Running After My Hat

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:

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.