Today's post is about one of my favorite parts of the novel writing process: story world mapping.
If there's one thing that most writers of genres outside of fantasy tend to ignore, it's the importance of drawing up a map of your story world. Sure, it's important to form an image of the layout of your world if you literally have an entirely different world, but it's just as useful to draw a little map of all of the normal, everyday settings that show up in your novel.
You know, like a character's bedroom, or the diner where most of the scenes take place...you get the picture. Mapping can actually be a valuable part of your brainstorming process, even if you're a non-otherworldly writer. Just try it out and see whether or not it influences how you picture the scenes in your head and how vividly you write them.
Now, I'm not saying that you have to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. My mountains are, to this day, nothing but triangles, and my trees look like chicken feet. I'm a writer, definitely not an artist. It doesn't matter if your people are stick figures, or if your dragons look like squiggly lines with crudely drawn feet. It's still a perfectly respectable story world outline either way, and you should be pretty damn proud of it if you ask me.
When I was little I did nothing but draw maps of the places I wanted to write about sometime in the future, sometimes having them set up so that to see the whole thing you had to piece several notebook pages together. My mother thought I was insane, especially because I wrote in mostly first person back then. I actually believe that her reaction to finding my writing notebooks is just the reason I have such an aversion to first person writing: she accused me of being schizophrenic and threatened to commit me.
I would suggest carrying your writing notebooks around like they're a treasure box full of gems that everyone would rip away from you and steal forever if you were to let a single person catch a glimpse of what's inside. Nobody likes to know you're writing something unless you've been published. Once you have, everyone wants to know, and I hear it gets pretty freaking annoying.
Try drawing a map your main character's bedroom. If nothing else, it'll at least be fun. Then, feel free to go map-crazy, even if they're all just simple aerial views.
If there's one thing that most writers of genres outside of fantasy tend to ignore, it's the importance of drawing up a map of your story world. Sure, it's important to form an image of the layout of your world if you literally have an entirely different world, but it's just as useful to draw a little map of all of the normal, everyday settings that show up in your novel.
You know, like a character's bedroom, or the diner where most of the scenes take place...you get the picture. Mapping can actually be a valuable part of your brainstorming process, even if you're a non-otherworldly writer. Just try it out and see whether or not it influences how you picture the scenes in your head and how vividly you write them.
Now, I'm not saying that you have to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. My mountains are, to this day, nothing but triangles, and my trees look like chicken feet. I'm a writer, definitely not an artist. It doesn't matter if your people are stick figures, or if your dragons look like squiggly lines with crudely drawn feet. It's still a perfectly respectable story world outline either way, and you should be pretty damn proud of it if you ask me.
When I was little I did nothing but draw maps of the places I wanted to write about sometime in the future, sometimes having them set up so that to see the whole thing you had to piece several notebook pages together. My mother thought I was insane, especially because I wrote in mostly first person back then. I actually believe that her reaction to finding my writing notebooks is just the reason I have such an aversion to first person writing: she accused me of being schizophrenic and threatened to commit me.
I would suggest carrying your writing notebooks around like they're a treasure box full of gems that everyone would rip away from you and steal forever if you were to let a single person catch a glimpse of what's inside. Nobody likes to know you're writing something unless you've been published. Once you have, everyone wants to know, and I hear it gets pretty freaking annoying.
Try drawing a map your main character's bedroom. If nothing else, it'll at least be fun. Then, feel free to go map-crazy, even if they're all just simple aerial views.
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