I’m covering this topic now because that’s what I’ve spent most of my time on in the past month to publish Resurgence. It also helped pass the time as my first book cover was being designed.
If you are writing in a fantasy world you created, I strongly recommend doing a sketch of the map as soon as traveling between two locations comes up in the story. If a faraway land is mentioned without saying how far or how long it takes to get there, you can wait to sketch that. But if a character travels from or to that faraway land, it’s a good idea to have a good idea of where that place is in relation to the other places that are important in the story.
Cons of writing without a sketch
I had a sketch of my map. I even tried to draw it on a large white cardboard paper and it looked all right. It worked reasonably well as a guideline to finish the books I started in my Auros world.
But now that I’m publishing Resurgence, I need to create a nice version of it and ensure that everything on the map relative to each other makes sense from a distance perspective. I can’t have a valley that looks farther to travel from what I wrote.
I thus find myself revisiting that sketch because I don’t like it enough to use it and I never really finished it. Other than looking like a ragged land border, it looked pretty much like a slightly diagonal line running north to south so not very original.
I also completed 5 books in my world and I now have to ensure everything about each place as well as going to and from them is plausible on the map.
There’s the rub. I have to build the map to fit the story. That’s the pickle I’m in.
It might have been easier had I just sat down and truly looked at where each place I know about are, how to get there. When a new place comes up, I would only have needed to consult my map and figure out where that new place should be. And with that, I would have automatically known approximately how long it takes to travel there from every where else on the map.
Some advantages to working without a sketch
If you haven’t yet completed one novel, then creating a sketch may be an excuse to avoid writing. A map, or a sketch, won’t help get the book finished so it’s important that map making or sketching is not taking serious time away from writing.
I should probably take my own advice since I’ve spent a lot of time on map making in the past month. In my defense, the time I’m spending is to publish Resurgence. I am itching to get back to working on book #6. It is not to avoid writing. My priority right now is to get the first book out.
Some tricks to build a map
Distance chart
In a spreadsheet, I manage an old-fashion atlas-like distance chart between various places in my world (I have probably just given away my age). Each place is listed on the left and on the top row, and in each cell, I provide information about getting from the place on the left to the place on the top as well as any other details that can be useful, like sailing down a river cuts travel by a day, or winter takes longer.
Using this was a great guideline as I was writing but now I have to build a map that fits that chart. It can be an advantage or disadvantage. An advantage because given a scale, I know where all the places should go (especially if mention a city is north of another). A disadvantage because it provides constraint to the map I’m building and this may lead me to have to adjust the story in some places if on a map, what I wrote does not make sense. Thankfully, with Resurgence, this is not the case so a big relief on my part.
Hand drawn versus digital
I first sat down and hand sketched a map based on what I had drawn before. It wasn’t really working well. I checked online for help on how best to create a map. I even checked a world Atlas for some ideas.
I found Nate (WASD20) who has a nifty video in YouTube to get started by using beans to figure out where your landmass is. He has other tutorials to help draw everything on a map.
I knew I would have to scan it at some point so I scanned the draft and tried to see if I could trace the outline in Paint. I sure can, but then I lose the image underneath. It was obvious I needed a better application than Paint. I tried a few online tools but they were not working out well.
Then I found GIMP.
Not only is it free software, whatever I create with it is mine to do with as I please. Based on the reviews I read, it is as close to Photoshop as a free application can be. I played around with it, I watched a few tutorials, and I was able to trace out my sketch on a new layer without destroying the original sketch. I practiced drawing and shading mountains using a tutorial by Fantastic maps.
Here's a practice image:
This was done using 5 layers in GIMP: background, detail lines, 2 layers for light and shade then a color layer.
Using a mouse.
I am getting better with practice. But it is time consuming since there is a learning curve. How steep the curve depends on your level of comfort learning a new application. I actually decided to get a pad and stylus to draw better and that too has required some time put aside to learn.
Do I have to create a nice looking digital map of my hand drawn sketch? No. There are simple ways of creating a hand drawn map that will look perfectly fine in a book. There are lots of tutorials on how to draw just about anything on a map and any style that fits your skills.
I chose to do a digital version so that I can put it on my Website and because it will look nicer. I will also be able to shrink it and add more pieces to the world with each book. I can’t manipulate a physical image on a piece of paper like I can digitally.
And face it, a digital map can look so cool!
If drawing is something that you just can’t do, you can pay someone to draw the map for you. Just remember that anytime you are looking to hire someone to do work for you, simply do your research before you hire them.
Where to start
Focus on the landmass of where your first story is set then add on as your story grows. If you have not finished writing one novel, avoid spending too much time map making or sketching at the expense of writing. The map can always be created or made prettier later.
What I discovered after writing the first 5 books in my Auros world is that as I wrote, I got a clearer picture of the world, which, in some ways, is making map making easier now despite challenges so it's important to keep writing. A map is nothing with out a story set in the world it represents.
Until such time as a map is published along with the story it goes with, whether the map is created first, in parallel to writing the story, or after the story is written doesn’t really matter. Both can be altered to fit the other as necessary.
What matters is having a story and a map as a finished product.
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