I have never been to Vladivostok. I have never stood on the banks of the Ural River or watched the sun set over the rooftops of Lisbon. I have never eaten breakfast in a Nairobi cafe or taken a late-night train through the Swiss Alps. And yet I have written about all of these places, sometimes with enough confidence that readers have asked me which hotel I stayed at.

This is one of those uncomfortable truths about fiction writing that nobody talks about at literary festivals. We praise authenticity. We celebrate writers who “write what they know.” But the reality is that most fiction writers, especially those of us working in historical or international settings, spend a lot of time writing about places we have never physically visited. And I think that is not only fine but sometimes preferable.

Let me explain what I mean by that, because it sounds controversial and I want to be precise.

The Myth of the Writing Traveler

There is a romantic image of the writer as world traveler. Hemingway in Paris. Orwell in Burma. Chatwin wandering Patagonia with a notebook. We have built an entire mythology around the idea that great writing about place requires physical presence, that you need to have breathed the air and tasted the water before you can describe it honestly.

I bought into this for years. In my twenties, I delayed writing a novel set in postwar Germany because I had not yet visited Berlin. I felt like a fraud even considering it. Then I read an interview with Hilary Mantel where she talked about writing Wolf Hall. She had obviously never met Thomas Cromwell. She had never walked through Tudor London because it no longer exists. What she had done was research, imagination, and careful attention to the textures of daily life that she could reconstruct from primary sources.

That interview changed how I thought about place in fiction. Not because research replaces experience, but because experience alone has never been sufficient either. I have been to plenty of cities that I could not write about convincingly. I spent a week in Tokyo and came away with impressions so shallow they would embarrass a travel brochure. Being somewhere does not automatically mean you understand it. Sometimes the opposite happens: the overwhelming flood of sensory information makes it harder to select the details that matter.

Research as a Different Kind of Seeing

When I write about a place I have not visited, my research process is obsessive and specific. I am not trying to learn everything about a city. I am trying to learn the particular things my characters would notice.

This distinction matters enormously. A character who is a dock worker in 1930s Marseille does not care about the architecture of the Basilique Notre-Dame de la Garde. He cares about the wind called the mistral and how it affects loading schedules. He cares about the smell of fish guts on the quay and whether the foreman is in a good mood. He knows which bars will let him run a tab and which ones water their pastis.

This is the kind of detail you get from reading memoirs, letters, and oral histories. Not from a three-day visit to the modern city. The Marseille my character inhabits does not exist anymore, just as Mantel’s London does not exist. What we are both doing is constructing a plausible world from fragments of evidence, and I would argue that this kind of deliberate construction sometimes produces more vivid settings than the distracted observations of an actual visit.

My process usually starts with maps. I love old maps. I will spend hours on archive websites looking at street-level maps from the period I am writing about. I want to know which streets intersected, where the markets were, how far it was from the railway station to the river. Google Earth is useful for contemporary settings because you can drop into street view and look at the actual facades of buildings. For historical periods, I rely on photographs, city directories, and sometimes architectural surveys.

After maps, I move to sensory details. What does the place sound like? What are the common smells? What is the quality of light at different times of day? For these, I read travel writing, personal diaries, and newspaper accounts from the era. Newspapers are especially useful because reporters describe mundane things that novelists and memoirists often skip. A newspaper article about a municipal sanitation dispute will tell you exactly what the streets smelled like in a way that a literary memoir might gloss over.

The Five-Detail Rule

Here is a technique I have developed over the years that I think works well for place-writing, whether you have visited or not. I call it the five-detail rule.

For any scene set in a specific location, I choose exactly five sensory details to anchor it. Not ten. Not twenty. Five. One for each sense, ideally, though sometimes I double up on sight or sound and skip taste if the character is not eating.

The reason for the limit is that readers do not actually want a comprehensive description of a place. They want enough to build their own mental image and then they want you to get on with the story. Five well-chosen details will do more work than two pages of exhaustive description. This is true whether you are writing about a place you know intimately or one you have only researched.

Let me give you an example. Say I am writing a scene set in a Buenos Aires cafe in the 1940s. My five details might be: the sound of a tango playing on a scratchy radio behind the counter, the bitter smell of mate mixed with cigarette smoke, the feel of a marble tabletop cool under the character’s forearms, the sight of condensation running down a window that looks out onto a grey afternoon, and the taste of a medialunas pastry that is slightly stale. Five details. Maybe sixty words total. But they put you in that room.

I did not need to visit Buenos Aires to write those details. I needed to know that cafes in that era had marble tables (from photographs), that mate was commonly consumed alongside coffee (from social histories), that tango was everywhere on the radio in the 1940s (from music histories), that medialunas are the standard cafe pastry (from food writing), and that Buenos Aires has grey, humid winters (from weather records and travel accounts).

Each detail is specific and verifiable. None of them are generic “exotic location” details. They are grounded in the actual texture of life in that particular place and time.

When Not Having Been There Is an Advantage

I said earlier that not visiting a place can sometimes be preferable, and I want to defend that claim.

When you visit a place, especially as a tourist, you are experiencing a version of it that has been curated for visitors. You see the landmarks. You eat at the restaurants that cater to outsiders. Your experience is filtered through the infrastructure of tourism, which is designed to show you a particular version of the city that may have little to do with how residents actually live.

I once met a writer who had set a novel in Naples after spending two weeks there on vacation. The Naples in her book was all pizza and Vesuvius views and charming old men playing cards in the piazza. It was a postcard. It bore almost no relationship to the complex, difficult, fascinating city that Neapolitans actually inhabit. She had been there, but she had only seen the surface designed for her consumption.

Contrast this with Elena Ferrante’s Naples, which feels so viscerally real that people make pilgrimages to the neighborhoods she describes. Ferrante obviously knows Naples intimately, but her knowledge is not tourist knowledge. It is the knowledge of someone who has paid attention to the domestic details, the social hierarchies, the way light falls in a particular courtyard. This is the kind of knowledge you can get from research if you are careful and patient enough.

When I research a place from my desk, I am forced to be deliberate about every detail I include. I cannot fall back on “well, that is what it looked like when I was there.” I have to justify every choice against my sources. This discipline often produces writing that is more carefully observed than memoir-style recall, which tends to drift toward the impressionistic and the generic.

The Ethical Questions

I do think there are ethical considerations here, and I do not want to brush past them.

Writing about a place you have not visited is different from writing about a culture you do not belong to. Place and culture overlap, obviously, but they are not the same thing. I feel comfortable writing about the physical geography and architecture of Nairobi because those are observable facts that can be researched. I would be much more cautious about writing from the perspective of a Kenyan character whose inner life is shaped by cultural experiences I have not shared.

This is not a hard boundary. Fiction writers cross cultural boundaries all the time, and some do it brilliantly. But I think the risk of getting things wrong increases significantly when you move from describing a place to inhabiting a perspective. My advice to other writers is to be honest about the distinction and to seek sensitivity readers when you are writing across cultural lines, regardless of whether you have visited the country in question.

Another ethical consideration is accuracy. If you write about a real place, you have a responsibility to get the basic facts right. Readers who live there will notice if you put the river on the wrong side of the city or describe snow in a tropical climate. This is where research becomes non-negotiable. I have a checklist that I run through for every real-world location I describe, covering geography, climate, architecture, flora, transportation, and food. If I cannot verify a detail, I either cut it or fictionalize the location enough that accuracy is not expected.

Practical Techniques for Research

Let me share some specific tools and methods that I have found useful over the years.

Google Earth and Google Street View are obvious starting points for contemporary settings. I have spent entire afternoons virtually walking through neighborhoods in cities I am writing about. You can see the color of the buildings, the width of the sidewalks, the types of cars parked on the street, even the brands on shop signs. It is not the same as being there, but it is remarkably close for visual reference.

For historical settings, I rely heavily on photograph archives. Most major cities have digitized historical photo collections. The Library of Congress has an extraordinary collection of photographs from around the world. The Imperial War Museum in London has photographs from both world wars that cover dozens of countries. University libraries often have specialized collections for their regions.

YouTube is an underrated research tool. People upload walking tours of cities, time-lapse videos of daily life, and amateur documentaries about neighborhoods. These give you a sense of pace and rhythm that photographs cannot capture. I once found a twenty-minute walking tour of a market in Marrakech that gave me more useful detail for a scene than any book I had read about the city.

Podcasts and radio documentaries are excellent for capturing the sound of a place. The BBC World Service archive has programs about virtually every country on earth, many of which include ambient audio recordings. Listening to the background sounds of a street in Lagos or a train station in Mumbai gives you a sonic texture that you can translate into prose.

Local newspapers are gold. Most countries have English-language newspapers or at least newspapers with online translation available. Reading the local news tells you what people actually care about, what problems they face, what their daily routines involve. A week of reading the Buenos Aires Herald archives taught me more about middle-class Argentine life in the 1940s than any history book.

Cookbooks and food writing are another underused resource. Food is one of the strongest anchors for place in fiction, and cookbooks often contain detailed descriptions of markets, kitchens, and dining customs that go far beyond the recipes themselves. Claudia Roden’s books on Middle Eastern food, for example, are as much social history as they are cookbooks.

What I Got Wrong

I should be honest about my failures, too. I have made mistakes writing about places I had not visited, and they taught me useful lessons.

In an early novel, I described a character walking from one neighborhood to another in a foreign city, and I got the distance completely wrong. What I described as a ten-minute walk would actually have taken over an hour. A reader who lived there wrote me a polite but firm email pointing out the error. I was mortified. Now I always check walking distances on a map before I have characters travel on foot.

In another book, I described the weather inaccurately. I had a scene set in a city during what I thought was the rainy season, but I had the months wrong. The rainy season there starts in June, not April. Again, a local reader caught it. Now I check climate data for every month I write about.

These are small errors, but they matter. Each one is a crack in the reader’s trust. If you get the weather wrong, the reader starts wondering what else you got wrong, and they stop trusting your descriptions. The whole illusion of the fictional world depends on the accuracy of its small details. Get the big things right and nobody checks. Get a small thing wrong and everyone notices.

The Question of Authenticity

I want to return to the question of authenticity because it is the one that comes up most often when I talk about this subject at workshops and panels.

People ask: “Is it authentic if you have not been there?” And my answer is always the same. Authenticity in fiction is not about the writer’s biography. It is about the quality of attention the writer brings to the work. A writer who has visited a place casually and writes from fuzzy memory is less “authentic” than a writer who has spent months researching from a distance with focused intent.

Consider science fiction. Nobody has been to Mars, but some novels set on Mars feel extraordinarily real while others feel flat and unconvincing. The difference is not travel experience. It is imaginative rigor. The writers who make Mars feel real have done their homework on Martian geology, atmospheric conditions, and the practical challenges of living in a low-gravity environment. They have thought carefully about what their characters would see, hear, and feel. They have made specific choices rather than relying on generic “alien planet” imagery.

The same principle applies to writing about real places on Earth. Specificity is what creates the feeling of authenticity. Not “a European city with cobblestone streets” but “a narrow street in the Alfama district where the cobblestones are worn smooth by centuries of foot traffic and the houses lean toward each other overhead like old friends sharing a secret.” That level of specificity can come from a visit or from a photograph. What matters is that the writer chose that particular detail and deployed it with purpose.

At ScrollWorks, we work with authors who write across a wide range of settings, from the historical fiction of The Last Archive to the international scope of Echoes of Iron. In both cases, the power of the setting comes not from where the author has physically traveled but from the depth and specificity of their research and imagination.

A Reading List for Place Research

If you are interested in getting better at writing about places you have not visited, here are some books I recommend. These are not writing guides. They are books that demonstrate exceptional place-writing and that also reveal their research methods, either explicitly or implicitly.

Fernand Braudel’s “The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II” is a masterpiece of place-as-history. Braudel writes about the Mediterranean as a living entity with its own rhythms and moods, and his descriptions of coastal cities and maritime life are so vivid they could serve as models for fiction. Jan Morris’s city portraits, especially “Venice” and “Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere,” show how a skilled writer can capture the essence of a place through carefully selected detail. W.G. Sebald’s “The Rings of Saturn” blends walking, memory, and historical research into something that feels like fiction even when it is ostensibly nonfiction. And for pure craft in fictional place-making, I think Roberto Bolano’s descriptions of Mexico City in “The Savage Detectives” are unmatched.

Each of these writers teaches a different lesson about how to evoke place through language. Braudel teaches scope and context. Morris teaches selectivity and voice. Sebald teaches the layering of past and present. Bolano teaches how to make a city feel alive through the movement and conversation of its inhabitants rather than through static description.

The common thread is that none of them treat place as backdrop. In their work, place is a character, with moods and histories and agendas of its own. That is the standard I try to hold myself to, whether I am writing about a city I know well or one I have only visited through books and maps and photographs.

Writing about places you have not been is not a limitation. It is a skill. Like any skill, it improves with practice and attention. The writers who do it well are not faking anything. They are doing a different kind of seeing, one that is mediated by research and imagination rather than by direct physical experience. In my view, that kind of seeing is just as valid and sometimes more precise than the distracted glancing we do when we actually stand in a place for the first time, overwhelmed by everything and truly seeing nothing at all.