The Making of a Place

A little over a week ago, I posted about how the idea for Waiting at Jimmy's first came to me. The thing about writing a book is that most of the time, the ideas don't come fully formed. They come in little snippets that I reach out and grasp onto hoping I can make them into full-grown stories.While it wasn't the first part of the story idea to come to me, the setting was one I put a lot of thought into as I was working on Waiting at Jimmy's.The story takes place in the fictional city of Rockton, Missouri, located about an hour northwest of St. Louis. It is not a real place, but when I visualize it, Rockton looks a lot like other mid-sized cities in Missouri that are very much real.For me, the most important part of the overall setting for this story was that it had to be her home. She was coming back to something she had left behind. While the settings were familiar, they were also a different experience this time around.The fictional Jimmy's Diner, which is a major location in the story, is the perfect example of that. Clara returns to this place that was a big part of her life in high school, but now she's a college graduate. Jimmy's was one of the first concrete ideas I had about the place and the plot of the story that was formulating in my brain.I wanted to place my main character somewhere she was comfortable, but not necessarily content. Somewhere she was confident in her duties when she wasn't confident of her place in the world.She knows her way around town, but she doesn't know what direction her life is headed. I wanted her to be somewhere she felt safe despite the fact that she didn't feel secure in her plans for life.Basically, I wanted the setting to be a stabilizing force in her life, which feels rather unstable when we first meet her. Jimmy's very much feels like a home away from home for Clara because she spent so much enjoyable time there in high school.What's some place that feels like home for you?