Fantasy map designer rivers update#

Don’t worry about fine details when you are laying down the story. In a first draft, it’s challenging to fit the visual world into a narrative without dumping it on the page because you are in the process of inventing it. An artist can give you a map containing the information readers need to enjoy your book.Īre changing seasons a part of your story? In that case, a little scribbled map will enable a map artist to provide you with a beautiful and accurate product.

Maybe you aren’t artistic but will want a nice map later. I keep a calendar of events for each novel, which has saved me several times. Having a realistic grip on time is critical to keeping the narrative believable. Those detours add to the distance and increase the time it takes to travel using the common mode of transportation. This creates opportunities for plot points, because the struggle is the story. On your fantasy map, rivers, mountains, lakes, and ponds make travel difficult, forcing a road or trail to go around them. Farms are usually situated near sources of water.

When making your map, locate rivers between mountains and hills.Ī river may emerge from a mountain spring or a glacier, but it will flow downhill to a valley where it will either continue on to the ocean or will pool and form lakes and ponds. While it may do so if pushed by the force of wave action or siphoning, water is a slave to gravity and chooses to flow downhill. You may need to note where rivers and forests are situated relative to towns, or in the case of towns, what streets and cross streets our Heroes must travel. Lay it out like a standard map with north at the top, east on the right, south at the bottom, and west on the left. Use a pencil, so you can easily note whatever changes during revisions.

Fantasy map designer rivers update#

If some of the action occurs in those buildings, you want to have your map out and update it as needed. He will have to return past the same shops and buildings he passed on the way. Or perhaps Hero lives in a city and wants coffee at the shop two blocks north of his apartment. He must return south, and your notes on your little map will help you remember this. If, in chapter one, Hero leaves home and follows the river north to the Big City of Smallville, he won’t reach home in time to save his mother if he then races east in chapter ten. The lines and scribbles you add to your map are the information you can use to check for consistency in your narrative. Knowing which direction your people are going at the outset is critical if your characters are going from one spot to another. Those are called cardinal points and the position of north at the top and the directions east, south, and west following at 90-degree intervals in the clockwise direction is standard in modern maps.Įven if your story is set in a town, you need to map it out. Place north at the top, east to the right, south to the bottom, and west to the left. If you are designing a fantasy world, you only need a pencil-drawn map. If you are interested, a post on creating a stylesheet is here: Designing the Story.

If you are writing a contemporary novel or historical work set in our real world, this is where you keep maps and maybe a link to Google Earth. Those are bits of knowledge you will be glad you made a note of, as they will contribute to the believability of your narrative. I suggest you include a glossary of created words, names, a list of sites where you got your research, and myriad notes related to that novel. It costs nothing to create but is a warehouse of information about your work-in-progress.

The stylesheet is one of the most valuable tools an author can have to aid them in worldbuilding. Those detours add to the distance we must travel and increase the time it takes to go from one place to another. Where I live, Puget Sound‘s shoreline determines the interstate highway’s path and the locations of cities and towns. Satellite View of Puget Sound by Sentinel 2