I once read advice from a… novelist? playwright? not sure — anyhow, someone who said something like, “The hardest job in writing a story is getting a character from one room to another.” This stuck in my head because at the time I was struggling with just this difficulty. I kept trying to account for the characters’ every movement: He walked to the door and reached for the doorknob. He turned it. He pulled the door open, hesitated, and then stepped over the threshold onto the bathroom tile… or whatever it was.
Even after I [knock on wood] grew out of that clumsiness, though — it’s a wonder more of my characters didn’t break their necks as I drove them past furniture, pets, fireplaces — I’ve always liked to have a sense of where characters are, relative to their landscapes and to one another. Of all the fears I have of a critic, somewhere, sometime, taking potshots at my stories, one of the biggest is that s/he will be able to sneer, y’know, something like the following:
[shudder]Simpson can’t even keep his geography straight. In one chapter he refers to a character walking three blocks and turning right; four pages later, the same character — taking the same route — is said to count five traffic signals and then turn left. Well, which is it, Mr. Simpson? Which is it?
Anyhow, when I started on Grail Seems to Fit, I knew I’d be making up a locale from scratch. This seemed clever at the time, because no one would be able to trip me up on mismatches with the real world.
Alas, it also meant that I occasionally got confused when navigating the action around the fictional world.
So then I went back through what I had written to that point, and laid out the town in question, in pencil, on a sheet of lined notebook paper: block by block, labeled with store names, residents’ names, and so on.
I found that map this morning. On one hand, the discovery annoyed me; I’d just typed the words “Chapter 1, Caerleon, Pennsylvania: 1991” at the top of page 1, when I suddenly thought Gee — didn’t I do a map of the town once…? I even knew right where I could find a copy of it. And once I found it, I spent the rest of my morning writing session inspecting it, trying to recall all the details I’d labeled (more or less legibly) 17-18 years ago and why I’d thought they were important.
So there went today’s writing down the drain. Tomorrow ought to go smoother. (Or at least, I’ll have one less excuse for not being productive.)
[For more information about the map in question, including what details I remembered and a larger, more legible copy, see here.]
Fellow writers, how about you? Do you make maps of your world(s) — not just maps in your head, but on paper? Do you draw floor plans? Or is this just some highly localized form of obsessive-compulsive disorder on my part?
Edit to add: Although I never did a map of any of the locations in the Welsh backstory, I do know exactly where the (fictional) village was where the main character lived in the 1700s. It was a village named Cymer Bach (roughly, “Little Confluence”); if you look at the Google Maps “terrain view” of Cymer Bach you can see why.
marta says
Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. Depends on how important the location is and, well, like you said. It is important to remember the neighbor lives to the left, not the right. And have some sense of how long it will take for a character to walk, run, dance from one point to another.
I’ve read that line about how hard it is to get a character from one room to the next. So true.
Beth says
I made a map when I had to figure out how long it was going to take for my characters to travel from one location to another.
And a funny thing about making maps. You start out sketching a map that fits the story, but in the drawing of it, unexpected geographical features surface, or cities appear where you don’t expect them, or you find ruins tucked away…and before you know it, the land begins shaping the story.
I know of one fantasy writer, Holly Lisle, who sometimes draws the maps first, and lets them suggest what sort of story she’s going to write.
John says
marta: For the book’s backstory, I had a character who had to walk from a certain location in mid-Wales to London and I wanted to know how long it would take him. So I went to Google Maps, the “get directions” feature, and entered a start and end point. I knew GM would tell me about how long (approx.) it would take to drive the distance, but I just wanted to get a feel for the distance itself, and I could extrapolate walking time from that.
Turns out GM provides a “map this route on foot [instead of by car]” option. Maybe it’s just a test they’re running, and maybe it’s just for the UK, but I was very excited to see it there. So of course I selected that feature. And I was stunned at the result: almost 200 miles, a little less than 3 days. So I worked the math backwards and it seems that they assume you will walk 24 hours a day. Er, no.
Making up the distances to match the time you want the travel to take is, by comparison, much simpler. :)
Beth: I think there’s something about the fantasy genre which lends itself especially well to map-making. (Which on second thought may be sort of obvious, but duh, if you want obvious then I’m the guy for the job!)
The first time I read the LotR trilogy, I was reading library books — hardcovers. The maps of Middle Earth were these big fold-out things mounted on the inside front cover, and I loved not only seeing the relationships of all the locales to one another but also imagining all the stuff which might have been happening in the blank areas away from the central storyline. I don’t know if Tolkien had drawn the maps, but it’s kind of cool, isn’t it?, to think that he had… and that he’d used Holly Lisle’s technique of letting the story spring from the geography.
As you say, the map can get out of hand. Without intention, I drew this map early enough, and detailed enough, that it didn’t turn into too great a distraction back then. :)
Aerin says
hahahaha which is it Mr. Simpson-sneer
(hahahaha in a please-god-don’t-let-that-happen-to-me kind of way)
Sylvia says
I have a terrible habit of taking the first viewpoint of a location (from a character or the narrator or whatever – the first actual sighting) and defining that view as heading north. This means that if you are following my characters around a landscape, they ALWAYS are facing north when they pause to look. I think next time I’m going to add in some superstition that they need to spin in a circle before ever stopping to look around, to try to explain this.
Your sketches are great – I do “word maps” of descriptions when I set aside for reference but if I had a chance of deciphering my own maps, that would be much better.
John says
Aerin: The second line in your comment — in some theological circles, that’s technically known as a placate-the-gods parenthesis. Nice save!
Sylvia: A “terrible” habit, maybe, but also — please don’t take this wrong — sort of… well… er, funny. I wonder if there’s a medical condition of some kind which would cause one to—
Well, consider someone standing, at rest, on a pair of roller skates. Could s/he somehow act as a giant human-shaped lodestone, rotating sloooooowly to magnetic north? What would be the consequences of a condition like that?
(Note willingness to toss unresolvable plot twists in someone else’s direction.)