While characters reign supreme for me as a novelist, story settings are important to me too.

Through the years, I’ve “created” a number of towns in which to set my stories, most of them set somewhere in Idaho, a few of them elsewhere. Of course, all novelists do this to one degree or another. Even when they use a real town or city, they add a house or a street or a business. This is true in historicals and contemporaries.

As long as you surround your fictional setting with reality, your readers...