The Evolution of a World Map

I’ve said before that I sometimes write my novels backwards. Things like characters, side-stories, and even setting are typically worked out and planned in advance, before any writing takes place. While I do plan and outline a ton before I write, usually those outlines consist of a broad, chapter by chapter breakdown of the plot. Doing that provides me with about a quarter or maybe a third of the characters and locations that will ultimately appear in the story. Another third will come as I’m writing; a character will need to know something, which will necessitate inventing a character who knows that something, etc. The last third, though—consisting of characters, locations, and other key details—are conceived as I start doodling and imagining what kind of characters or places might exist in this world.

I may know who my main character is but I don’t usually have a sense of his personality until I have drawn him. Is he cocky or insecure? Is he loud or quiet? Is he old or young? Rarely do I know, and it’s not until I have drawn him or her, and I look at the final product, that I realize “Oh okay, this person is a bad guy with a heart of gold” or “ooh look at her expression; this lady is hiding a secret.” And from there, character development and arcs start to form.

Doing a fantasy book requires extra work, because I not only have to conceive the cast of characters but also the entire world they inhabit. Drawing a fantasy map is tedious, tiresome, and takes a terrible amount of time, but I love tinkering with them because I find it therapeutic.

For the book I’m working on now, Froggy Went A-Courtin’, the story is set with a backdrop of political and international intrigue and scheming. A map was crucial, not only for the readers to be able to follow where everything is relative to everything else, but for me as well, as I frequently would have to check to be reminded how close we are to this border or that river, etc.

I started out with a very rough sketch of the world…

As you can see, I wrote in “Mediterranean Sea” and “Black Sea” as helpful references to myself, so I could have some idea of the size of the nations around it. After that, I chopped the map into six regions, numbering them in terms of importance to the story…

And then I slowly began filling in details. This picture is just an example of how I would layer and layer the picture with little notes and details, adding rivers and mountains and other key landmarks just to keep me aware of where the plot was going, from point-A to point-B. Then, just before I sat down to actually write, I went into my map drawing program and really started tinkering. I don’t have any “work in progress” pictures to show you, but here’s the final map for the book…

And here it is as a parchment…

The book’s coming along great, by the way. I hope to be done in a few weeks. This one was a long time coming, as I first thought about it a decade ago. I’m glad to see it’s finally (almost) fully realized.

~ Matthew