Picturing Your Storyworld
by Randy Ingermanson
Advanced Fiction Writing
Maps bring a storyworld to life. If you’re a fan of The Lord of the Rings, you’ve probably spent a fair bit of time poring over the map of Middle Earth that J.R.R. Tolkien created. The map helps you make sense out of the very complicated story.
I’ve always wished I could draw like that, but I just haven’t ever developed my drawing skills, so it’s not possible right now.
The novel I’m currently trying to finish up is set in the world of first-century Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. I’ve been to modern Israel several times and I’ve spent many days on-site in various locations where my story is set. I have more than 10,000 pictures of my storyworld, and I know the geography pretty well.
But it’s very hard to put that geography into words. Very hard.
A Picture Really Is Worth 1000 Words
It’s a worn-out cliche, but in the case of geography, it’s absolutely true. A map is worth a whole lot more than 1000 words.
Several months ago, I decided to hire a graphic designer to draw some maps for me.
Then I realized how hard that was going to be. None of the maps I’ve found in books is anything close to what I want. So I can’t just hand a graphic artist a map and say, “Draw me something a bit like this, only different.”
The horrible truth dawned on me that trying to tell an artist how to draw my maps would end up taking a lot of words. To really explain what I wanted, I’d need to draw them a picture. But if I had the skills to draw them a picture, I wouldn’t need a graphic artist in the first place.
I did a little research online and found some cool map-drawing tools. Some of them are web-based. Some are Windows-only. One is Mac-only.
They all have different features, and I finally settled on the Mac-based tool, a fairly pricey program named Ortelius. Fortunately, Ortelius lets you download a trial version to test.
A Learning Curve
Ortelius is amazingly powerful. But like most powerful tools, the learning curve is steep. I thought it was important, so I took a week and worked through the entire tuturial for Ortelius.
At the end of that week, I felt confident enough to start drawing my maps. And it’s going very well. I had a list of 7 maps I wanted drawn. I’ve now got 4 of them done, and they came out much better than I would have expected.
Now that I’m well into this project, I wish I’d tackled it years ago. I’ve always known that geography matters a lot to a story. Drawing my own maps forced me to make many hard decisions to get rid of all ambiguity. (When you have 20 different maps and they all disagree in one way or another, you have a lot of ambiguity.)
How Maps Affect Your Story
Already, I can see that a good map helps you think out your story.
In my storyworld, people walk everywhere. Walking takes time, so you need to be able to estimate how long it takes to get between any two places.
But you can’t walk where there aren’t roads, so you also need to work out where the roads are. That puts constraints on your story, which helps in two ways:
- It tells you when your characters don’t have a choice, which is useful to know. Sometimes, they’re forced to go through some particular town. When you know that, it suggests ideas for what must happen along the way.
- And it tells you when they do have a choice, which can help generate conflict. Sometimes, all choices have downsides. When you know that, you have a meaningful dilemma, and that’s good for your story.
Visualizing Your Action
Action is a crucial part of any scene. If you want to visualize the action in your scene, it’s crucially important that you know what the stage is like.
A fair bit of my story happens in the small village of Nazareth. The archaeology of Nazareth is poorly understood, which means that there aren’t any good maps of the village. Without a map, it’s easy to write a very generic scene with very generic action.
What I discovered when I made my own map of Nazareth was that the act of making a map forced me to remove all the fuzziness from my mental picture of the place. It brought everything into focus for me. And once I had it in focus in my own mind, it was vastly easier to put it into focus on the page.
So after drawing my map of Nazareth, I went through my entire novel and checked every scene. I found that a handful of scenes could be put into sharper focus, now that I had a map. So I tweaked those scenes. It would have been smarter to do that before I wrote the novel. But now that I’ve got good map-making software, I’ll do better in the future.
Homework
- How well can you visualize your storyworld?
- Are there fuzzy parts of your mental image of your world?
- Would it bring things into focus if you drew a map on paper? (Even a rough sketch.)
- How long would it take to sketch out a quick map?
- How much value would that have for your project?
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