And the World You Came in On... Your Map!

I'm not visual, so I don't think about maps when I'm writing original Fantasy worlds. Getting the words is my main concern, and geography will land where it lands as the story progresses. I've finished entire books without any concern about a map with no problem.

I know there's no problem, because one of my betas enjoys drawing maps for fun (yeah, I know, she's weird), and she will often send one back with her commentary, drawn from what's in the book and she's never mentioned any contradictions or comments of distances/locations to change in the text, so *shrug*

When I write anything historical (I write historical Fantasy), the first map I look for is one appropriate to that time period, preferably created in that country/location. It gives me insight into their mindset and helps lock the world into my mind. And then I pretty much ignore maps again since such distances, etc., don't really play into my stories much.

I have an interest in cartography for it's own sake, so map-making for any story will come to me naturally and as a separate endeavour. I love geography, and it gives me a chance to visualise the world in my mind in a more concrete sense.

I made a map of my world purely for reference about halfway through my novel. It was awful, but it worked.
One day, I decided to make an actual one. After three weeks of trying different pens (finally found the one I began with, a .07 Pilot G-10) I set to work. The mountains were a pain, but really fun to draw, and thanks to some tutorials, they actually looked halfway professional. After that, I was hooked, and I made maps of literally every location I could think of for my book.
It effected my writing in a good way, though I have to admit, I sometimes changed things in the story to fit a mistake I made on the map. ><'
It's an awesome visual aid though, and it makes my descriptions all the more solid. Or so I feel.
~Lev

It depends on the story for me. If it's a story where I predict a lot of inter-national traveling, I might do a map earlier. If it's all in one country or city, I might not do a map at all.

I have Campaign Cartographer, and it's been a love hate thing with me. It's a powerful tool, aimed more at gamers than writers, I think. But it's got a steep learning curve and is not super intuitive. I still find myself returning to the tutorial (and not just the standard one included with the program, but the expanded one I paid extra for) when I forget how to do something.

Scaling is the hardest bit for me. I created a globe sized map and I'm having a heck of time figuring out how to keep the borders of all the continents from being too thick (like they've been drawn by a felt pen). And when I think I have the scale set up appropriately, it defaults to object sizes that are rather larger than appropriate for the scale (a single mountain or city might be 500 miles across), so I have to shrink objects and so on.

And the system they have that allows you to grab a portion of your large map and create a more zoomed in, localized view (or vice versa) is not something I've been able to figure out. Their copy and paste feature is very, very non intuitive.

I mainly just want to conceptualize where locations in my world are at this point, but at some point, I'd like to make the sort of map that might be included with the novel. I'm not any good at hand drawing maps, especially in programs like paint, so I'd love a program that creates nice, slick looking maps that have the major land features (mountain ranges, rivers, forests, oceans, bays, inlets etc) while showing the locations of towns, cities and national borders when needed.

I started making a world map very far along in my world creation process, after I'd already worked out how everything fit together and what basic structure I needed. All I was sure of at this point was that I had two clusters of large landmasses, and one island chain.

I felt it was necessary when I had already mapped out in my head the basic path that my protagonists would be taking, where and when they'd temporarily part ways, and the points of origin for most of them. I felt that having a nice, physical map to point to and go "here!" would help me flesh out the story and, more broadly, the rest of the world.

Since I'm planning on doing this story as a comic, I was thinking visually pretty much from day one, and knew all along that I'd need to draw a map to really get a feel for the world as a whole.

I'm really visual, so if I don't have a point of reference, I will not remember where everything is in relation to each other. It also helps me nail down climate (and thereby economical) info about my countries, and if my peons characters have to go somewhere, then I have an accurate way to figure out how long it'll take them. I didn't use anything fancy to make it--drew by hand, then in Paint--and I'm pretty sure an artist would sob into their pillow at the sight, but it gets the job done.

I adore maps. It will save bandwidth if I just link to a blog post I did about maps and worldbuilding last year.

The first map in the post was hand-drawn on paper. The second is purely digital now, worked in Painter.

I have a couple ideas ruminating around in my head for a fantasy story. But map-making was one of the things I've always struggled with. I'm not a very visual artist. I've played around with some mapmaking software, but I never got very far with it. It all seemed rather non-intuitive to me.

Still, following this one with interest!

I have a bizarre interest in geology and took some college classes on it. I love rocks, okay? I'm really into land formations and how they interact with the world. Sometimes, I put as much history into the mountains themselves as much as the kingdom that's built upon them.

Anyways, when I started writing I had no clue where anything was. I let my characters discover these new fanciful cities and locations. I knew there was a mountain range they had to cross to get to the ocean, and down south there's a lot of sand. That's literally all I started with.

In my first draft, the geography was a mess. Cities were inconsistent distances from each other, and every mountain range they crossed was the McKlain Mountains. Now that I'm on the second draft, I'm separating the mountain ranges into different entities, and since they travel east to west, I know the order they're them in. In writing the story once, I figured out where the cities were, so now I have to go back and make the mismatching details consistent.

I'm actually ready to draw a good map now that it's the second time around. Like I said, I love geology, so I'm excited to do that!

I usually write general maps, labeling countries, distinct areas of terrain, and big cities. A lot of the smaller towns don't get labeled, and I only include the really important rivers. I just remember when I'm writing that a lot of cities should be located near water sources.

For my current massive epic fantasy project, I've made a general map of the entire world. I'll fill it in as I get to different parts of the world. Yeah, I'm going for really epic here.

I'm a map freak. I collect maps and old atlases, and can spend hours staring at them. And everywhere I've ever been is mapped in my head. This also seems to apply to my writing. For everywhere my characters go, both on various worlds and in space, I've built a map in my head. And how the story unfolds can depend on where we are on that map.

Book one - set in the UK
Book two - a collection of short stories, no map
Book three - set in the real world
WIP - that's a bit more interesting...

I started with a concept - an artificial world. That gave me a broad shape - a round disc covered with a more or less spherical dome. Because it's an artificial world, I then tried to think logically. How would an architect design this, as opposed to the organic creation of a non-artificial world?

So I plonked a single city right in the centre of the disc. Then radiating out from this centre I imagined a series of mostly rural districts, shaped more or less like segments of pie. In the middle of each of these portions of pie I placed a largish village. Then scatter farmhouses and smaller settlements around the villages. I imagined that the soil would be thinnest near the edge of the dome, so that is why the rural poor tend to cluster.

Then for geography I imagined that water would flow from the centre of the world to the outside. So I had a range of hills in the middle with rivers radiating out from that. And that automatically meant that the central city had to be built on or near a hill.

The map exists only in my head, at least for now.

ZachJPayne said:

I have a couple ideas ruminating around in my head for a fantasy story. But map-making was one of the things I've always struggled with. I'm not a very visual artist. I've played around with some mapmaking software, but I never got very far with it. It all seemed rather non-intuitive to me.

Still, following this one with interest!

Click to expand...

I recommend using Photoshop or GIMP rather than specific map-making software. It's like any other form of drawing, which is done by careful observation of your subject; in this case, landforms. There are various different styles, but they all build upon that observation.

I use Photoshop to create my maps. However the map handling in my series is a bit strange as it is drawn by the main character and it will be revealed only at the very end of the trilogy. Until that time I leave the map to the fantasy of the reader.

I love maps, but I only create one for my writing if I absolutely have to. Like when I need to remember which side of the river a building's on....

My map came about naturally in my mind's eye as I developed my fantasy world. I thought about plot, characters, and the way the world works. It just ended up happening. I'm sure I could draw it out now, but I'm going to wait until I think about it some more. I've got details to figure out.

I'm a pantser, so I use maps, but only as they're needed.

For instance, in my WIP there's an underground city located in a cave system similar to Mammoth Caves in Tennessee. I needed to understand how the geography of a cave would affect the culture & the story, not to mention how large the city could grow while still remaining underground, so I printed out a map of Mammoth Caves and superimposed locations from my story over it.

It's extremely rough.

I have a mental map of where the alien city is located in relation to the underground (human) city, as well as the mountains where the wild (human) tribes live. At some point, I'll probably formalize this, and it will probably all relate roughly to real-world geography, because that's easy and believable, and geography plays only a minor role.

I do believe having a well-conceived map, with place names, nearly always makes a story stronger. I'm just not quite there yet...

As a kid I fell in love with maps and was always creating my own. (Generally for no purpose whatsoever.) Once I started playing D&D I got heavily into mapping out the towns, cities and countries my victims (the PCs) would be traveling through.

One of the nifty tricks I sometimes used for D&D, was to get a few topological maps from the US Geological Survey.

Oddly, I don't make many maps for my writing.

Nenfari takes place in a city, so I didn't feel a need to draw a map. When I realized that for the main book my MC needed to know a bit about the geography and politics of the surrounding kingdoms, I made a rough hand-drawn map, mostly to figure out how long travel would take and what sort of terrain she would pass.

That map (as well as the latest 4-5 chapters of Assassin's Flower) died in a house fire, but I still recall the important parts.

Dark Moon Gates is set in a real town in upstate NY, so the map making was already done for me. I'd moved away several years before I started writing the story, so I had my (super helpful and long-suffering) Mom run around the town taking pictures of my MCs route and telling me what had changed.

What I'm seeing here is, the making of maps is very much based on each indvidual's style and how visual they are.

Me- I could only draw the map as the POV character moved to different places. In the beginning, she is only in her castle, so I didn't need a very detailed map then. I did have a very basic map showing the two countries I knew existed, but it was very much blank. But as the MC moves on, the rest of the map develops. Then I find myself going back and making reference in earlier chapters to places the MC goes to later. Those places did not exist the first time through my writing, but later on, when they spring into existence, I can go back and add references to them so that you know they didn't just actually come into being the second the MC went there. Of course there are places the MC never goes to, but the blanks of the map get filled in as the story develops, and more characters come in, and these characters have to be from somewhere right? By the time I got through the first draft, I had a fully developed, well detailed map. That's just how it worked for me in writing my current manuscript. Who knows if it would even work the same way the next time I decide to create a world.

I have a map. I had a geologist bud make it geo-friendy so that I didn't have mountains where mountains might not be or swamps where there should be no swamps. He also spruced it up on a nice graphics program he had (not sure which one he used). That's pretty much what I use now and will use throughout the writing of the series.

I love maps. I pour over them when reading a new book. Heck, I could gaze at a map for hours.

As long as writers aren't using the visuals as a crutch for real description (world-building) then I'm pretty darn cool with them.

My characters move around- A lot! And it was getting difficult to work out travelling times and distances. If they had to get from place A to B, and someone else was moving from C to B, would they get there at the same time? It was becoming unmanageable and so I fired up photoshop and began drawing it out.

This was my first map:



That covers about 40,000 words

This is where it is 4 years later:



The little red block is the area that the first map covers.
Its obviously just for my own reference and hopefully someone more artistic will do a real map some time in the future. As you can see there is a big open space to the center of the right edge that has nothing more than a few names. My story refers to some of those place but the characters don't go there, so I haven't gotten round to filling in the details.

ave said:

My characters move around- A lot! And it was getting difficult to work out travelling times and distances. If they had to get from place A to B, and someone else was moving from C to B, would they get there at the same time? It was becoming unmanageable and so I fired up photoshop and began drawing it out.

Click to expand...

Now this second specimen is the kind of map I'd spend a lot of time peering at -- I too love to see on the map just where everyone is going or has been. I think it adds to the reality of the reading experience.

A minor peeve is when the story and the map don't match, like when under the same travel conditions, some huge distance takes hours to cover and some tiny distance takes weeks. Then I spend a lot of time trying to figure out where we really are on a map that's clearly wrong.

And that makes me wonder about maps as 'unreliable narrators' and how that might be well-used in a story.