X Marks the Spot

    We’ve all heard that old adage, haven’t we?  X marks the spot for treasure and it always leads to some sort of adventure, fraught with head hunting savages, quicksand, and nasty little monkeys.
    For Worldbuilders the map is probably one of the most priceless commodities.  As we create new peoples, cities, and landmarks, we need to record their positions for our own sake.  I know I’ve talked about maps before (See blog entry: In the Beginning) but today I want to talk about them in more detail, and cover a few points of interest I’ve stumbled upon over the last few weeks.
   
    As I mentioned in another blog entry, I have been working on a world map 17”x22 that’s roughly to scale.  I was less interested in the overall scale of the map (that is, one inch equals one hundred miles or something like that) and more interested in the placement of things.  I have been creating various cities, ruins and landscapes for my story, and realised knowing where they were really mattered.
    For example, it wasn’t enough to know that the province of Bristyl was on the western coast of the continent, as that coast is huge.  I needed to know where the island nation of Coventry Boondis (the nation that rules Bristyl) was in relation to the west coast, so that I could then say, “Yes, that spot is exactly where they’d build Bristyl.”  Now the placement of Bristyl makes sense to me, its history makes more sense as well, as now I’ve decided that the colonisation of Bristyl started a war with the city state of Calsis, and resulted in the formation of the Bristyl Boys Militia (this militia, by the way, does have some importance in the long run of my story).

    I started work on what I call the “Genesis” map before I really did any research on how to make maps.  It was on a single 8.5”x11” sheet of graph paper and if you asked me at that time, I’d have said it looked pretty good.  In hindsight, it wasn’t that good.  I still use it of course, as it has most of the definition I want, so I scribble lakes and rivers and all of my landmarks on it, just to see how they might fit together.  Once I’m happy with where things are (and it has taken time, I did spend several hours merely concerned with the placement of some mountains) I can transfer them to my new map, which is much bigger and not even a quarter of the way done.

    What I’ve learned since starting my mapmaking adventures, kicked off in its fullness by Fantasy Mapmaking is that less is in fact more sometimes.  It is the concept of balance; lots of artistic types know what that means.  Basically, you always need dead space as much as filled to capacity space.  The way I interpreted it was that you don’t want too much of anything, but you do want a little of a lot of things.  It’s rare that you’ll find a “desert” world or a “forest” world (note: to those readers who know how much I love Star Wars, I suspend all disbelief for Lucas).
We want to put everything on our maps, don’t we?  We want readers to see a map and know where every village, city, river’s crook and tree are at any given time, isn’t that the goal of a map?  Sure it is, we use maps to find things, but sometimes we just have too many things to put on a map.  Once you count all your villages, towns, cities, fortresses, forests, deserts, swamps, roads, borders, mountains, rivers, lakes, canals, railways, ruins, and points of sundry interest you’ve now got a map overflowing with things great and small and your readers (or even you) can be lost in what you see.  Only add those details that you will need now, anything else can be added later.
    One of the biggest detriments, I discovered, was writing too much on your map.  I try to keep labels down to the minimum, only naming rivers by writing the river’s name along the course of the river.  Other places and things, like cities and ruins, I use an alphanumeric combination next to them.  So, the city of Barton Wod is labelled 1C, Coventry on Bry is labelled 2C, and Calsis is labelled 3C, et cetera et cetera.  Ruins, archaeological sites, and monoliths are labelled 1R, 2R, and 3R.  Each one gets a unique label, which I add to a hand written legend I’m keeping on a scrap piece of paper.
    At first I was using thin post-it notes with titles written on them to label places, but quickly the map became obscured by post-it notes and I realised the alpha-numeric system was probably my best bet.  This of course, is just the system I use, but yours might be different.

    No matter what system you use to create your maps and label them, the idea that less is more still fits.  In a lot of stories the borders of nations constantly fluctuate, or if you are using city-states rather than nation states, borders really are never permanent (or even really exist, look at a map of ancient Greece for proof).  So now you don’t need to draw borders and label every nation by colours.  Conversely, many borders (even today) are created by fairly natural boundaries, so you can just state that Nation X’s borders span from the Ural Mountains to the Danube River and not have to worry about yet another layer of detail.
    I don’t think I’m an artisan mapmaker – not yet anyways – but I think I’m getting the hang of it.  I imagine if my book is ever published, there will be a far better mapmaker who will take what I have done and improve on it. Until then, we all need maps to mark the spot.
  

My "Genesis" map, or the first map I drew of the entire world of Taleasia
Quadrant 2 of my larger map, as you can see it has really evolved since the Genesis version (quadrant two is the upper right of the genesis map)
The scrap paper legend to accompany Quadrant 2, I've used my own symbology and reference system