There’s a city I love that I have never been able to call home.
Portland, Oregon sits in that particular corner of my heart reserved for things that are yours in every way that matters and yet somehow just out of reach. I found it through a person — someone I love still, someone I will always love — and what we had was real and true and not quite possible to build into a life. The world we were navigating didn’t have the architecture for us. Same-sex marriage wasn’t yet a legal reality, and the immigration policies of both our countries had no interest in making exceptions for two women who had found something rare and were trying to hold onto it across an ocean. We loved each other. We still do. It just couldn’t be what we both wanted it to be.
So I did what writers do with the things they can’t keep. I made it into a world.
Portland became the home of my hockey universe for reasons that are practical and personal in equal measure. I have someone there I trust completely, someone who has been my eyes and ears and orientation on the ground for years — a person who will answer a text at an inconvenient hour to confirm whether a particular neighbourhood smells like coffee and rain or whether I’ve romanticised that detail from a visit I made years ago. The city just felt right in the way that only the truest creative decisions feel right — not chosen so much as recognised.
But here’s what I’ve learned from building an entire fictional NHL franchise in a city I love from a distance: setting is not backdrop. Setting is character. And if you treat it that way from the very beginning, it will do an enormous amount of your narrative work for you.
Your City Has a Personality, and You Need to Know It
The first question to ask yourself when choosing a home city for your hockey universe is not logistical. It’s not about whether the city could realistically support an NHL franchise or whether the climate makes sense for ice sports. Those things matter, but they’re secondary to a more fundamental question: what kind of city is this, and how does that shape the people who live there?
Every city has a personality. Not a stereotype — a genuine, textured set of values and rhythms and contradictions that residents recognise immediately and outsiders sense within hours of arriving. Portland’s personality is specific and deeply useful for fiction. It’s a city that takes its coffee seriously and its politics loudly, that has fierce civic pride alongside genuine social consciousness, that sits in landscape so dramatically beautiful it makes people feel things they weren’t prepared to feel. It’s a city that attracts people who chose it deliberately — not people who ended up there by default, but people who arrived with intention and stayed because it matched something in them.
That personality shapes my characters before I write a single word of their stories. A player who comes to Portland from a corporate, high-pressure hockey market and discovers he actually likes the farmers market and the independent bookshops and the weird little neighbourhood bar where the bartender knows his order by week three — that’s a character arc the city is generating for me, without me having to manufacture it artificially. The setting is doing the work.
Know your city’s personality. Not the travel brochure version. The real version, with its complications and contradictions and the things the locals find quietly embarrassing about the tourists. That’s the version that will make your world feel inhabited.
Specificity Is Everything
Here is the single most important craft principle when it comes to writing place: vague setting feels like no setting at all.
Readers can tell the difference between a city that has been researched and a city that has been gestured at. They can tell when an author has walked those streets — or found someone who has — versus when the setting is a named location with generic urban furniture arranged inside it. A coffee shop in a city you know is a specific place with a particular kind of chair and a view of a particular intersection and a barista who has an opinion about the neighbourhood’s changing character. A coffee shop in a city you don’t know is just a coffee shop.
This is where having someone on the ground is invaluable, and I don’t say that lightly. My Portland person has saved me from countless details I would have gotten wrong — not dramatically wrong, just slightly off in the way that readers who know the city would feel as a faint wrongness, a sense that something doesn’t quite sit right. The angle of the light in a particular season. Whether a character would realistically take that route between those two neighbourhoods. What the stadium district feels like on a game night when the streets are full and the air has that electric quality of collective anticipation.
If you’re writing a city you don’t know personally, find your person. Find someone who lives there and loves it and is willing to be your consultant. Writers’ communities are generous in this way — someone almost always knows someone. That relationship will improve your writing in ways that no amount of Google Street View research can fully replicate, because what you need isn’t images. It’s the felt sense of a place.
Let the City Create Conflict
Setting isn’t just atmosphere. In a well-built fictional world, the city actively generates conflict for your characters — and not just the obvious logistical conflict of traffic and weather and the difficulty of finding parking near the arena.
Portland’s geography, for instance, gives me conflict I didn’t have to invent. The city is divided by the Willamette River into east and west, and those two sides carry distinct personalities and different costs of living. A veteran player who can afford the established west side neighbourhoods exists in a different Portland than the rookie on an entry-level contract scrambling to find something decent in a rapidly gentrifying east side neighbourhood. Their city is the same city but it isn’t, and that difference in experience creates immediate character texture and potential for connection across difference.
The weather is conflict. Portland’s famous grey, wet winters are not just atmospheric backdrop — they’re an active presence that shapes how people move through the city, how they feel in their bodies, how they relate to seasons and light and the particular joy of a rare clear day in February when the mountain appears on the horizon like a gift nobody ordered. A character who grew up in a sun-saturated climate and arrives in Portland for their first November is having an experience that tells you something about their adaptability and their relationship with discomfort.
Ask yourself: what does my city do to people who aren’t expecting it? What does it do to people who chose it? How does it reward loyalty and resist certain kinds of ambition? The answers are your conflict.
The Arena as the City’s Heart
In a hockey romance universe, the arena occupies a special place in your city’s geography. It’s not just a venue — it’s the place where your city’s collective emotional life gets expressed in its most concentrated form. On game nights, the arena is where the city becomes briefly unified, where strangers share a language and a purpose and the particular intimacy of wanting the same thing at the same time.
Think carefully about where your arena sits in the urban landscape. Is it downtown, embedded in the heartbeat of the city, surrounded by bars and restaurants that live and die on game nights? Is it on the edge of the city, requiring a deliberate journey that becomes part of the ritual? What does the neighbourhood around it look like, and what does the contrast between that neighbourhood on a game night versus a Tuesday morning in February tell your reader about the role hockey plays in your fictional community?
The arena and the city should feel inseparable. The arena is where your team lives. The city is what your team represents. When your players skate out for a home game, they’re carrying something of the place on their shoulders — the pride, the expectation, the history. That weight is only meaningful if you’ve made the city real enough to generate it.
Your City Will Tell You Things You Didn’t Know You Needed
This is the part I didn’t expect when I started building Portland as the home of my universe, the part that still surprises me even now with 58 books mapped out and a series bible that has taken on a life of its own.
The city tells you things.
When you know a place well enough — when you’ve loved it long enough, researched it deeply enough, talked to the right people about the right corners of it — it starts to generate story without you asking. A neighbourhood you chose for purely practical plot reasons turns out to have a history that becomes thematically perfect. A weather pattern you included for atmosphere becomes a metaphor you didn’t plan. A geographical feature that just seemed like good description ends up being exactly the right place for a scene you didn’t know you needed.
I think this happens because real places have an integrity that invented places have to work harder to achieve. When you’re drawing on something true, that truth has roots — and those roots go deeper than you can consciously map. Portland’s particular combination of natural beauty and urban grit and fierce independent spirit has shaped my characters in ways I’m still discovering, three series deep into a universe that started with a love story I couldn’t keep.
I couldn’t build a life there. But I could build a world.
And it turns out that worlds, unlike lives, have no immigration restrictions. Mine is open to everyone.
Your home city is not the place where your story happens. It’s the reason your story happens the way it does, with these particular people, in this specific emotional register. Choose it with your whole heart. Research it until it feels like memory. Love it like it’s yours.
Because the best fictional cities always are.
Bella Bruce 