children.
Homes in the suburbs are far enough apart that you don’t have that living on top of each other feel of city life, but sometimes, even a yard away can be too close for clashing personalities. People will feud over property lines, animals, children you name it.
There are kid bullies who will chase you down, steal your toys, throw rocks at you, and break your stuff. They will shout horrible things about you in front of your friends, and they will go after you even more if you try to get an adult involved. There are also adult bullies who will curse you out for even setting foot in your yard, threaten to call the police for the tiniest of reasons, or just plain creep you out so that you avoid being cornered by them.
Knowing the sinister side of suburbia can fodder great horror, sci-fi and fantasy stories. Anything can happen in suburbia. So, it makes stories like those seen in E.T., Stranger Things, and Poltergeist plausible. There’s no telling what will land in our backyards, what is buried beneath our yards, and what secret organizations are secretly doing in plain sight.
Final thoughts on suburbia
Setting is one of the building blocks that make up the solid base of a fully-fledged story. And having a clear and focused grasp of that setting can make world building so much easier, particularly when world building is not your strong suit.
I try to write books that are relatable, but it has to be relatable to me first. I draw from my experiences so that I have something tangible to say and to pass on to my young readers.
For me, that starts with familiarity of surroundings. Even if those surroundings are not familiar to my reader at first, I try to get them comfortable enough with it that it will feel familiar with them by the end. And, hopefully, that will make it feel as real to them as the lived experience, which is what stories set out to achieve, no matter how fantastical, that it is as real as the scene outside your window.
Where did you grow up? What is/was your perception of suburbia? Leave your answers in the comments below!
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