The Worldbuilder Diaries: Maps and Locations

I do most of my location-based worldbuilding while I’m drafting a story. I don’t think I have ever drawn a map first; that’s always a much later step in my process.

I start with a list of locations.

As I mentioned in the first post of this series, Organization of Ideas and Concepts, I collect all of my worldbuilding info in a notebook or binder. This includes locations and points of interest, and I often add notes to the entry regarding where the place is first mentioned within the story (this helps me find it easily within the text, and I’ll come back to why I do this a bit later.)

My notebook entries for locations usually start out as a list, with a page number reference or chapter to go back to. I tend to add details to the location entry as I develop the world further. Sometimes this happens as I’m writing and sometimes ideas strike me at random, but if I like the concept and think it’ll work with the story, I’ll add it in. Not all of my random ideas make it into the final text, but I have them if need them for later.

Developing a map

I usually don’t start to draw up an actual map until I’m pretty far into a book or series. I’ll use The Caein Legacy an example for this post, since it’s the most recent map project I’ve worked on (if you count 4 years ago as “recent.”)

I wrote the entire series before I even attempted to sketch out a map, and was drafting the early books of the related series, The Mage War Chronicles, when I finally decided it was time. By that point, I had dozens of locations to add between the cities, mountain ranges, forests, and rivers that make up that world.

Drawing the map required me to go back to the text of each book to make sure each location was positioned correctly based on what was described as the characters traveled. (For those who have read Guardian, you know just how much traveling took place in that book alone. The map for the series was drawn up about 18 months after I’d finished writing Guardian, so it wasn’t exactly fresh in my mind… Which is why I like to include chapter or page numbers with my location entries.)

Even with all the areas my characters traveled, there were some blank spots on the map. I filled in a lot of those with random location names I came up with on the spot to make the world appear filled out. (I have since used some of those locations in The Mage War Chronicles.)

This is the draft sketch I made. You’ll notice most of the locations are labeled with a number alone (I don’t write very small, so to make it less messy, I wrote up a separate key with the location names that correspond to the numbers.)

Map illustration

As you can see, my illustration skills aren’t anything to get excited about. I wanted the maps that would be included in the books to look professional, so I outsourced that part of the project.

There are tons of talented illustrators out there who will happily take on a map commission. The official map for The Caein Legacy was drawn by Dewi Hargreaves (More info about his map commissions is available on his website: dewihargreaves.com.)

If you have a sketch completed of your world, even if it’s a bad one, it helps tremendously in the overall process. I sent Dewi my rough sketch and the corresponding key, and he created this beauty:

Thanks for checking out another of my rambling posts on worldbuilding. The full list of topics I’m planning to write about can be found here: The Worldbuilder Diaries