Great stories aren’t just set in cities.

They’re shaped by them.

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Urban spaces don’t simply host narrative—they accelerate it, distort it, constrain it, and sometimes destroy it. Where many craft guides treat the city as background or atmosphere, Writing the City treats it as dramaturgical force: a character in its own right, with desires, constraints, rhythms, stakes, and agency.

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This book is for fiction writers who want place to hit harder—where infrastructure shapes plot, hostile design limits movement, and gentrification redraws emotional terrain. But it’s also for anyone shaped by city life who knows how public space can seduce, surveil, erase, or bite back—and how power hides in the map.

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At its core, Writing the City is shaped by the bones and ruptures of Chicago. Not as a nostalgic backdrop, but as a working example of how urban form sculpts narrative. From the racialized geography of its expressways to the psychic weight of gentrified neighborhoods, from its architecture of segregation to the soundscape of sirens and trains, Chicago serves as a live laboratory for how cities make story inevitable. This is not just a book about writing Chicago—it’s a book written through Chicago, using its grids, contradictions, and survival logic to teach urban craft for any setting.

Each chapter focuses on a different craft element—voice, rhythm, geography, memory, time, transformation, and ethics—and shows how urban form reshapes narrative at every level. You’ll learn:

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• How to give your city teeth—writing it not as backdrop, but as a character with moods, contradictions, and a mind of its own.

• How to plot like a city moves—using infrastructure, transit, and geography to create friction, urgency, and consequence.

• How to write what space feels like—from redlined silence to public spectacle, from alley whispers to architectural arrogance.

• How to make time visible—by layering memory, erasure, and ghost infrastructure into the emotional structure of your scenes.

• How cities shape relationships and intimacy—how desire gets rerouted through noise, distance, and distraction, and how love survives (or doesn’t) across sidewalks, systems, and cityscapes that shape emotion and behavior.

• How to stop writing tourist fiction—and instead write cities with complexity, conscience, and a deep sense of who’s been displaced.

Whether you're writing literary fiction, speculative worlds, or grounded realism, Writing the City offers a new way to see, feel, and write the spaces that shape us.