I loved making fantasy maps up as a kid. Mountains, forests, seas, continents. Pages and pages of them. Now I always put a sticky note on the map page of a fantasy tome. I love the additional - everything - that they bring to a story, as you trace the various journeys of the characters. What does your map look like?
This isn't for a fantasy novel, but Hide is the first book I've ever found it useful to create a map. Literally just a reference point so I can remember which way people need to move, where they need to be to be in sight of somewhere else, etc etc. Would be interesting to see people's real fantasy maps (ones which took actual effort to draw up).
This is from one of my novels, strictly work in progress. I'll have to redo it from scratch, the geography is all wrong, some of the names are just placeholders, and so on.
The last time I drew a map for a world, I started with two countries and added in around them as the notes and outline expanded and an idea for a prequel trilogy emerged. It wasn't long though before I realized I had vaguely drawn a map of North America with wildly different borders. I didn't want to draw Earth parallels, so a number of ancient, established societies were forcibly relocated hundreds or thousands of miles across the newly reshaped landmass. I would post it, but it's lost on a dead hard drive. Sad face.
This the proto-map for my If Eternity should Fail high fantasy series. I basically rearranged the continents in Photoshop. The 1st draft for the first book is completed, so I'm about to do a beta map. The beta map will have customized continents and closer to finalized names.
The map is like a 'visual blurb' for me. It's the first thing I look at after the back cover when picking up a new fantasy book. Believe it or not, if that map doesn't grab me, I just put it back on the shelf. It reminds me of a book that I am going to buy - Origins: How the Earth Made Us. The history of the world and it's conflicts can almost exclusively be tied back to geography, one way or another. And so a glance at a map can often tell its own story: a quick taster of what one might expect when reading the novel - where the important resources are, where conflicts are likely to occur. I struggle to get enthusiastic about those novels that do not give any respectable consideration to this.
A book that really influenced my thinking is Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. I highly recommend it.
Hey, thanks! I'm using Wonderdraft, which unfortunately doesn't have a free version. It costs $30. It's a neat little toy, easy to use, good if you don't have access to/aren't proficient with illustration software.
Looks interesting. I asked a similar question as to the subject of this book on this forum last year sometime, in fact. I shall have to invest!
300,000 words in, and I'm still making up the map of my hard SF planet as I go. The characters don't think much about exact distances. Given the usual modes of travel (walking, riding, and hypersonic-capable antigrav vehicles -- but beware the noise fines) they don't really need to.
You've legit made me think perhaps I should make a map. My fantasy novel doesn't have one... I've just never cared, even as a reader
Not every Fantasy novel needs a map. I probably won't be making one for my current novel, for a multitude of reasons: That story takes place on a galactic scale, though somewhat ironically much of the action (here meaning "content of the scenes") takes place inside people's homes and similarly enclosed locations. This setting also has wormholes, teleportation, space flight, and other features that make the precise distance between and relation of this thing and that less important. It also has to do with storytelling technique; this story is lighter and more frivolous than the other, which doesn't necessarily translate into not (ETA missing word) needing a map, but in this case I feel like it does. Location here is just the cool place where the cool thing happens. In the former, more serious novel, there's much more focus on the world, the history of each place, the forces that have shaped them, the wars they are fighting, shifting territory lines, trade routes, and so on. There's also much more in the way of conventional travel, on foot or by horse, all of which necessitates at least a basic understanding of where things are. And also, map-making is kind of an indulgence for me. I've always enjoyed it, and I want to bring to life this world I've created over half a decade. TL;DR: Don't feel pressured to make maps
Soo, I had a situation in my WIP where a crisis was happening, and Alex was trying to get from point A to point B ASAP. But how long should it take? In one draft, in response to Charley's desperate plea that Alex hurry, Alex says "I'm doing Mach 17 already, it's going to cost me a fortune in noise fines." Dang, now I had to figure out how far it was so the flight time was reasonable. Now I needed a map. So much work. Later draft, Alex says "I'm hypersonic already, it's going to cost me a fortune in noise fines." Problem solved. Or at least swept under the rug for a bit.
You see, I have no spatial imagination whatsoever and I have no clue how long it should take a horse to travel from Point A to B. I guess a map would be useful in helping me pinpoint something more exact. I usually just sweep it under the carpet and go for "A while later" I never state time frames outright - it's just assumed that time has passed. One time I ran into a time frame problem, I resolved it because my MC was travelling with a dryad, a supernatural creature, so I just made it that my MC was shocked by how fast they'd travelled because it wasn't normal Yours sound like a sci-fi, not fantasy - I don't read sci-fi at all so I don't know what the conventions are, but I'm not aware that sci-fi novels typically have maps? Or do they?
Yeah, me too, my sense of scale is beyond ridiculous for a so-called artist. Hence all the maps also why my map up there is wildly out of proportion. I think it's fine, in many cases, to just gloss over exactly how much time has passed, but sometimes you need events to match up chronologically, and sometimes people need to travel and meet up for those events to happen. Since I'm super bad at keeping those things straight in my mind, I make use of maps and timelines. It's still a chore, but they help. The novel I described is a so-called "Fantasy Kitchen Sink", if you're familiar with the trope. It's basically generic Fantasy with fairytales, mythology, religion, Cosmic Horror, Science Fiction, and much else thrown into the mix. The novel that the map is from also has an underpinning of Sci-Fi, but there the auxiliary genre is more subdued. ETA: No, I'm under the impression that Sci-Fi books generally don't have maps, but I'm not very widely read in the genre.
