Today, we're going to talk about one of my favorite parts of world-building: maps! This is the third part of a series on world-building. The first two parts can be found here:
Often, we think of novel maps as big, complicated (possibly overkill?) illustrations used primarily for secondary fantasy worlds like in the Lord of the Rings or Song of Ice and Fire series. They're pretty and scary and pretty scary when you think about making them yourself!
Big fantasy novels often publish their maps as part of the book, and that's certainly something you can explore, but for our purposes today, we're just talking about maps to help you draft and deepen your world.
These maps can be as big as a world or as small as a village or even a single house. They are not for the reader; they're for you, the author.
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| An early map I drew for my old Air Pirates novel (that I have to get back to some day) |
How Do Maps Help With World-Building?
Maps can provide several benefits to your story, even if nobody ever sees them but you:
- A map helps maintain consistency. Like a world bible, a map provides a way to keep track of things in your story—specifically, where things are relative to each other and how far away they are.
- A map helps you think things through. Drawing a map—like drawing anything—requires dozens of tiny decisions that you might not have thought about if you were just looking at words in a word bible. How large is this place? What does it look like? How far is it from that other place? How did it get there? What resources is it near? It's another avenue of questions to ask that can deepen your world.
- A map can inspire new ideas. You'll start your map with the locations you know, but pretty soon, you'll run into areas that provoke new ideas. What would be located in this space here? How might that impact the people in the other places? What cool thing might go in this empty space?
- A map can immerse you in the world. One reason maps are published in novels is to immerse the reader in their worlds. Making your own map can do the same for you. And as I've said before, if you are immersed in your world, your reader will be too.
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| The map for my Post-Apoc Ninjas novel |
How Do You Make a Map?
There are lots of ways to make your own map, but my preference is to actually draw the thing. You don't have to be an artist, and it doesn't have to make sense to anyone but you, but drawing your own map gives you several advantages over, say, finding or generating a map online:
- It's faster. This feels counterintuitive, but it's true—I've spent enough time with map generators to know. Usually, you spend a lot of time generating new maps (or trying new searches) when it would be much quicker to just do a couple of drafts yourself.
- You get exactly what you want. You may not know what you want right away, but when you start generating maps, you quickly realize you know what you don't want. This is one of the reasons drawing your own map is actually faster. Drawing your own forces you to think it through and make decisions, until you realize you actually do want certain things.
- It's easy to revise. This is another reason that finding or generating a map doesn't work as well: you know it's not what you want, but you can't just tweak things here and there. You have to generate a whole new map with different parameters. Drawing your own map, revision is as simple as a quick erase.
(Interestingly, the same advantages above apply to using AI to create anything—writing a novel or creating an image or whatever. It feels like AI will save you time, but in the end, it actually takes longer and is never quite what you want, and that's not counting AI's other problems.)
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| A map for a secret project I co-authored with a friend (man, I want to return to this one, too) |
How Do You Use the Map?
Most of the utility you'll get from your map will come as you're actually making it—as you're asking and answering questions and recording dozens of large and small decisions. A map can also be an inspiring thing to look at every time you sit down to write.
And, depending on your story, you might occasionally use it to determine times and distances, though this happens a lot less often than you'd think... even in a book that's all about walking:
As you write your story, your map will be useful for reference and inspiration, but always remember one key thing: your reader will never see it. It can be tricky to write for someone who can't see what you see, but as with most things, it's a skill you can learn.
In the end, the goal of your map is not to be perfect or pretty or to ever be seen by anyone. It's help your world remain consistent and to help you immerse yourself in that world. Because when you're immersed in your own world...
You know the rest.
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