You Are Here

18 January 2010 | Filed Under Tools of the Trade 

A fantasy writer’s best friend, ignoring glossaries, will inevitably be the map of their world. Maybe that’s why it’s so difficult to get it right.

Is the novel set in the mountains? Desert? An archipelago? The clouds? A city? A farm? A combination?

If you have no idea where the action is taking place relative to where the action has already and will be taking place, then how on earth are your readers going to manage?

As for me, I am terrible at designing maps. I would much rather be given a random map (that has the elements I’m looking for, obviously) with landmarks already marked out (a city here, a mountain pass there). Ta da! Now I can write my story.

The problem I am finding for my current project is that I cannot for the life of me find a random map to use. I don’t trust the internet far enough to download anything. I’m not a Dungeon Master who needs to work in hexagons. My options automatically narrow down to nil.

Fancying that I might have an ingenious streak, I started up an Age of Empires game. I pretended I wanted to generate a campaign, and started fiddling with the random maps. I soon learned that these maps would be perfect for a small setting, but do not cover nearly enough terrain to create an entire country. My hopes, and ego, were crushed.

I suppose all that’s left is to take a blank sheet of paper, close my eyes, and hope the perfect map just…magically appears. At this point, I would gladly take a half-perfect map, or even just a mediocre-run-of-the-mill-looks-vaguely-reminiscent-of-Middle-Earth map. Yeah. We’ll go with that.

Comments

2 Responses to “You Are Here”

  1. Dan on January 19th, 2010 4:46 pm

    Incidentally…

    Many moons ago (like, in high school…geez I’m old) I wrote something like that. Basically it just sort of randomly scribbled shapes on the screen, not always filled in. I would keep running it until I saw island-like shapes that I liked, then would somewhat arbitrarily lay down mountain ranges, lakes, deserts, etc., as well as placing the shapes in some orientation with respect to one another for the larger globe map as a whole.

  2. jajohnson7 on January 19th, 2010 4:53 pm

    If that’s a computer program you are truly awesome, my friend.

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