Amanda Frederickson's Blog: Musings - Posts Tagged "mapping"
Writing to the Map
My grandmother recently sent me a link to an article about J.R.R. Tolkien’s maps and sketches, which are seriously awesome by themselves. But there was also a quote that stood out to me. “He ‘started with a map, and made the story fit (generally with meticulous care for distances),’ adding that its reverse, ‘to compose a map from a story’ is ‘weary work.’”
I’ve loved fantasy maps forever. (Or regular maps, for that matter.) I’ve been drawing my own since I was a kid, but only in just these last few years have I taken a more serious interest in doing more than just vague scribbles of “city goes here, river something like this. Mountains!”
You can see my working map of Satora on my Facebook page (and a pretty edition!). I made those maps for my revision/rewrite of Peasant Queen (re-titled Blood Queen), but my new map for Satora isn’t the same as the original one I scribbled in 2004. (Wow, was it seriously that long ago?) Originally, the two kingdoms in conflict were separated by a small sea. For the new edition, Satora is now on one long continent with a deep bay called Demon’s Run. Changing the map changed the dynamics of the story in ways that I didn’t anticipate, and in some ways changed the nature of the story itself. It made the conflict between the kingdoms much more up close and personal, becoming more of a civil war than the original clash, and part of why Blood Queen has been on pause for a while is that I had to stop and decide the ramifications of these changes. I wouldn’t have even considered these differences if I hadn’t drawn the map first.
For the sake of keeping my gushing over maps to a minimum, I’ll just say this: if you’re planning to write a book, any book, draw a map. Even if you don’t think it’s important, even if your setting is a small town in the middle of nowhere and your characters aren’t going to travel anywhere else. You’ll find things that you didn’t expect.
I’ve loved fantasy maps forever. (Or regular maps, for that matter.) I’ve been drawing my own since I was a kid, but only in just these last few years have I taken a more serious interest in doing more than just vague scribbles of “city goes here, river something like this. Mountains!”
You can see my working map of Satora on my Facebook page (and a pretty edition!). I made those maps for my revision/rewrite of Peasant Queen (re-titled Blood Queen), but my new map for Satora isn’t the same as the original one I scribbled in 2004. (Wow, was it seriously that long ago?) Originally, the two kingdoms in conflict were separated by a small sea. For the new edition, Satora is now on one long continent with a deep bay called Demon’s Run. Changing the map changed the dynamics of the story in ways that I didn’t anticipate, and in some ways changed the nature of the story itself. It made the conflict between the kingdoms much more up close and personal, becoming more of a civil war than the original clash, and part of why Blood Queen has been on pause for a while is that I had to stop and decide the ramifications of these changes. I wouldn’t have even considered these differences if I hadn’t drawn the map first.
For the sake of keeping my gushing over maps to a minimum, I’ll just say this: if you’re planning to write a book, any book, draw a map. Even if you don’t think it’s important, even if your setting is a small town in the middle of nowhere and your characters aren’t going to travel anywhere else. You’ll find things that you didn’t expect.
