Zurich as a setting for a novel?
I have an idea for a story, but I'm still deciding on the setting. I'm thinking of Zurich, but I'm also considering other locations. I've even considered using a completely fictional setting.
What is your opinion on this?
If you take a real place, you should know him well.
Goethe says something interesting that many made too close demands on reality, and for example asked in what city on the Rhine these or those of his ballads play. “As it’s not better,” he says, “to think of any kind.” – You don’t have to offer the reader a “city tour”, the imagination already sees what it needs to see if only people and actions are quite clear. – In all circumstances, you are interested primarily in people and their actions, not for things or even cities, which you can see on Gogglemaps much better than described and counted in detail! Think about it.
But it depends on the kind of history. Of course, when I write a love story in which one person lives up and the other one lives down on the mountain, it doesn’t matter what mountain that is exactly. However, in this history the places will play a certain role.
For this role, however, there must already have solid ideas, and there is not every place, because the connection determines the locality, e.g., south-eastern loose, north-west German hard. Uncanny stories like to play in Prague; Crimes preferably in New York, etc. – I don’t know what image Zurich has, though I know it and find it very nice. Emergency invents a place that fits. Good luck!
But then it is not specific, so it is not absolutely necessary, as on the contrary your restriction on Zurich suggested.
You can give every place any function…
That’s your thing.
If you want to play it in Zurich, you need to know a bit far with Zurich and possibly Switzerland, if that is somehow relevant. That’s why I’m always suggesting that you can play stories first and foremost in places with which you can identify halfway or quickly access a large number of information to bring them into history.
This is not an SO big problem with Zurich, but with all hobby authors who want to play their stories in Korea with a Korean character who then makes his (typically German) Abitur and pays with Euro. In Zurich, this is less problematic, because the country is closer to our, culturally, it is likely to fit halfway and a lot of information would have to be found out.
Personally, I would advise you: Take a city and a country where you look halfway and where you feel comfortable. I also have a story in my mind, which I had originally located in London, but which suddenly became much easier and more structured than I had just moved to New York. This shows me that a change of location in the planning is perhaps not a bad idea if the place itself has no great relevance.
If he owns them, then of course you are ‘fixed’ in a certain way, but then you are also in the duty to inform you comprehensively.