Worldbuilding: a Digression.

KISS: Keep it Simple, Stupid!

OR, I really try to stay on track but don’t.

Ok Last Week I tried to order my thoughts and realized I might have gone into the complex far to quickly. As previously stated, I have never put these thoughts into writing before and I am not working from an outline. This blog is being pantsed…(might be a future blog where I talk about being a Hybrid writer).

Trying to keep the information as genuine as possible I don’t create a very deep backlog, and I like to make a list of topics and just run with them straight from the heart and mind. I am not researching heavily and then polishing a bunch of collected knowledge here (though there will be a FEW posts like that in the future) I am merely articulating how I think.

Recently I had a distinction pointed out to me. That World-Building is not Map Making, but that the two coexist.

Searching for meaning:

Mapmaking doesn’t equal Worldbuilding.

I had to take that apart and mull it over for a while. And this is what I get from that statement. Worldbuilding is a very large discipline that utilizes a lot of skills and covers a wide degree of information. It is not limited to creating geography alone, but also culture, race distinctions, economics, and on and on.

Mapmaking is only a portion of World-Building, and many writers don’t even make maps. They might plot out points but statistically speaking only 1 in 4 fantasy books published today actually have a map in them.

Now the thing is I have always stressed map making as part of my process for world-building. And it has always formed the core of my “beliefs” for creating living worlds.

The First Maps:

As a child I often bought the fantasy books that had the maps within them. My first exposure to maps in books was with Tolkien when I was about 10. So, I always had a love for maps, and as I started buying books with what little money I could scrounge. There were basically three things I looked for in a book during my formative years.

First was great cover art, it had to draw the eye. Second was the thickness of the spine, I was kid and didn’t really have allowance. I made money recycling cans or doing extra chores, so buying a book was expensive to me and I wanted the most for my dollars. The third thing that would tip my decision would be maps.

It was The Hobbit that influenced me at first, subtitled, There and Back Again. When I read a book with a map, I would often take a pen or pencil and put dots on the map as the character traveled. I’d circle every city they came to and mark a battle scene.

First Map First Plotting:

So, the very first map I drew was actually the very first time I plotted a story. I started as a 100% panster, heck that was how I ran most of my gaming sessions back then as well. 90% improv on the spot and a memory that could hold all those details.

I often started a story with a character, with my pov, and one summer I had an entire package of index cards. So, on one card I wrote down some details about where I wanted my character to start and what he was going after. I think it the very silly, very done to death, chosen farm boy finds something and must take to the capital but ends up being the wielder of the MacGuffin.

Hey I was only 12 or 13 at this time and it WAS a hugely popular and done to death story.

The map IS the plot:

Taking that index card, I flipped over to the blank side and drew a dot that represented the village of the character and then I made a broken line to a town and another to the capital. Then I filled in hills and trees and other things willy-nilly. (It would be more than a decade before I started to learnt about temperate zones and air patterns for weather and stuff)

Once I filled the entire back of the index card with random towns and farms and terrain. I decided to put another card next to it and continue. I thought up more of the story. About how the “Relic” would call to monsters from a place off the map. I added in more kingdoms, some who wanted to help and some who wanted to take the relic.

Mapping Obsession:

In other words, I kept adding cards to the map and adding story and plot with each card that I drew. Eventually I taped the cards together and formed a map that was four index cards high and about three wide.

My plotting was a simple travelogue, where I drew my dotted line that meandered across all of these cards. As I drew on each card, I thought of new characters to be encountered, of new problems that might arise, and creatures that might live in such places. As a child I ignored how a swamp was formed and merely attached a swamp index card to my map to have a kingdom of lizard folk.

Without realizing it I had stumbled on plotting and also started my obsession with mapping. The sad thing is I never actually used that map, nor did I write that story. The cards got lost as I drew them while spending the weekend with my grandparents and somehow the cards never went home with me and when I returned to my grandparents’ home the cards were gone.

The Current WIP:

So, I mentioned in a previous POST about my current WIP, about its genesis and where it stands as of today. I also ran through the 5 Iterations of the World in the very first World-Building Post. Here is where I admit that there is not actually a fleshed-out map for the current version of the world.

Draklon 5 was created by taking the bare map from version 4 and deciding to add in every OTHER campaign setting/ world I had created from various games over 2 decades into it. I took a world that was already huge and added an entire new continent and expanded the old continent by an order of magnitude.

So, my current WIP is being written based on memories that are years and years old and basic familiarity without an actual map. And I will tell you now I keep having huge long breaks in my writing. Not exactly block but just indecision and second guessing so many points.

The Problem:

I have come to realize that as much as I have a wholly built world (it has magic systems, it has religion, it has cultures, characters, history… so much history… it has art and philosophy and blatant Earth based cultures and cities.) It has everything it needs to be a living world.

But my story takes place in the new world, and while I know what the Ashlands are like, I know what the colonies on the fertile coast are like, and I know what horrors await my POVs in the vast wasteland…

I can’t “SEE” it.

I can see the white sands that appear rainbow hued at a distance, I can see the weirdly warped rock towers that appear melted and painted, vitrified stone. I know the races and cultures that call these lands home, I know how they survive and thrive and I know the history of their origin. I know all the secrets of the wasteland.

In short, I have done my world building. But I skipped making a map of the area, and the original map of the game which originally used this vast desert is a completely different “animal.” In adapting it to Draklon I fully changed the origin, the secrets, and the history. I changed everything accept the concept and the size and shape of the land.

Writers Block?

My “writer’s block” is from not having maps. Not having a visual guide to my writing is making me sit on things. Making me constantly go back and rework my ideas instead of putting more words on the page.

Or maybe that is just another excuse. (might be a future post on THAT subject as well)

Back on track:

Ok, I feel we might have gone a little off track on this one.

It was supposed to be a post about simplifying things and I never really touched on that subject. But I did give you more insight into how I started with the mapping and world-building ideas. And again, for me World-building cannot fully be removed from map making.

My third rule was that you have to learn Geography. That you need to make that step to fundamentally understand how environment changes and affects all living things, including your characters. I also learnt that I need a visual cue to keep my progress going, it doesn’t need to be a full-blown map. But a diagram at the very least helps with focus. (perhaps I should start to plan these posts a little better, 😊)

Ok, next week I think we will discuss Pantsing and Plotting, which will help narrow down this discussion and hopefully bring it all together.