January 8, 2023

Mapping it out...

​Thursday, I finished the first rough draft of Harmi's Song - The Last Wizard Book 4. The editing process begins this coming week.

Creating a fantasy story entails creating a rich world in which the characters can play out their lives. The original The Last Wizard (1995) was based in a pseudo-Nordic coastal environment in a village called Harbin nestled beneath Dragon Mountain. All the village culture and history aside, I created a map of Harbin to visually position events (maps below).

I labelled the significant places in the final version, and in the print edition the colours were transformed to a black and white rendition. Harbin became a place.
 
For fantasy writers, geography and an understanding of how geographical formations and features co-exist and affect each other to create a specific ecosystem of plants, birds, animals, becomes an essential tool bag of knowledge and skills when designing a place or a world.

The expansion of The Last Wizard into four distinct books where the central characters are drawn by necessity and circumstance into a much larger world than their original village has necessitated more map building. The value of maps for me include:

• understanding and utilising geographical spaces and names in the story
• ensuring travel distances and time are logical and consistent
• flagging cultural norms and changes for the readers as well as the characters
• providing physical challenges and refuges for characters
• adding 'reality' through 'suspension of disbelief' for readers

​The first draft maps I generated to show Chasse and Jaysin's and eventually everyones' journeys from the remote village of Harbin to the centre of the Kermakk Empire where multiple kingdoms and nations are drawn into a single cosmopolitan city were partly generated on my computer - a mixture of hand-drawn outlines and digital fonts: visually nice, but, for me, lacking a rustic authenticity I wanted to associate with these fantasy societies. I also wanted to give the 'mapmaker' a personality which the computer assisted mapping didn't provide. So, I have resorted to hand-drawn maps and deliberately rough lettering, partly to suggest the maker of these maps is not a professional nor a member of any royal court with practised skills in mapping, but someone who is trying to make sense of the world.
 
I was hoping to show a couple of finished versions from today (see draft in larger photo), but I have yet to add in details so I will hold those off until next week.

All the while that I was deciding on my approach, I was nagged by the thought that my stories don't really need to bother with including maps, especially rudimentary ones. Places are named and described, and the stories detail distances and times spent travelling and the destinations. Readers can imagine. The maps are superfluous. It's an interesting dilemma. Are maps in fantasy novels merely an unnecessary genre trope? What do you think?

For now, I'll complete the maps for these stories this week before I begin the much more demanding task of editing. If nothing else, it's a therapeutic exercise.