How to Map Your World: An Author's Guide to Mapping Fictional Worlds: Author Guides, #6

By A Trevena

Want to create a fantasy landscape that feels real and immersive?

 

Need help drafting a map that enriches the experience of your world?

 

How to Map Your World breaks the process down into easy-to-follow steps. By completing a series of creative prompts, this book will show you how to map out an engaging world full of stories and adventure.

 

This workbook will help you to:

• Lay out your world in a way that complements your story
• Use hints and plot hooks in your map to entice your readers
• Find surprise stories and inspiration in your landscape
• Draw an attractive world map that reinforces your worldbuilding

Work your way through the creation of a map that hooks and intrigues your readers, leading them deep into the world of your story. Learn simple methods for drawing landscape details from mountains to coastlines, and how to put them together in a finished world map.

 

Get How to Map Your World today, and become the cartographer of your own world.

 

Available as both an ebook Guidebook and a paperback Workbook with space for answering each prompt.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maythorne Press
• Release date: Apr 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215441947

Book preview

USING THIS GUIDEBOOK

Let me start by saying that I am not an artist. Nor am I a geologist, navigator, nor qualified cartographer. I am, probably like you, a lover of beautiful maps.

I, like many others, took up a new hobby in the turbulent year of 2020. But, honestly, I’m terrible at baking, and I am a danger to all plant-life, so I took up drawing fantasy maps instead. Over the next few years, I practised and honed my skills, taking my maps from a few scrawls, to impressive pieces of cartographical artwork. I’m still learning, and refining, just as we forever continue to do as writers.

I have been known to buy a fantasy novel based on the beauty of the map included in its first few pages. I have wandered around them with my fingers, imagining what it might be like to enter this great forest, or gaze up at this grand mountain, or to cross the epic terrain on foot, or horseback.

Because that is the primary job of a map: to draw your readers into your story, your world. To intrigue them with mysteries, with curiosity, with the promise of adventure.

And so, this book is much more than an artistry guide, teaching you how to draw mountain ranges and rivers. This is a book that will lead you through the creation of your world map, from deciding where to place your first settlement, and exploring how your world has changed, to choosing names for forests and fens, and hiding stories in the map for your readers to find.

This book is about laying out your world. It’s about leading your characters from point A to point B, while knowing exactly why they need to take that route. It’s about creating a world that will challenge them along their journey, and give them moments of enlightenment, of joy and wonder. And it’s about bringing your reader along for the ride, and letting them gaze at the view. To dip their toes in the lake, and pick up pine cones in the woodland. To struggle through the snow-covered mountains, or detour for a week around impassable marshes. Or, perhaps, to cross its perilous waterways, barely making it to the far side.

Mapping out your world doesn’t require you to be a great artist. It doesn’t require you to hand-draw the map that will, eventually, be published in your book. There are other ways to do that. So, if drawing isn’t your strong point, or if it terrifies you altogether, just know that you’re not alone. And that this book won’t require artistic talent from you. You might use this map just for yourself, to help guide you while you write your story. You might use it as a sketch to pass onto an artist to create the final version for you.

Of course, if you want to improve your map drawing, then, yes, this book will give you guidance on how to do that too. Just remember: practice, practice, practice. Your maps will improve over time. You should see the first ones I drew!

This list of worldbuilding prompts is not, by any means, exhaustive. Depending on your genre, your story, your characters, and the world you need to create for them, you may need aspects that are not covered by this guidebook. Likewise, some of these prompts may not be relevant to you.

Think of it like a garden. This book gives you the foundation to build upon. It helps you to plant the seeds, and offers you seeds you may not have considered planting yourself. But you’ll need to cultivate it, and water it. And you may have plants of your own that you want to include. A special tree, your favourite flower. You may like to have a pond, or a bench, or a marquee.

The other thing you’ll need is a safe, singular place to keep all of your worldbuilding notes. This might be a notebook, or a digital folder, or a shoebox filled with index cards. Whatever works for you. Whatever helps you to keep everything ordered. It’s surprisingly easy to get lost in your own world, and surprisingly easy to forget the details of it. This will become your worldbuilding bible. Your one-stop-shop for everything you need to know about your world. When you come to writing your story, keep your notes next to you, so that everything you need to know about your world is in easy reach.

Above all, enjoy your worldbuilding. Enjoy exploring it, and watching it come to life around you.

As a simple human, this may be the closest you’ll come to performing real magic. To visualise an entire world from nothing. To pluck things from the air and make them real. To take breath on the wind and form it into something tangible. That is the most real, purest magic I know