{"id":4476,"date":"2009-05-19T16:38:13","date_gmt":"2009-05-19T20:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=4476"},"modified":"2014-08-20T06:38:38","modified_gmt":"2014-08-20T10:38:38","slug":"mapping-the-wip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/mapping-the-wip\/","title":{"rendered":"Mapping the WIP"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I once read advice from a… novelist? playwright? not sure — anyhow, someone<\/em> 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<\/em>… or whatever it was.<\/p>\n

Even after I [knock on wood]<\/em><\/span> 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:<\/p>\n

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?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n[shudder]\n

Anyhow, when I started on Grail<\/em><\/del> Seems to Fit<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

Alas, it also meant that I occasionally got confused when navigating the action around the fictional<\/em> world.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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…?<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

[For more information about the map in question, including what details I remembered and a larger, more legible copy, see here<\/a>.]<\/em><\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

Edit to add:<\/strong> 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<\/a>” of Cymer Bach you can see why.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[38,5,324,372,515],"tags":[47,141,1233,1234],"class_list":{"0":"post-4476","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-backwards","7":"category-06_writing","8":"category-researchresources","9":"category-style-and-craft","10":"category-grail","11":"tag-maps","12":"tag-fiction","13":"tag-geography","14":"tag-fiction-vs-real-life","15":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-1ac","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4476"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15935,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4476\/revisions\/15935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}