Outside the Harry Potter novels, writers need to avoid creating rooms and buildings with interiors that couldn’t possibly exist. In a post on Writer Unboxed, Dave King advises you to pay attention to your architectural choices and descriptions when you’re creating rooms for your characters.
“Does your hero’s home contain two small rooms downstairs and three reasonably sized bedrooms upstairs? Or vice versa?” he asks. “Does an interior room have a window? Or too many doors? Or not enough?”
You should pay extra attention if (like me) you change your settings as you write or come up with a great plot twist that requires that a home have a basement window, when in chapter one you already described the basement as pitch dark and airless.
Setting aside those kinds of continuity blips, King says writers should carefully consider how architecture reflects their theme or affects their characters. “Nothing says grim dystopia better than some Soviet Brutalist apartment blocks,” he explains. “There’s no better way to show fussiness and a little decadence than a lot of gingerbread, gables, and dowelwork.”
