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In my world, there all sorts of places that I'd like to include in my book but I have yet to find sound reasons to include more a handful of them.

How can I connect several distinct locations to my plot?

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What type of constraints should I keep in mind while doing so? (I'm shooting for ~100k word count)

Note: I have been intentionally vague about the details of my plot, characters and world because I'm looking for over-arching, reusable mechanics rather than specific fixes for my book.

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If you want to include a place:

  • Give characters a reason to go there.
  • Have the characters interact with the things that make the place interesting to you (or to the characters, or to readers).
  • Show the characters' sensory experience of the place, and their opinions of what they experience.
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Typically, I see this being done three different ways in the books I've read:

A) The narrative is a journey: This is the simplest reason to visit many different places --the narrative is a trip, and each place is a natural stop along the way.

B) There are Important Things located in each place. This can feel a bit cliche, but it's an old standard in adventure plots because it's effective.

C) The main character is being chased, and needs to hide out in a variety of places.

With all that said, don't feel that your characters have to actually visit every single interesting place you've thought up for your world --that wouldn't be a book most people would want to read. It might be better for your main characters to just hear about some of those places --or to meet people from them (or just save those places for the sequel!).

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Let there be important actions and / or information at those places, that are needed for the story. Otherwise the reader may always think you just try to "make pages"...

One of the worst books I ever read was that way. Hundreds of pages because the protagonist just wanted to watch animals ... That had nothing to do with the story and was just annoying, because nothing important happened.

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