What Makes a Small-Town Setting Feel Real? Representing Coastal Maine in Fiction
Waverly Cove isn't a real place. There's no exit off I-95 for it, no dot on a Maine map. But if I've done my job right, it should feel like there could be.
So what makes a fictional small town feel like an actual place instead of something arranged behind the romance?
It has to be more than scenery
Plenty of books tell you they're set in a small town and leave it at that. There's a cute Main Street, a diner, maybe some string lights overhead. Nothing wrong with any of that, but scenery alone doesn't make a town believable.
People do.
Somebody's business is struggling. Somebody's kid moved to Portland and everyone has an opinion about it. The first warm Saturday in spring changes everyone's plans. A storm closes the schools, wipes out an event, or leaves half the town comparing generator setups.
The town doesn't just look a certain way. Living there affects what the characters can do, where they go, and who they're likely to run into along the way.
The same faces keep showing up
This is a big part of why I It’s also why I write the Waverly Cove books as interconnected standalones and keep coming back to the Westfield family instead of starting over with a brand-new cast every time.
Changing Course belongs to Kate. Uncharted Waters shifts the focus to her brother Liam and Kate's best friend, Gemma. But Kate doesn't disappear just because her book is over. Neither does the rest of the Westfield family, or the neighbors who have a habit of turning up at exactly the right, or wrong, moment.
That's one of the things I love about writing Waverly Cove.
In a small town, you don't meet your neighbor once and conveniently never see her again. You see her at the grocery store on Wednesday. She ends up three tables away from you at dinner on Friday. Then she's volunteering at the same town event on Saturday, already fully informed about whatever happened on Wednesday.
People overlap. Their histories overlap. And after enough books, readers start recognizing the people in the background before they've ever had a story of their own.
Coastal Maine has its own rhythm
Waverly Cove may be fictional, but coastal Maine gives me plenty to work with.
Life changes with the season. Summer means traffic, crowded restaurants, rental houses filling up, and people arriving with very different ideas about what counts as cold water. Fall brings leaf peepers. Winter belongs much more to the people who actually live there.
And the weather gets a vote.
Rain can wreck an afternoon. Fog can swallow the view. A beautiful summer day can make everybody abandon whatever they were supposed to be doing. Those things aren't decorative details. They change how people live.
That's what I want from Waverly Cove. Not simply a pretty Maine backdrop, but a place where being in Maine actually matters.
Why it's important to get it right
Small-town romance depends on proximity.
There are only so many places to buy groceries, get coffee, eat dinner, or avoid the person you're absolutely not thinking about. You can decide you're done with someone at nine in the morning and find yourself standing behind them in line before lunch.
That forced overlap is part of what makes the genre so much fun.
Both Changing Course and Uncharted Waters are set in Waverly Cove, and each follows a different member of the Westfield family's orbit. The love stories change. The people around them don't.
So by the time you finish one book and start the next, my hope is that Waverly Cove doesn't feel like a place you have to relearn.
It feels like somewhere you've been before.
If you're ready to visit Waverly Cove for yourself, start with Changing Course or Uncharted Waters. The stories stand alone, but the town, the Westfields, and a few very familiar faces will be waiting in both.