How to Map Your World

Table of contents :
Cover Page
How to Map Your World
Table of Contents
How to Map Your World
Copyright
Author Guides Series
Introduction
Using this Guidebook
Worldbuilding Basics
Using a Map
How Genre Informs Your Map
Finding Stories in Your Map
Your World as a Character
Your World's Own Character Arc
Your World as Inciting Incident
Your World as Antagonist
Your World as Elderly Mentor
Your World as the Final Goal
Changes in the Landscape
How People Survive in Your World
How People Thrive in Your World
Putting People into Your Map
How Society Changes
Naming Places
Drawing Your Map
Tools of the Trade
Land
Sea
Mountains and Hills
Rivers and Lakes
Forests and Woodland
Marshes, Deserts, and Desolate Spaces
Town Markers and Other Labels
Special Points of Interest
Putting It All Together
A Word on Info Dumping and Learning Curves
Ideas Dump
Want Even More Worldbuilding?
About Angeline Trevena

Citation preview

Table of Contents

How to Map Your World

Copyright

Author Guides Series

Introduction

Using this Guidebook

Worldbuilding Basics

Using a Map

How Genre Informs Your Map

Finding Stories in Your Map

Your World as a Character

Your World's Own Character Arc

Your World as Inciting Incident

Your World as Antagonist

Your World as Elderly Mentor

Your World as the Final Goal

Changes in the Landscape

How People Survive in Your World

How People Thrive in Your World

Putting People into Your Map

How Society Changes

Naming Places

Drawing Your Map

Tools of the Trade

Land

Sea

Mountains and Hills

Rivers and Lakes

Forests and Woodland

Marshes, Deserts, and Desolate Spaces

Town Markers and Other Labels

Special Points of Interest

Putting It All Together

A Word on Info Dumping and Learning Curves

Ideas Dump

Want Even More Worldbuilding?

About Angeline Trevena

HOW TO MAP YOUR WORLD

AN AUTHOR'S GUIDE TO MAPPING FICTIONAL WORLDS

A TREVENA

Copyright © 2023 Angeline Trevena

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be copied or transmitted in any form, electronic or otherwise, without express written consent of the publisher or author.

Cover art by P&V Digital

Published by Maythorne Press www.maythornepress.co.uk

AUTHOR GUIDES SERIES

30 DAYS OF WORLDBUILDING SECOND EDITION An Author’s Step-by-Step Guide to Building Fictional Worlds

HOW TO DESTROY THE WORLD An Author’s Guide to Writing Dystopia and Post-Apocalypse

FROM SANCTITY TO SORCERY An Author’s Guide to Building Belief Structures and Magic Systems

HOW TO CREATE HISTORY An Author’s Guide to Creating History, Myths, and Monsters

HOW TO BUILD A CULTURE An Author’s Guide to Building Rich and Diverse Cultures

HOW TO MAP YOUR WORLD An Author’s Guide to Mapping Fictional Worlds

COMPLETE WORLDBUILDING An Author’s Step-by-Step Guide to Building Fictional Worlds

www.guidetoworldbuilding.com

INTRODUCTION

I am one of those authors who have been writing, pretty much, since they were old enough to hold a pen. I have a folder of old stories, typed up on an old typewriter, that I don’t even remember having written.

I was rarely seen without a book in my hand, and spent every spare hour I had, buried deep in fantastical worlds. I was lucky that my parents encouraged it. They never told me that I was wasting my time, or to keep my head out of the clouds. They even let me read at the dinner table, eating one-handed.

I was also lucky to have access to a local library, and quickly worked my way through the fantasy catalogue in their children’s section. I swept my way through all of the Choose Your Own Adventure books; not only following the adventures of kids—passing into a fantasy world to fight dragons, mounted on their bicycle steeds—but I got to control the stories. I could re-read them over and over, choosing different paths each time, creating a multitude of adventures for myself.

My love of speculative fiction had started young. It was my dad’s job to read the bedtime stories each night, all of us huddled together to listen. He often picked books from his own collection which, almost exclusively, consisted of classic sci-fi novels. And so, as a child, my bedtime stories were written by the likes of H.G. Wells and John Wyndham. Looking back, I suspect that The War of the Worlds and The Day of the Triffids were probably inappropriate choices for children about to go to sleep, but it must have caught my imagination. I will forever thank my dad for introducing me to such tales.

At the age of 16 I finally picked up the Chronicles of Narnia books, reading all

seven of them in just five days. It was then that my Narnia obsession began, and it has never waned.

Before starting at university, I worked in an antique auction house. Every wardrobe that came through the saleroom, I would check in the back of it for Narnia. It reached the point where my colleagues would come and inform me each time they took receipt of one!

When they announced the latest film adaptations, I scoured the internet daily for news. I saw each of them on their day of release, going to the cinema alone for an uninterrupted experience. A pure absorption of them. I can still name the four actors who portrayed the Pevensie children, their names branded into my memory. Yes, the woman who can’t even remember her own phone number!

One of my most treasured possessions is an old wardrobe. I bought it from a second-hand furniture shop for just £20. It has moved house with us several times, and has practically fallen apart, with my husband tasked with fixing it back together. Carved into its door is a beautiful rendering of a ship, in full sail, riding the sea. And the serpentine hinges on it are like sea monsters. It is beautiful, and largely useless. It isn’t deep enough to hold a standard coat hanger on its rail, and the mirror on the back of the door is so mottled and degraded it hardly reflects anything at all. In fact, it has rarely ever been used as an actual wardrobe, and currently holds my increasingly out of control to-be-read pile.

But, because it looks like it may have once stood in the captain’s quarters on board the Dawntreader, I will never part with it.

And, over the years, I have collected other bits and pieces that remind me of Narnia. Including film props, and a good collection of behind-the-scenes and the-making-of books. My obsession is complete, and incurable. All that is left is

to find a way to Narnia myself. I’m still looking, and I won’t give up.

Despite this, I did stray from my love of fantasy. At university I studied Drama and Creative Writing, and wandered away from magic and fantastical worlds. I can’t say why, it just happened. Perhaps I felt pressure to finally grow up. Perhaps my university course pushed me towards literary fiction. Perhaps I simply needed a break from it for a while. I don’t know.

After university, as I began to navigate the confusing and cynical world of adulthood, I barely read anything at all. For a long time, I hardly managed a handful of books a year. During this time, I read my first ever Stephen King book. It was, interestingly enough, On Writing that I picked up first, and I finished it in just a few days. And so, I was brought back to literature with a renewed desire to read, as well as to write.

Although I’ve been writing since I was very young, it was never my ambition to make a career from it. I wanted to act. I wanted to be on stage. My whole childhood was filled with drama lessons, singing lessons, lessons in several different forms of dance. I was always performing: music concerts, amateur dramatics, school plays. If there was a spotlight, I was in it.

While I was at university, studying Drama, I discovered that I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I’d expected to. I had a long heart-to-heart with myself, finally accepting that the ambition I’d had all of my life, my singular goal, simply wasn’t what I wanted anymore. And it was difficult to let go of. This vision had shaped my entire life, my entire personality, and I had nothing to replace it with.

But I couldn’t pretend to myself anymore. And, as I continued with my degree, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to be onstage, blinking into the spotlight, speaking someone else’s words. What I wanted was to sit in the back

of a darkened auditorium, watching other people perform my words. I wanted to write.

Even with this revelation, I still didn’t imagine myself making writing into any kind of a career. The first Kindle wouldn’t come on the market for another six years. The publishing landscape was a very different one to what it is today. Becoming a published author was a pipe-dream. One that seemed to rely far more on luck than any kind of talent. A who-you-know rather than a what-youknow industry. And for a young woman barely into her twenties, and still reeling from losing the footing of the one constant she’d had in her life, it all seemed like an impossibility.

As part of my Creative Writing class, our tutor asked us to write a personal introduction to an imaginary book about ourselves. Much like this introduction you’re reading right now. The difference being, in that hypothetical introduction, I wrote “I can’t imagine writing ever being anything more than a hobby for me.” When I wrote that, I wouldn’t have believed I’d ever be writing one for real.

When our assignments were returned, my tutor had highlighted that sentence, responding with the note “That would be a shame.” That single comment began a shift in mindset which, over the following years, led me to this moment right now. And this book, through all those that have come before it.

Inspiration tends to come from the most unexpected sources, at the most unexpected of moments.

And I’m sure that my tutor has no idea of the impact she had. Of the wheels she set into motion. Of the future she helped to craft. She dropped a small pebble into a pool, and its ripples are still radiating outwards.

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 of.

Of course, I’m being presumptuous here. You may have magical abilities beyond my comprehension. In fact, you may even be a little more than human...

WORLDBUILDING BASICS

While fantasy and science-fiction authors may be doing the heavy lifting when creating their fictional worlds, worldbuilding exists in, pretty much, every genre. To a certain extent.

Whether it’s the creation of an imaginary cafe in a real town, or imagining an alternative outcome to an event from history, any book, of any kind, can involve worldbuilding. At the fantasy, sci-fi, and horror end of the scale, the worldbuilding-heavyweights, it may mean the creation of a magic system, or monsters, to slot alongside the real world. Or it may mean building an entirely new world with new species and cultures, right up to an entire universe of planets.

It can become quite the epic task!

Now, I don’t know about you, but I tend to get easily overwhelmed by epic tasks. That’s why I’m still working up to de-cluttering my house. I just look at the job as a whole, can’t untangle where to actually start, and I end up doing nothing at all.

As much as I understand the usefulness and the importance of breaking things down into workable chunks, into simple steps, the ability and method for doing this very often escapes me. Unlike many other people, I can see the wood very clearly. It’s the trees I have trouble with.

And this is what this workbook is designed to do. It breaks the task of building a

fully fictional world into sizeable chunks. 30 of them. If you simply complete one task per day, by the end of the month, you will have a whole world to begin writing in, or to continue building into finer detail.

One task a day. That’s not difficult or scary, is it?

Worldbuilding doesn’t need to be difficult, or complicated. It doesn’t need to take forever, or be an excuse for never actually writing the book. It doesn’t need to be overwhelming or intimidating. At the other end of the scale, it shouldn’t be something that you haphazardly bolt on in a last-minute panic.

As you’ll discover through this book, worldbuilding should be tightly integrated with your plot and your characters. Your characters, and their goals, their struggles, their journey, are the reason your readers show up. That’s the reason they keep reading. You can have the most amazing world, but if you don’t populate it with compelling, sympathetic, and relatable characters, readers will simply stop turning the pages. Likewise, if you write amazing characters, and put them into a flat, paper world, your readers won’t want to walk along with them, or explore with them.

Just as you want your readers to believe in your characters, you want them to believe in your world, too.

Let them smell the salt on the breeze, hear the buzzing of the insects. Let them feel the heat of the burning buildings, and feel the oppression of the government. Let them walk every single step with your characters. Invite them in. And invite them to stay. Whether they want to set up home there, or fight to change it.

Your worldbuilding is equally as important as your story and characters. Give your characters somewhere real to live, and give your readers somewhere real to visit. You simply can’t separate these things out if you want to write the best book that you can.

So, what are you waiting for? Let’s get started with the basics of worldbuilding.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF WORLDBUILDING

There are a few different ways to approach worldbuilding, and which you choose, will depend on your goals, your story, and your genre.

Building a whole new fictional world: This is mostly used for writing fantasy and science fiction, and involves creating an entirely fictional world from scratch. Somewhere that does not, and never has, existed. It may have similarities to our world, and it may have huge differences. Think along the lines of second-world fantasies penned by the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis.

A real place with an alternative past or future: This may be taking a real existing place, London, for example, and giving it an alternative or altered history. Imagine if the Great Fire of London had actually been started by dragons. How would that change the world today? Or it may be taking the real-world place, and throwing it into your imagined future. This is very common in dystopia, imagining an unpleasant future for our world.

When using this style of worldbuilding, your map is usually, largely, already done for you. There is likely to be some changes, such as missing landmarks, or different names for places. The extent of the changes would entirely depend on your story, and how different you have imagined the past or future of this place.

A real place with a parallel fictional world: The other way is to set your story in a real place, and have a fictional world created alongside it, usually invisible or hidden from the general public. Such as in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, or Harry Potter, or Hellboy. The fictional side of the world may be tightly integrated with the real world, or it may be quite separate. This would depend, again, on your story.

Whichever kind of world you’re building, your objective is still the same: to create a believable world that your readers can really imagine walking around in.

MAP MAKING

One of my favourite parts of worldbuilding is making the map. You don’t need to be an amazing artist; a child-like scrawl on the back of an envelope is good enough, as long as it makes sense to you and prevents you from getting lost in your own world. Which, believe me, is surprisingly easy.

Imagine your characters are travelling from A to B. If, in one chapter, B lies west of A and then, suddenly, it’s south, your readers will notice. Or if B is a coastal town one minute, and a village in the mountains the next, your readers will notice, and it will drag them out of your story. Plus, they will love to call you up on it. They’ll email you. They’ll message you on social media. And they’ll write it in their reviews.

As an author, your job is to keep them in the story. To keep them believing in it. To blur out their real world, their real life, and construct a new one for them, for as long as they’re reading your book. Glaring inaccuracies will pluck them out of your world. Inaccuracies break the illusion, and remind them that they are simply reading a story. That they’re not a hero fighting against a terrible foe. It pulls them back to their own cold, harsh, boring reality. And no one wants that!

And so, at the writing stage, your world map is for you. If you’re not confident in your artistic abilities, there are plenty of artists who can create a stunning map to go into the front of your book. At this stage, the map is only for your eyes. Build it out of Lego, build it on Minecraft, mould it from clay, or cake, or whatever. As long as it’s useful to you (and you’re not tempted to eat it!)

And don’t be tempted to simply draw a map and then randomly scatter towns across it. That doesn’t happen, it’s not believable. Towns are founded in specific places for specific reasons. The main reason being, of course, survival.

So, imagine you’re choosing a place to establish a town. What do you need? What considerations do you need to make?

Fresh water source: The most important and first consideration. Have you ever noticed how many major cities have a river flowing through them?

Varied food source:

Man cannot live by bread alone. Or cake, sadly. Their food source needs to be varied enough to keep them healthy.

Natural resources: They need enough resources to be able to build their homes, and the things they need. They can also use these resources for trade.

Appropriate land for crops/animals: The landscape they choose to settle in will hugely impact the kind of food and animals they farm.

Access and security: Can they get in and out of their settlement easily while still keeping it protected from intruders?

Trade route: Can traders visit their settlement? Is it on a major trade route, or will they have to rely on people making a special trip?

Predators: What lives in the woods? Or the mountains? How do they protect themselves against it?

People, by and large, will choose the easiest option for their home, unless the benefits outweigh the dangers or struggles. For example, you might consider it foolish to establish a town in the middle of a dragon breeding ground. But what if just one dragon scale (which could be naturally shed) would sell for a price that could feed a family for three months. Then, it may well be worth it.

NAMING PLACES

There are several different ways to name the places on your map. Remember that it’s not just towns and cities you need to name. Depending on how big your map is, you might be naming mountain ranges, rivers, forests, counties, countries, oceans, continents, or even planets.

Just like places on your map aren’t randomly placed, neither are they randomly named. They might be named after their founder, or the landscape, or the natural resources, the wildlife, the river or mountain they’re close to. They might be named after a local legend; your place names can actually conjure up stories of their own.

Of course, you can backward engineer these things. You can find the name for a place, and then create the reason it was named that. Perhaps no one remembers. Perhaps it doesn’t matter to you, or your characters, or your story. As I’ll discuss in the next section, you don’t need a full and complete history for everything.

There are so many online naming generators. Simply do a search, and you’ll find countless. I have two that I favour:

squid.org/rpg-random-generator seventhsanctum.com

HISTORY

Your current world is a product of everything that ever happened there, even if no one in your world still remembers. It’s your job, as the writer, to know. To remember what they can’t.

I’m not saying that you need to plot out 5 million years’ worth of history. Unless you’re into that. Some people are. But you definitely need to know enough to understand why things are the way they are. To know enough to effectively create the world, its culture, and values.

As people, we act according to our culture. And each culture is different. And there are variations in that culture. The things we value. The things we see as rude, or polite, or unnecessary. The things we want, the things we avoid. Religion. Festivals. The way we treat our elderly. The way we treat children. The kind of food we eat, and the way in which we eat it. The kind of jobs we do. The differences between rich and poor. The differences between high culture and low culture.

And these things change over time. Invading cultures. Migrating cultures. Important events. A war, or a natural disaster can hugely change a place’s culture. Changing what’s important to them. Changing the way they live their lives.

And you need to remember that every time something changes, it affects everything else.

There are different levels at which an event can occur.

International events: Something that affects the entire world. Like climate change, population explosion, the sun dying, zombie apocalypse, etc

National events: Something that affects the country or large area. Like an economic crash, natural disasters, death of a monarch, etc.

Local events: Something that affects a town or community. Harvest failure, flood, local elections, introduction of a new predator, a new trade deal, etc.

Individual events: Something that affects one person or family. Bereavement, loss of employment, loss of home, births, marriages, a lottery win, etc.

It’s obvious how an international event affects everything else. I’m sure a

worldwide zombie outbreak would affect you and your family. But what about the other way round?

So, imagine a family preparing for a wedding. They order a whole load of wine from the next village. That gives the farmer enough money to finally live out his dream of buying a boat and exploring the seas. When the winter rains come, the lack of the vineyard on the hillside causes a landslip which demolishes the mining town below, which leads to a shortage of minerals, which leads to a shortage of coins, which results in an economic crash.

This is, of course, a somewhat extreme example, but it’s an important thing to bear in mind. Think about the butterfly effect, and the ripples you might be sending out.

Imagine your world as a pool. Every event, ever construct, every thing you change or create, is like dropping a pebble into the water. Sometimes, the ripples last a few minutes. Sometimes, a few years. Spreading wider. Affecting more people. Sometimes, those ripples last for centuries.

HOW YOUR WORLD AFFECTS CHARACTER AND STORY

You can also use your worldbuilding to create conflict. Remember that conflict is created when your protagonist’s goal is interrupted, or opposed, and you can use your world to do that.

Perhaps the most obvious example is if the protagonist’s goal requires them to break the law. But you can use other things too: limitations of magic, social norms and expectations, gender roles. The landscape itself can become a

physical barrier, or the weather, or a lack of resources.

And you can use all of this in your worldbuilding to raise the stakes. To increase the tension.

Because your world doesn’t exist separately from the people who live in it, and you should create it with those people in mind. They will have opinions about everything. Beliefs, hopes, grievances. Things they love, things they hate. Things they want to change. Things they fight to change.

And these things will differ based on all of their nuances: gender, age, class, religion, etc. So their opinions will be different to the person stood next to them. They may even directly oppose one another. Conflict.

You have to remember that everything comes back to character. You have to remember that you aren’t writing a story about a world that happens to have people living in it. You are writing a story about people who happen to live in a particular world.

Worldbuilding. Story. Character. None of these is independent from the others.

USING A MAP

The first question I should probably address is ‘why?’ Why should you use a map? Do you really need one? What should you use it for?

While epic fantasy is a genre known for its maps (I’m sure that most of us can recall the maps of Middle Earth or Narnia from memory), it might be that you’re writing something different. Science-fiction, horror, perhaps even a cosy mystery. But don’t be mistaken that maps are only for the epic fantasy authors among us. It doesn’t matter what genre you’re writing in, a map can always be a useful tool.

One of my own novels, The Notary of Gotliss Street, takes place, entirely, within a single city street. Granted, it is a very long street, but I needed a map when I was writing that book. There is no map in the book, but I needed one for my own reference. I needed to know who lived where. I needed to know where the council hall was, and where my main characters lived in relation to each other. That map was nothing more than squares drawn onto graph paper. It wasn’t pretty, but it was essential. In that single street, I would have got myself completely lost without a map. And do you know who would have noticed? My readers.

If your characters are travelling west, from a coastal town to one halfway up a mountain, your readers will remember that. If you have a scene where they’re walking along, admiring the sunrise in front of them, your readers will notice the mistake. If they reach the mountain town, and it’s suddenly located deep in a valley, or at the edge of a wide, flat marshland with not a mountain in sight, your readers will notice that.

Likewise, if your main character lives at number 117 Ashen Street at the beginning of the book, and ends up living at number 171 Amber Road (without mention of the stress of moving house), your readers will notice. Or, if your characters are living in cabin 347-98B, located near the bow of the Spaceship Legacy, your readers will notice if they arrive in seconds to dowse the fire in the Microglyph Accelerator control deck. Which, as we all know, is always found at the stern of any spaceship.

The point is, that you can get lost in just about any world. Be it a huge, epic fantasy one, or a single ship. Trust me, at eleven years old, I travelled on my first overnight ferry crossing. I knew that I needed to turn left-right-left-right to return to our cabin from the deck. Of course, silly me, turned right-left-right-left, and was lucky to be found! Even if your story is set in a single village, even a single house, keeping tabs on where everything is in relation to everything else, and keeping it consistent, is essential to the believability of your world.

We’ve all smiled to ourselves when we spot a continuity error in a movie. Perhaps a character’s bag strap was over their collar in one shot, only to switch to being underneath it in the next. And then back again. It’s distracting, and it breaks the illusion. We’re suddenly hyper aware that we’re watching a movie (and that someone in continuity wasn’t doing their job properly). It’s no different with your own story. You need to be the continuity expert, and you need to do your job well. Having a map by your side as you write will help you to do that.

Good continuity, good consistency, will make your world believable. More real. And when your world is believable, it’s immersive. And when your reader is immersed, they keep turning the pages. And buying the next book in the series.

Your map might never end up in your published book. You might never have any intention of sharing it with anyone. That’s fine. It’s not a requirement. This isn’t school, and I won’t be marking your homework.

And so, your map might never be more than a visual aid for you as you write. In which case, it might just be a scrawl on a napkin. It doesn’t matter, as long as it helps you. Or, you might decide you’d like to learn to create beautiful maps of your own. You might choose to hire an artist to improve your sketch, or to use an online generator.

Two of the online services I use are Inkarnate (inkarnate.com) and a series of generators created by Watabou (watabou.itch.io). Be aware that Inkarnate is a paid service if you wish to use the maps commercially, and Watabou has a Patreon that, if you use their generators, I’d urge you to join. Us creatives all need to support one another. There are many other generators out there, but these are the two I use.

On the other hand, you might want to share your map with your readers, and have it beautifully presented in the front pages of your book. Or use it as a bonus download for your newsletter subscribers. You could print it onto t-shirts, or bookmarks, notebooks, or badges. You could have it printed onto a table covering for live events. The possibilities are vast. (Just note, if you use an artist or an online generator to create a map, make sure you have the correct permissions, licenses, and rights to use it for all of these purposes.)

But, beyond navigation, beyond keeping you from getting lost, your map can do so much more.

It’s an entry point into your world, and into your story. Just as your book cover is used to intrigue your readers, and catch their eye, so too can your map. Just like your cover, it can hint at the story inside: raising questions, catching your readers’ curiosity. It can make promises of the adventure to come, and hook your readers, just as your first page does. It can be used to back up every other way that you, as an author, hooks a reader and keeps them reading.

Besides catching the imagination of your readers, it can serve as inspiration for you too. Perhaps you add a forest, and name it ‘Two Armies Forest’. For no reason in particular, simply because it sounds cool. It’s not important, because it doesn’t figure in the story anyway. But then again… Maybe that sparks an idea. Maybe you work it into your story, or make a note to include it in a sequel. Perhaps it conjures up an entire story of its own that becomes a spin-off novella.

You might find that you have an empty spot in your map and, on a whim, you add a stone circle. Maybe you call it ‘Mage’s Wreath’. Perhaps, all of a sudden, you’re working an ancient magic system into your world. One that’s been long forgotten, all knowledge of it lost, until it’s woken from its centuries-long slumber.

There are so many opportunities to add story elements into your map, to tell your story through the winding rivers and the rocky mountains. But your map has stories of its own to tell. And you might just find it whispering some of them to you.

HOW GENRE INFORMS YOUR MAP

When you’re looking to start putting your map together, the first thing you should consider, is your genre.

Are you writing epic fantasy, with great battles between men and dragons, or dwarves and elves? Are your characters going on legendary journeys to rediscover the lost knowledge of the mages, or to search for the last unicorn? Perhaps, instead, you’re writing a space opera, with your characters travelling between several alien worlds, living their lives onboard a spaceship. Perhaps you’re working on a post-apocalyptic story set in an underground military bunker, or an urban fantasy set in the shadowed streets of a single city.

Each genre comes with its own expectations. Expectations of setting, characters, plot. Of course, you can subvert these conventions, and twist them on their head. You can, absolutely, set an entire epic fantasy story in an underground cavern system. You can, of course, set your urban fantasy in a cosy village in the countryside. You can, by all means, set your cyberpunk story in a peaceful mountain monastery. It’s your story, and you can do whatever you want with it.

But, always bear in mind, that epic fantasy fans often enjoy epic fantasy because of the vast sweeping landscapes. And urban fantasy fans often enjoy urban fantasy because of the gritty, dark city streets. Fans have these expectations of their favourite genres because it’s what they like. It’s what they want. So, if you go against them, know that your book might be a hard sell. It might too niche. It might put off the very people you’re hoping to attract.

With that said, this does not mean that your book should be a carbon copy of everything else. It doesn’t mean stifling your imagination. It doesn’t mean

creating a story full of clichés. After all, if you’re choosing to write a postapocalyptic story, it’s probably because you’re a fan of that genre. So, think about what you like about that genre. Which tropes you enjoy.

I will always be a sucker for the ‘last person alive’ trope. No matter how many stories I read, or watch, or listen to, I love it every time. And I love the ‘accidentally slept through the apocalypse’ trope. Mainly because I relate to those characters so much! And show me a million zombie movies, I’ll never get bored of them! Because they’re still all different. Give one hundred authors the same opening line of a story, and you’ll have one hundred very different stories.

Of course, in every genre, there are tropes we don’t like. I’m pretty bored of the ‘racing across the country to rescue family’ trope. I don’t find it that interesting. But there are other post-apocalyptic fans who love that trope, and seek it out. If you have an idea in your head that your story will appeal to every single fan of your genre, give up on that now. It won’t. It never will. Our trope likes and dislikes are as varied as how we like our coffee.

And don’t fall into the trap of thinking that tropes are the same as clichés. They’re not. Of course, tropes can become clichéd through over use, but there’s always something new to do with them.

Think of tropes as mile markers in your story. They tell the epic fantasy fan that they’re on the right path. If they spot the ‘chosen one’ marker, they know they’re on the right path for a story that they’ll love. And, as they journey along, they find the ‘elderly mentor’ marker, and know that they’re going to enjoy themselves. And you can carve extra, unfamiliar markings into those familiar milestones. Or you can hide them behind a bush. Or place them in the middle of the path for readers to trip over. But don’t think of them as clichés, just markers to let your readers know they’re on the right path for a story that includes all of their favourite things.

Let’s bring this back to maps. As I said, different genres come with their own setting expectations. In epic fantasy, you’re likely to be mapping a huge world. Different countries, different landscapes. Urban fantasy is usually set within a single city. Paranormal romance is a little more fluid, and might be anything from a single university to a full metropolis. Or a country town. It’s definitely more fluid.

If we take a sidestep to science-fiction, you might find yourself mapping several different planets for a space opera, or it might just be a single spaceship (which might be as big as a planet!) Post-apocalyptic might be a desert, it might be a bunker, or a city. Cyberpunk is, like urban fantasy, likely to be a single city. Dieselpunk or scavengerpunk might be a single scrapyard.

Horror, again, can be very fluid, depending on the subgenre. It might be wilderness horror, set in a mountain range or a forest. It might be body horror, set in a hospital or an asylum. It might be a haunted house or an abandoned warehouse. Besides the wilderness, horror tends to be smaller, more claustrophobic settings.

There are so many genres, and subgenres, and niche genres, with new ones cropping up all the time, so I couldn’t possibly list them all. But this gives you a general idea of how figuring out your genre can help to inform your map. Tell you how much you need to map. There’s little point in mapping eighteen different planets in a distant solar system if your characters never step out of their spaceship. Unless you want to. Never let me stop you from drawing maps just for fun!

Just as your genre can help to inform your map, your map can help to inform your genre. If you’re not entirely sure of your genre, but you know the location it takes place in, that might help you. Or, if you know you’re writing a genre mash-

up, such as a sci-fi horror or a dystopian epic fantasy, your map might tell you which is the more dominant genre. Which genre to focus your marketing on. Which genre to draw more tropes from.

Have a think about the genre of your story. Consider the tropes you’ll be including, and the locations you’ll need to map. If you’re including an elderly mentor, where do they come from? A distant wizard’s academy? A secret tower? Perhaps a cavern beneath an ancient monolith. If vampires live, hidden, alongside humans, where are their houses? What buildings and businesses do they own? Perhaps they’re connected beneath the city streets to allow movement during daylight hours.

If your characters are running from zombies, where are the safehouses? Where are the no-go zones? Where are the military strongholds and checkpoints? And when they’re traversing the universe, where do your characters stop to refuel or pick up supplies? Where are they delivering packages to? Which planets have banned humans altogether? What happens when your character’s spaceship crashes there and they need help? I’m getting carried away now.

Questions:

What is your book’s main genre? What area does your map need to cover? What locations are needed for your story? For each location, write down: The location Its important to the story

FINDING STORIES IN YOUR MAP

There are two ways that stories find their way into your map: through design, and happy accident. The happy accidents are always my favourite! But first, let’s look at how you intentionally put stories into your map.

Let’s imagine that your characters need to travel from Torstaff to Little Port. The reason doesn’t matter right now, it’s simply a journey that’s imperative to the story. You could build them a straight road. Perhaps it’ll take a day on horseback, or an hour by hover-bike, or whatever. Maybe the road is called Pleasant Journey Road. Maybe that’s exactly what they have. How boring. We’re certainly not going to make it that easy on them, are we?

Instead, why not throw a mountain range in their way? Call it Cruel Downs. Fill it with bandits. Or trolls. Or giant snakes. Make it a place that no one travels without a guide. Make it a place that no one travels without a guide who is also a warrior. Maybe your characters can’t afford one. Maybe they can only afford to hire the apprentice who, along the way, they discover only cleans out the stables.

But how do we show all of this in a map? Sure, Cruel Downs gives a hint, but can we do even more? Depending on how zoomed-in your map is, you can add in extra nods to the story. Even more promises of dangerous adventures.

You can place a town just at the edge of Cruel Downs. Call if Swordseed, or Axefind, or Warriorbourne. Why not have a river that runs from the mountains, flowing past that town? Call it Bladewash, or Serpentstrike, or Bandit’s Path. Maybe there’s a single route through the mountains. A valley, a ridge, a narrow passage. Call it Troll Lock, or Tomb Ridge, or Swordpoint Pass. Perhaps, on the far side of the mountains, they come to Refuge Forest, or the Monastery of

Eversleep, or the Hundred Graves Tavern.

All of these things can add little hints, little promises, so that your readers know your characters are going to find themselves in danger. That they will have a lot to overcome. It’s these promises that hook our readers in, that make them dive into the story.

Let’s look at another example. Imagine a world map with two countries, separated by a band of ocean that is wide and vast at one end, and no more than a narrow strip of water at the other. Perhaps these two countries are close trade partners and political allies. Maybe they are bitter rivals, always fighting over fishing rights, or the large island that sits between them. Again, how can we show this in our map? How can we relate their relationship through cartography?

If their relationship is a friendly one, perhaps the coastal cities and towns have names like Monksharbour, Copperport, Citadelmarket, and Havenbay. Alternatively, you might call these same places Guardedkame, Firedell, Crookblade, and Stronghold Wash. Just changing the names gives an entirely different impression. Is the close proximity of these two countries a benefit for cheap and easy trade, or is it a little too close for comfort? And so, by carefully considering the names and proximity of these places, you’re conveying a story. You’re telling a history, and hinting at stories to come.

This is how you can use your map to entice people into the story you’ve set there. You give them hints, promises, histories, and hooks into the story that follows. You’re setting up their expectations, you’re promising them things, you’re letting them know that, in this world, in this story, they’re going to find the adventure, intrigue, and conflict they’re looking for.

In the same way, you can use your map to introduce your world itself, and convey the society that exists there. Perhaps your society is heavily militaristic, and your map is dotted with castles, and keeps, watchtowers, and defences.

Again, you can use names of places to emphasise this: Warhorn Forest, Mountains of Marches, Fallen Soldier Plains.

Maybe your society is very religious, and the map is peppered with monasteries, cathedrals, temples, and shrines. Perhaps you add Divinity Woods, The Sacred Lakes, and Pilgrim Moor. Perhaps magic is deeply rooted in your world, and the landscape is filled with stone circles, or mage’s towers, or rings of mountains to enhance the potency of the magic. Perhaps your characters will travel to Elixir Cove, or Lakes of the Gems, or The Forest of Runes.

Of course, you may want to create a world in which this was the history, but is not the present. Perhaps the monasteries lie in ruins, maybe the stone circles have been broken apart. Perhaps your characters drink at the Broken Chalice Tavern, or stay overnight at the Bloodied Robes Inn. Maybe your characters are looking to re-ignite the past: to return magic to the land, or to prove that the dead God is, actually, still listening.

These are all ways in which you can purposefully use your map to tell stories. But don’t only think about the land. Remember, you also have the sea. You can also create historical maps, depicting places, buildings, and names that no longer exist. Or you can write both the new and old names for places on your map. All of this gives your readers an instant, visual hook into your world and your story.

And then we have the happy accidents. When, instead of consciously putting a story into your map, your map delivers a story idea to you.

I’m sure we’ve all experienced that side character who demanded a leading role. A side character that you brought into your story for a bit of flavour, or to fulfil a plot need, or simply to bring food to your character’s table, and they said something unexpected, or did something you didn’t tell them to, or had an

unplanned scar and, all of a sudden, they have a wonderfully tragic backstory, and you’re planning a spin-off novella with them in the title role. Yeah, those characters. We’ve all had them. And your map can be just as much of a trickster as that curiously handsome and intriguing bookseller in chapter two.

Imagine that you’re happily drawing your world map, and using an online name generator to fill in some gaps. It’s not important what those places are called, because your characters will never go there, you’re just filling up a bit of blank space. And then, out of nowhere, comes Hundredmarch Bridge, or Hallowmere Forest, or Dell of the Souls, and suddenly your characters have a whole new adventure to plan.

And you just know that the strange barmaid at the randomly named Hundred Seeing Shrines Tavern is going to have a fascinating story to tell about the Brotherhood of the Stairs. And then it’s just one thing after another.

So, yes, your map can lead you off in unexpected directions. I’ll warn you now; they’re far from being dead documents. Maps live, and breathe, and they have a habit of whispering in your ear. So beware, especially if you’re prone to chasing squirrels and other shiny objects.

Have a think about the plot and worldbuilding elements you’d like to tease with your map, the story elements that can enhance your map, and tie it tighter to the story.

Questions:

For each element, ask yourself:

What is it? How can this be shown in the map? eg: layouts, locations, or place names

And to catch all of those happy accidents, dedicate a space in your notebook to capture any ideas or place names that spark off some inspiration for you. I don’t expect you to find them all right now, but whenever one crops up, write it down. And they might not all make it into this map, or this story, but they might give you the perfect location for a future book someday. So don’t let them get away.

YOUR WORLD AS A CHARACTER

As storytellers, we spend a lot of time creating our characters. We give them goals, and flaws, and strengths, and flaws that turn out to be strengths and vice versa. We give them tragic backstories that motivate and mould them. We kill their families, break their hearts, imprison them, enslave them. We torture and traumatise them, all in the name of creating a history for them that deeply affects their present, and their future. We make them fascinating, and relatable, and spend so much time and effort in making them believable.

When we spend so much effort creating these fully-rounded, multi-faceted characters, why would we drop them into a world that’s flat and flimsy, like it’s made of paper? Your world needs to be just as fully-rounded as your characters. Just as multi-faceted.

Your world is not just a pretty backdrop. It isn’t a piece of theatre scenery, painted, unmoving, on a backboard. Something that your characters can’t interact with, or be touched by.

Your world will affect your characters, and you need to give it the opportunity to do that. Your world had an impact on your characters before they were even born; by creating the culture they would be born into, and educated in, and become an adult in. It gave them their language, their religion, their place in society. It gave them their opportunities, their chances, their desires and goals. It gave them their limitations, their barriers, their enemies. It gave them the lens with which they view the world, and with which they view themselves.

And so, you should treat your worldbuilding just as you treat your characters. Give your world its own tragic backstory. Invade it, enslave it, drain it of

resources and industrialise it. Give it a lazy king, or an oppressive government, or kill its God. Dry up its lakes, topple its mountains, ravage its seas. Give it flaws, give it strengths, give it goals of its own. Perhaps those goals align with those of your main character. Perhaps they oppose it.

Give your world a role in your story, a role in your character’s life. Give it a story of its own.

YOUR WORLD’S OWN CHARACTER ARC

Over time, your world will have changed; both the physical landscape, and the society residing there.

Forests will have been felled, mines will have been dug out. Perhaps volcanoes, earthquakes, or droughts have transformed the landscape. Maybe dragons, or wizards, or giants have changed it. Perhaps a God, bored of their creation, or perhaps seeking to improve it, reached out and moved things around.

Your world might have had to recover after war, maybe it had an election that changed everything, perhaps magic was outlawed, or education for the poor, or a traditional religion eradicated.

Whatever has happened in your world, has changed it, and shaped it, and it, in turn, has changed and shaped its people. What it means, this historical chain of constant flux, is that your world has a character arc all of its own. Some of these changes might have taken centuries, others may have happened over just a few days. Or, even, hours. Some changes may have been for the better, others may have made life far more difficult. There were probably winners and losers in each case.

If you think, for a moment, about post-apocalyptic stories, we can see a world go from something benign to something that is destructive, or deadly. It can happen in a single moment, leaving people struggling to survive. But we can also see the world redeem itself. Perhaps by wiping out huge numbers of people, it allows nature to re-wild the planet, making the air cleaner, and the water clearer. We can see a hostile environment offer up moments of hope, or sanctuaries, or maybe the world becomes a haven to those who felt unsafe in society before.

Likewise, the dystopian genre gives us another clear example of the world having its own character arc. We start in an unfair, unequal world, perhaps suffering the tyrannical rule of an oppressive government or leader. But when a hero emerges from the population, leading a revolution, they change the world for the better, pushing it into a redemption arc.

And so, just as you track the journey of change that your characters follow (whether they change for themselves, or change through the influence of others’ actions), you can also track the arc of your world’s changes.

Note down some of the major changes your world has gone through historically, or that happen during the timeline of your story. Think about the impact this has had, and how that impact is evident. And always bring it back to your characters, considering how the changes affect them, or what part they might have played in making those changes.

Questions:

For each world-changing event, ask yourself: What was it? How is that change felt?

And consider how these events, and these changes, impact the arc of your world’s character journey. Does your world redeem itself? Does it turn from benevolence to malevolence? Does it transform into something unrecognisable?

The arc might encompass changes in the physical landscape, such as we see in post-apocalyptic stories, or in the society, as seen in dystopian worlds. It might be internal changes that grow out from a central shift, such as climate change, or the readjustment of a ruling ideology or belief system. Or it might be from external pressure, a forced change that pushes in from outside, such as a revolution, or an invasion.

Write some notes on what that arc might be, and the ways in which your world changes through the story.

YOUR WORLD AS INCITING INCIDENT

Your world needs to impact on your character, and to be an important, integral part of your story. The best worlds are ones that are the only places your story could have happened. The only places your characters would be who they are. That, in another world, your characters would have made different choices, and their stories would have played out entirely differently. And your world can imprint on your story in many different ways. One of those, is as the inciting incident.

The inciting incident is the event that starts your character’s journey. The thing that happens that impacts them enough, that they simply have to set out to achieve their ultimate goal. The thing that they cannot take lying down, that changes them, and their life, significantly enough, that it pushes them off on a new course, a journey beyond their previous status quo. And your world can do this.

Again, the post-apocalyptic genre gives us a very obvious example of this. A volcano eruption, the arrival of hostile aliens, the death of the sun. A very clear inciting incident, setting your character off on their quest. This incident can be a huge range of things: your character stumbling into a forest and discovering that fae exist, or unicorns, or talking trees. It might be that magic starts to fail, or that dragons burst out of the mountains, or that water becomes poisonous. Perhaps a new law is passed, making your character’s life impossible, or their very existence illegal. Maybe they discover a magical portal, or step back in time, or are forced to seek refuge on another planet.

A recent rise in the popularity of climate change fiction, or cli-fi, offers up a whole variety of ways in which the world can act as the inciting incident. And the more positive solar-punk sub genre allows for the redemption arc, by

exploring positive outcomes, with people learning to work with the environment, rather than against it.

When your world is the inciting incident, it can either be due to the physical landscape itself, or the society built on it. This is all part of your worldbuilding; the world in which your character lives. Physically, socially, and ideologically.

Write down some ideas of how your world could be an inciting incident.

YOUR WORLD AS ANTAGONIST

The antagonist of your story is someone who stands in the way of your main character achieving their goal. They’re someone who’s own goal directly opposes that of your protagonist. Perhaps they’re both seeking the same object, for their own reasons. Maybe your character wants to uncover the truth, and your antagonist wants to keep it concealed. It may be as simple as your hero wanting to survive, and the antagonist wanting them dead. Opposing forces, opposing goals.

We often think of the antagonist as a classic villain. Doing evil. The arch nemesis of any hero. They might have a cat, and they have almost certainly perfected an evil chuckle. But your antagonist needn’t be the typical ‘bad guy’. In fact, it needn’t be a person at all. Your world can play the part of the antagonist.

Dystopian fiction offers a very clear example of this; in which an oppressive government, and a society built on deep-rooted inequality, is the antagonist. Of course, we are likely to see individual people interacting with your character as a villain, but they are an embodiment of the system as a whole. A representative of the power structure; the systems in place that oppose your character. It’s a system, no matter who the public face is.

Maybe your character’s goal is to learn magic. Perhaps to follow in their father’s footsteps, perhaps to be able to fight back against the landowner that turfed their family out of their farm, maybe to seek revenge on those who killed their brother. But perhaps low-born people are banned from learning magic, or girls are banned, or anyone who hasn’t inherited a position through their family line. The system, the laws, are your character’s antagonist, embodied in the tutor who turns down their requests, or the school that denies them access, or the guards

that arrest them for even trying.

The world might play the part of the antagonist through the institution of religion, using strict rules of morality and the threat of eternal damnation to block your character from achieving their goal. Perhaps the religion your character follows is outlawed, and its practices banned.

It might be more that the physical world is the antagonist, rather than the social structures within it. Perhaps your character seeks to cure their mother, but the plant they need is rare, or even believed to be entirely extinct. Or perhaps the herbs they need for a spell to cure their own infertility only grows in a very specific place in the world. Maybe that place is 4,000 miles away.

Don’t think of your world as a dead piece of rock. It isn’t. (To be fair, your world might actually be, but I’m going to assume it is home to an abundance of life for the purposes of this point.) Nature has its own plans, and its own goals, and it is incredibly adaptable. It is also incredibly ferocious. We, as humans, tend to quite arrogantly think we can control nature. That we’re in charge of it. And this assumption tends to be deeply rooted in the ego of, certainly Westernised, humans.

We all know the devastation that nature can cause, and how we, in so many cases, can do no more than stand back and watch the horror unfold. Volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, fires. Nature has so many ways of destroying everything we build, everything we rely on, everything we need to survive. With every high tide, nature is literally eating away at our habitat. (Arguably, that’s just what we deserve.) But every single thing that we build, nature can destroy. Just one weed can undermine a whole building.

If nature, one day, decided she’d had enough of humans, I don’t think she’d have

a hard job of wiping us out. This, of course, assumes collective sentience on nature’s part. But, who am I to say whether or not that exists? And perhaps, in your world, it does. Perhaps, in your world, simply wandering into a forest, or getting caught in a rainstorm, or just taking a breath of the air, is likely to kill you.

Perhaps your character is directly fighting against the world, seeking to bring nature back under control, to eradicate a dangerous predator, or to reverse nature’s adaptation that left all plants deadly to the touch. Or maybe the God in your world is intent on destroying itself, or simply wants to quietly die, and your character seeks to change its mind.

There are many ways in which the world can oppose your character’s ultimate goal, and seek to stop them from achieving it. But always remember that villains aren’t born, they’re made. If your world—be it part of the ideology, culture, and society, or be it the physical world itself—is playing the part of the antagonist, it needs its own goals and motivations. It needs its own inciting incident, and backstory. It needs to be treated just like a character would be.

Perhaps the world thinks it’s doing the right thing, or has chosen to sacrifice the few to save the many. Maybe it made the best decision it could in the moment. Or maybe its goals are selfish and mean-spirited. Maybe it’s motivated by a desire for money, power, or vengeance.

Consider the ways in which the world could play the part of the antagonist in your story.

YOUR WORLD AS ELDERLY MENTOR

The elderly mentor trope is one seen in practically every genre, but is especially prevalent in fantasy and science-fiction. This is an older character who teaches a younger character a skill, or wisdom, or independence. They are often seeking to ‘pass the torch’ of their knowledge, or their abilities, or their role. They may have become too weak to continue themselves, or may sense that their time is coming to an end.

Essentially, the elderly mentor is a character whose role it is to teach something to the young hero. To guide them, and give them the tools they need to continue their journey towards their final goal. It may be the teaching of a practical skill, or simply showing the hero that they are brave and capable enough for the task at hand. Because, sometimes, all a hero really needs to succeed, is a little selfbelief.

This is, absolutely, a role that can be fulfilled by your world. Through all of the trials and tribulations, barriers and conflicts that your world can throw in the way of your character, your world can teach your hero the very thing they need to know or understand in order to achieve their final goal.

You may come up with a way to let your world actually speak to your character —a talking forest, a singing rock, a mystical voice in the wind—without it coming across as comical or trite (of course, humour might be your intention), but when the world takes the role of your elderly mentor, its teachings are more likely to come through a moment of self-realisation on your character’s part.

By being the source of conflict, creating barriers in your character’s path towards their goal, your world can show your character their strengths; teaching them

that they are stronger than they thought they were, or braver, or smarter, or more cunning.

In a reverse way, it might teach them about their flaws; showing them that they are too arrogant, too vain, or too hot-headed, and that, without making a change, their flaws will be their downfall and the reason for their failure.

And it may take several conflicts for them to learn the lesson required. We can resist admitting to our strengths with equal reluctance as admitting to our faults. So, put your characters to the test via your world. Teach them bravery by facing them with loneliness, hard decisions, tough enemies. Teach them patience by facing them with getting lost, slow-burn choices, illness and injury. Give them difficulties that they fail because of their impatience or arrogance.

Do it to them over and over until, eventually, when faced with their final test, when everything hangs in the balance, give them that moment of self-realisation. Let them see what the world has been trying to show them all along.

Consider some lessons your character needs to learn along their journey, and think about the ways in which the world can teach them something valuable.

YOUR WORLD AS THE FINAL GOAL

We’ve looked at the various character roles your world can take to help your protagonist along their journey, or to hinder them. But what about when the world is their final, ultimate goal? When the world is the very thing they’re journeying towards?

Your character’s goal might be to change the world. To save it. To overhaul and reimagine it. That might be by bringing down part of the ideology, like revolting against an oppressive government, or revealing an overbearing religion as a sham. It might be pushing through a huge culture shift, and breaking down deeprooted prejudice. It might be rediscovering lost magic, or locking away magical secrets that are destructive and dangerous.

Or your character might seek to change the physicality of the world, by ending a flood or famine, by ridding the world of dragons (please don’t!), or reversing the destruction humans have done to the climate. They might be seeking a cure, or to stop an asteroid, or seek a new planet for humans to live on.

It might be that your character is trying to find their way back to their homeland. One that they were banished from, or one that they were taken from, or one that had to be evacuated, and might finally be habitable again.

If your character seeks to overhaul the world in some way, or to rediscover a world that’s been lost to them, then the world gets to play the part of the final goal.

When you take this path, remember to keep bringing it back to the singular, personal level. You want your readers to connect with your character, to be able to relate and empathise with them. It’s quite difficult to connect with the abstract idea of wanting to save the whole world, simply to make life better for everyone. It’s far easier to relate to someone wanting to rediscover lost magic in order to save their dying mother, or who wants to break down the indoctrination of a religion that exploits women, so that their daughter doesn’t have to suffer the enslavement they did.

Of course, while their goal might have started from that personal level, with them setting out to find a cure for their mother, or to find a haven for their daughter, as their mission escalates, they might find themselves leading a revolution they never intended to. Suddenly, they’re a figurehead for a campaign, an idol, a hero, leading a battle they never sought to fight.

Perhaps, on their journey to rediscover their lost homeland, they begin a mass migration, leading an entire people back to their roots. Rediscovering a lost culture, a forgotten language, resurrecting a dead religion.

Don’t be afraid to give your character a huge goal, and a massive responsibility. The reluctant or accidental hero is a popular trope, and one that I personally love. At times, such an imposing goal might overwhelm them, but if their motivations are compelling, and well-defined, and personal, that will keep them going. Keep them pursuing that goal. It also offers you an immense climax when your character reaches the point when everything seems lost. The fate of the world? Those are big stakes for you to play with!

Think about some ways in which your world can be the final goal for your character, whether they intended it or not.

CHANGES IN THE LANDSCAPE

Your world is not static. Nor does it exist in a vacuum. It has an entire history before your story began (unless your story is about the very beginnings of your world), and it will continue to have a life after your story ends (unless your story encompasses its complete destruction). And over all at that time, things have changed. Life has evolved, the landscape has altered, and history has etched its marks on both.

This history, these changes, are things that can be woven into your map. Just as you can leave hints in your map for the story to come, you can also leave breadcrumbs leading to its past.

An expanse of your map called Brownbog Desert might suggest that, once upon a time, that vast, dry expanse was boggy, water-logged wetland. An area of pasture land might be called Gilt Forest, suggesting that many trees were once felled to make way for farming. And a city street called Swan Bridge, where there is, in fact, no bridge, and no river for it to span anyway, might suggest that a river has long-since been dammed up or re-routed elsewhere. Perhaps it still flows, underneath the city’s streets.

There are many ways in which your world can change, and be changed, and many different ways that you can reflect this in your map. While the loss of Gilt Forest to farmland, and the loss of the actual bridge at Swan Bridge are evidence of social evolution, and the needs of humans, what happened at Brownbog Desert? Perhaps it was more human intervention; draining the land, removing plant life, human-caused climate change. Or maybe it was natural; just a shift in climate over time, an asteroid strike, a volcanic eruption. It may have even been magical; caused by mages, or dragons, or Gods.

Whatever the cause for the changes, you can use this method of paradoxical place names to show how your world has changed and shifted over time. It might be huge changes in the landscape, perhaps devastating changes, with wide-reaching consequences that reach out for years to come. Perhaps there is a large, rocky plain called Hellstream Flats, which is what remains of ancient lava fields. Maybe deep crevices sliced into the cliffs are called Kingsfrost Fingers, and were caused by an ice-age millions of years before. Perhaps Lostkin Canyon tells of an earthquake that split a city in two.

They might be smaller, or slower changes, giving people (and nature) time to adapt to their new situation. Rising sea levels, or coastal erosion, or the shifting of tectonic plates. But these changes can still be seen in your map with lines of mountain ranges and gulleys, with forests teetering on the edges of cliffs, or long lost towns that are now underwater.

You can also use the landscape of your world to create myths and legends. Imagine a deep gulley through a mountain range, one that splits the peaked horizon in two. Maybe that gulley is called Dragon’s Rage Pass, or Giant’s Walkway, or Hagrun Passage. While the gulley might have, in truth, been created by an earthquake centuries before, the legends that give it its name are more enticing. It also tells you something about the society that named it; the things they fear, their superstitions, their beliefs.

Another reason that your landscape might change, is through migration. The migration may have come in the form of a bloody invasion, resulting in the destruction of towns, or cathedrals, or ancient monuments. It might have seen forests removed to create space for battlegrounds, or left the landscape pitted and gouged from explosions.

Even when it’s peaceful and gradual, migration might have brought new religions, or new technologies and farming practices, or new cultural preoccupations that have changed the way people use the land. Where they’ve

felled forests, or mined the earth, or diverted rivers. Perhaps they value a different precious metal, or grow a different type of food, or import a new sport that requires large playing fields.

People like to divide up land, they like to claim ownership, and they like to protect that land from others. Borders between estates, between provinces, kingdoms, and countries are mapped, marked, and patrolled. And it’s far easier when that border is physical, and visible, and even easier when it’s a natural barrier, rather than simply a theoretical line on a map many people will never see.

Hedges and fences separate farms, but so do woodlands, and rivers, ridges, and ravines. If a landowner can stand on their property and say “My land begins at the river in the east, and ends at the western forest. In the north, it begins at the rise, and runs to the southern valley”, it’s easier for people to visualise, and understand. And it’s easier for them to protect what is theirs.

Of course, there are always disputes, and then there’s the natural world messing with things a little. Forests spread, and move. Rivers change their course and grow wider and deeper. Landslips can move ridges and rises, changing the shape of a landscape that was once clearly divided.

A border between countries that once ran along the course of a great river, may end up straying off that path. A border that once ran through a mountain range, even, can be shifted off course. Avalanches, earthquakes, volcanic activity, can all change the landscape. And that’s before you bring in any interference from people, or giants, or dragons, or whatever else exists in your world. Maybe the mages of a greedy King are tasked to move the mountains, inch by inch, to claim more of the neighbouring kingdom’s land. Maybe people mine too wide and too deep, causing cave-ins and turning a line of hills into flat, rocky moorland.

So, when you’re creating the map of your world, think about where the various borders might have originally been placed, along those natural landmarks that are easily spotted, easily claimed, but also consider where they might have strayed to due to the changing landscape.

Note down some of the changes that have happened in your world’s landscape, and how these can be shown in your map. Think about the names of places, consider the stories that might be told about unusual land formations, and think about the impact that both people, and nature, have had on shaping the land.

You can work in either direction on your world’s timeline; either thinking about how the world looks now, and working changes backwards, or deciding on how the world used to be, and working the changes forward.

Questions:

For each change, ask yourself: What is the change that has happened? What caused the change? How can this be shown on the map?

HOW PEOPLE SURVIVE IN YOUR WORLD

Every settlement on your map began as a single house, or a group of tents. It started with one person thinking ‘this would be a nice place to live’, and setting up camp there. But why this particular place, instead of over there, by those hills? Or past that forest? Or towards the coast?

Settlements aren’t chosen on sheer whim. They’re not chosen simply because of a pretty view, or tired feet. They are chosen for their resources, for their position, for their riches.

There are certain things people need, in order to survive. First and foremost, is access to clean, fresh water. Be that a spring, a stream, a great river, or a vast lake. Without fresh water, people simply cannot survive, and it must be their top priority. But water alone doesn’t make for the perfect place to settle.

Your people also need food sources, and these need to be varied, and renewable. Whether in the form of fertile earth, pasture land, a river brimming with fish, or a woodland packed with mushrooms, berries, and game, people need access to different kinds of food that they can sustain appropriate levels of (first to feed their own, second to trade).

They also need natural resources. While they may have brought tents with them, if they wish to create a permanent town that may, one day, end as a vast city, they need to be able to build houses. They might need rock, wood, mud, reeds, metals. Whatever they build their homes with, they need easy access to vast amounts of those materials. Again, first for their own needs, and then for trade if they wish to thrive as a town into the future. Easy access to these resources may come via road or river, it isn’t necessarily all available right on their doorstep.

No spot is likely to be perfect in every way. There will always be some compromises, and problems that need to be solved.

Another feature that your people will be looking for is security. How easily can they protect their town? How easily can they see approaching invaders? What kind of visibility does the position offer them, what natural barriers? But it isn’t just the threat of invaders that they will need to consider, but the threat of nature; through weather and predators. A vast forest might protect a town from a buffeting north wind, but it also conceals intruders from view. The mountains might bring plenty of rain for growing thirsty fruit, but it might also bring wolves or dragons. There are compromises to be made, but the benefits should outweigh the downfalls.

Finally, your settlers need to consider access. While they may seek to prevent intrusion, if they have no access in and out of their town for themselves, then all they are building is a prison and, eventually, a mausoleum. They will need to be able to get out to gather the resources they need, by collecting it from sources further afield, or by trading with their neighbours. They will also need to welcome buyers for what they produce, perhaps opening up a market. Visitors bring money, and they bring goods and food that can’t be sourced locally. They bring education and skills, treasures, culture, and religion. They bring stories of the world beyond. And, however crass it may sound, they also bring a wider, deeper gene pool, preventing inbreeding in the town.

Note down the names of some of the hamlets, villages, towns, and cities that will appear on your map. Note down what resources are nearby; water sources, food sources, farming land, natural resources, security and access. What is it that made that place the right place to start a town? But also consider the compromises that have to be made, consider the downfalls of each place. The things your people need to adapt to, and learn to live with.

Questions:

For each location, ask yourself: What is it called? What resources and other benefits are nearby? What are the downfalls?

HOW PEOPLE THRIVE IN YOUR WORLD

However lovely a place is, however idyllic the surroundings, eventually, people will move away. Perhaps they move to find better-paid work, or to follow a dream, to find love, or to have an adventure. Or people might be forced to move, even when they don’t want to. Famine, drought, invasion. Loss of habitat, poisoning of the earth, or having used up all of the natural resources. Even though a particular place was once perfect for a town, it might not always remain so.

Perhaps the culture changed what people want from life, or perhaps the population grew too vast too quickly. For one reason or another, there will be some places on your map that thrive and grow, while others are gradually abandoned to history.

What has happened in your world to push people to move to one place, or another? Maybe the climate has changed to a drier, hotter one, forcing people to abandon their fruit farms and move to the coast. Perhaps a rising sea level has forced them to move to higher ground. It might be that a rapid advancement in technology has moved people from the country into the cities, where education and employment are rich with opportunities for the future. Maybe a skills shortage resulted in higher wages being offered, tempting people to move from other areas. Or perhaps a new predator appeared from the wilds, in search of an easier, more abundant food source. Perhaps it brought disease with it, or a powerful curse, or an enemy’s army.

People will move to different places in order to improve their survival chances. They’ll also move somewhere because they think it will make life easier, or more lucrative, or just nicer. They might move somewhere simply because the place is considered fashionable and desirable.

Which towns in your map have grown into sprawling cities? Which have declined to half-empty hamlets?

It may be that a town was abandoned because of a landslip that buried farmland. Perhaps a dam was erected upstream, cutting off a town’s water supply. Maybe they were overrun with predators, or they mined their valuable metals into exhaustion, or the younger generations were simply tempted away by the opportunities in a nearby city.

Keep thinking back to the things people look for when deciding to settle somewhere; the fresh water, the food sources, the natural resources, security, and access. Which towns provide more of these things, and at a better consistency? Which towns are best-placed to expand, simply because they had a better position to begin with?

And consider how the needs of people change over time. Maybe they no longer need a good resource of tin. Perhaps they find a more sustainable source of wood. Or a cheaper, fast-growing source. Their main trade partners may change over time, meaning that proximity to different trade routes becomes important.

Questions:

For each thriving city, ask yourself: What is its name? What has made it so successful??

For each declining town, ask yourself: What is its name? Why has it declined?

PUTTING PEOPLE INTO YOUR MAP

When people are choosing where to settle in your world, and looking for those essential and desirable qualities in this place, or that place, they are making compromises. Some downfalls, they can learn to live with, if they’re heavily outweighed by benefits. Other things, they can change to their advantage.

They might strip out a forest to make room for pastures, or dam a stream to create a lake, and capture fish. They may flatten entire hills, or create new ones. They might carve out tunnels, or re-route rivers, flood valleys, or dry out marshes. They’ll destroy, remove, build, create, move, and shift. They’ll put their mark on the world, and their presence might be evident for centuries, or millennia, to come. So when you’re putting evidence of people into your map, remember their ancestors, and those who came before. Remember what they might have left behind.

But don’t think that people are always going to be destructive. People might rescue, save, preserve, and re-wild. Your people might seek to change the landscape to benefit their own needs, or they might look to live within nature, disturbing as little as possible, and changing themselves to fit in. Perhaps they have learnt some harsh lessons from the generations before them.

There will be evidence of people all over your map, beyond their towns and cities. There will be a network of roads and travel routes, bridges and fords, farmland and parks, monuments and megaliths. There will be evidence of their domesticity and their employment. Their religion and their culture. Their battles and their burials.

The ways in which people interact with the landscape, tells a great deal about

their culture and their beliefs. Are their roads wide and straight, cutting through anything that lies in their path, or do they meander around hills and lakes, quietly passing through the landscape without a fuss? Maybe your people prefer water for travel and trade. Maybe their settlements all hug the coast, with the inland space remaining wild and untouched. Or perhaps they have carved out great canals, or trained rivers to pass where they need them to.

Your countryside might be peppered with religious monuments; cathedrals, altars, obelisks, or stone circles. Perhaps it’s littered with the remains of ancient monuments, ones built in honour of a different God, one long-since abandoned and forgotten. Or maybe there’s evidence of magic; hills carved out into concave hollows and basins to amplify magical powers, or mountains curved into rings in order to contain it.

Your map might have evidence of ancient battles, or not so ancient ones. Vast areas of scorched, pitted earth, criss-crossed with trenches. Perhaps plant life has been unable to grow there since, leaving it barren and desolate. Maybe nature has reclaimed it, twisting vines around discarded metal structures, and fallen stone fortresses. Perhaps, as vast as the battlefield itself, is the graveyard. Maybe it’s neatly manicured, with tidy rows of headstones. Maybe it’s bleached by white flowers, or stained with red heather. Perhaps the bones have been formed into a monument, standing as a reminder of the loss and futility of war, or as a threat to any enemies that might consider invading again.

When you’re thinking about how your people have impacted your map, the markers and evidence they’ve added, don’t limit yourself to locations that appear within your story. You can add other locations and landmarks that reveal things about your world and your people’s culture, about their history and their beliefs. You can use your map to reveal themes of your book, and to fully explore your worldbuilding, even if your characters never actually go there themselves. Of course, it also gives you scope for other books in the series, or spin-off series, or prequels. You never know what new stories your map might reveal to you.

Think of some ways in which your people have added to your world map, either historically, or in the present time of your story. Think about how they might impact your story, your characters, and their journeys. And think about what they might represent; what they reveal about your world, your people, their history, and culture.

Questions:

For each landmark or evidence of people, ask yourself: What is it? How did it come to be? What does it represent?

HOW SOCIETY CHANGES

As society evolves, and people’s lives change, the way in which they use, move around, and impact the world changes too. As technology evolves, they might need bigger and wider roads. They might build railway lines. They might change the resources they dig out of the earth, and the waste products they leave behind. They might require more farmland, more wood, fewer lakes.

As society evolves, and the needs and desires of people change, they might make huge, even irreversible changes to the world they live in. They might eradicate certain plants, and wipe out certain animals. They might pollute the oceans or the air. But don’t only think in terms of destruction, society might evolve to become more aware of the precious planet on which they live. They might rewild areas, withdrawing human intervention, and leaving nature to do what it does best. The human population might suddenly decrease, or technology might fail, or a change in religion might shift a change in priorities.

Or it might be little changes, such as how the names of towns and streets change over time. But those changes can also display bigger, more significant shifts. Legion Street might represent a war from centuries past, in a society that now values pacifism above all else. Miller Square might be filled with factories run solely by robots and automated machines, while people unable to find employment beg on the street outside. Dead Avenue might lead to a housing estate where the ruins of an old cathedral are disappearing under the foundations of a new shopping centre.

These can act as little nods to cultural and social changes that have happened over time: shifts in ideologies, shifts in technology, shifts in land-use and the practical needs of the population. Perhaps the changes have completely disconnected society from its past. Perhaps it’s a past they wish to forget.

Perhaps it’s one they wish to systematically erase. Renaming Gallows Walk, Sorcerers Lane, or Skull Street with more innocuous names.

When you’re creating your map, don’t just think about the things that are there now, think about the things that used to be there too. There might be ruins of ancient buildings in your map. Maybe a village under the water of a lake, the rooftops only becoming visible when the water level is at its lowest. It might be that everything above ground has been left to nature, while humans have been forced to adapt to living underground as the planet heats up.

One social change that you can show in your map, is a change in the major religion or belief system. Your map might have stone circles or monoliths that have been broken and torn down by an intruding religion, changing from a place that people revered, to one that represents evil and lost souls. There might be ancient, forgotten temples hidden in forests, or cathedrals whose stone has been removed to build houses instead.

You can also portray changes in government, and the laws that they pass. Perhaps the capital city is having a fortified wall constructed around it, with turrets and towers. Maybe there’s a large castle constructed, with a town attached called New Fort. It might be that your new government has outlawed magic, and Mage’s Tower, once a focus at the centre of your map, is now just a pile of bricks. Perhaps your government is against scientific discovery, and the many research centres on your map are now marked as ‘decommissioned’. Maybe your government no longer wishes to trade with its overseas neighbours, and the harbours and ports have been removed or blocked off.

If your country is at war with its neighbour, your map might have refugee camps, with people flocking to the mountains, or the coast, in search of sanctuary. Your map might show military camps, with large tents housing the soldiers, along with hastily erected structures and buildings. It might be that this war has been simmering for decades, even centuries, and your military force is well-

established along the border with castles and fortified encampments.

The amount of detail that you can include in your map, entirely depends on its style. You might have a full world map, zoomed right out, with towns marked as nothing more than a spot and a name. You might, on the other hand, have a map of a much smaller area, allowing for closer details. But don’t think that these are your only options. You can include important landmarks out-of-scale. Either drawing them in larger than they would really be, or by using a marker to highlight them. It’s more important for your map to tell the story you need it to, than for it to be a perfect, to-scale recreation of a landscape.

You can also choose to include two place names for each location: the original name, and the new name. The name in different languages or dialects. The local name, and the official one. Maybe places are known by different names depending on someone’s religion. Or their gender. Or whether they’re dwarven, elvish, or vampiric.

However you wish to highlight changes in your map, you’re free to do so. Your map exists to tell your story, not to simply be an inch-by-inch recreation of the landscape in which the story happens.

Note down some of the changes that have happened in your world’s society, and how these can be shown in your map.

You can work in either direction on your world’s timeline; either thinking about how the world looks now, and working changes backwards, or deciding on how the world used to be, and working the changes forward.

Questions:

For each change, ask yourself: What is the change that has happened? How can this be shown on the map?

NAMING PLACES

Naming places is one of my favourite parts of making a map. It’s where you can pack in stories, and hidden meanings, and Easter eggs for the story to come. Just as you might have spent time finding the perfect character names, with meanings that match your character’s role or personality, you can take care with choosing your place names.

Or, of course, you can randomly pick a name, and then decide why it might be called that, or use the name to inform your map and your story. However you’re happiest to do it. Or a mix of the two approaches.

Depending on the area your map covers, you might be naming lots of different things. Streets, and individual buildings. Villages, towns, and cities. Forests, rivers, mountain ranges, moorland, marshes, deserts. You might be naming countries, continents, and oceans. You might even be naming planets, stars, and galaxies.

And there are lots of ways that you can choose to name places. You might name them by what they’re close to. The Yellow Caves might be part of the Yellow Mountains. Maybe the forest there is called the Golden Forest, or the Forest of the Sun. Maybe a mountain town is called Torchbit, or Flamebrook, or just Yellowvale.

You might have a moorland town called Bayhills, or one in a vast valley named Undermeadows.

Places might be named after the natural resources that are found there, perhaps the very thing that made the town prosperous. Wine Bridge, Saltshadow, Silverpoole, or Bronze Ridge. Or there might be something else that draws people to a particular place: Fellcastle, Blacken Quays, Altarport, Hidden Church.

Perhaps they’re named after the local wildlife, whether friend or foe. Dogbarren, Gorewolf, Grimdeer, or Duckfields.

Places are also named after their founders, or their saviours, or their patron saints. They are sometimes named after local legends and stories. Names might incorporate a part of the place’s history, or something for people to be wary of. Wanderer’s Drop, Unclean Bay. They might be a holy place, or a place of power. Spirit Tor, Celestial Heights.

The names of the different locations are prime real estate for telling stories through your map. While you can use the landscape and settlements to show some of your story, you can use the names to tell it. In this case, tell is better than show. It allows you to be more direct. But you can still be subtle. It’s up to you whether you choose a name like Skeleton Friary, or dampen it down to Gravemay. And you can still use names to surprise people. Maybe visitors to Moundgold find the riches they were hoping for. Maybe it’s simply the nicest place to watch the sunset.

Names can tell your stories. Or they can give you new stories of their own.

Dedicate a space in your notebook to capturing some ideas for names. Consider why a place is called what it is. Think about the hints and suggestions you’re feeding to your readers using those names. Remember to consider the history of a place, and what might be important to the people who live there.

And, while you shouldn’t seek to confuse your readers, remember that names are re-used all the time. You might have Upper Grayen and Lower Grayen. You might have Helmsrift and New Helmsrift. You might have the town of Hornsay at the edge of Hornsay Forest. So mark down any gatherings of names, and ways you can use them to tie places together, or to remind your readers of their proximity during your story.

Questions:

For each place, ask yourself: What is its name? What’s the story behind the name? What similar names can be found nearby?

DRAWING YOUR MAP

Now that we’ve worked through all the preparation, and the theory side, let’s move onto the part I’m sure we’re all excited about; drawing the map.

First up, let me say this: we all start somewhere. You may already have amazing artistic skills or, like me when I first started, you might have none at all. That’s fine. What you’ll see in this book is the result of two years of practising, learning, practising, improving, and practising. Don’t expect this to come naturally and automatically. We all have to start somewhere. And it might be that the first few maps you draw never see the light of day. That’s fine. You don’t publish the first draft of your book, and you needn’t publish the first draft of your map either.

My style has adapted and changed over time, and I’m constantly picking up new tips and methods, and evolving the way I do things. So don’t try to be perfect first try. Your first maps might look nothing like what they’ll look like further down the line.

In the following sections of this book, I’ll be showing you how I draw maps. This is far from being the only way to do it, and I certainly won’t claim that it’s the best way to do it either. This is simply how I do things, in my style. I’m aiming to give you lots of different methods to try, so that you can find your own style, and offer some pointers along the way.

Just promise me one thing; even if you’re anxious about drawing, even if you think you’ll fail, just try to have fun with it. Don’t put pressure on yourself, because it doesn’t need to be perfect. You don’t have to show it to anyone. Ever. Just do this for you, and for fun. You have plenty of time to get serious about it

later.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

You can draw a map with whatever you feel comfortable using, and you can draw it on anything you fancy. If you want to practice in pencil, with an eraser close at hand, do so. If you want to use felt tip pens, crayons, watercolours, charcoal, quill and ink, whatever you’re happiest drawing with, use that. You can even follow these methods with a graphics tablet and pen, creating your map digitally.

When I first started drawing maps, I was simply drawing them onto standard printer paper with a Paper Mate felt tip pen. Nothing fancy, merely what I had to hand. As I’ve got more serious about my maps, my tools have changed, and I’ve found my favourites.

I’ve always been very particular about my stationery, and have found, over the years, my favourite brand of rollerball pen, and my favourite brand of notebooks. I am, absolutely, a stationery snob. And I say that without any shame, because you shouldn’t feel any shame over that. Find your favourite brands, and stick with them. Try out other suggestions, and they might work better, or they might not. Be stubborn and selective, and pay no heed to anyone who laughs at you for that.

So, here are the tools that I prefer. These are what work best for me, and I welcome you to try them out, and if you prefer something else, then use that instead.

Pens:

When it comes to pens, I like the Uni Pin fine liners. My standard choice, for drawing practically everything, is the brush tip one. Their fine liners come in a wide range of both colours and sizes. I’ve recently bought myself a 0.03 gauge fine liner, for doing tiny details, and I love it. But it’s not an everyday pen. I wouldn’t draw a large map with it.

And I have their fine liners in black, which is my standard choice, as well as sepia, dark grey, and light grey. I can give a map more variance and depth by using the different colours together, or I can draw a whole map in either grey or sepia tones.

The reason I love these pens, beyond the variety of choice, is that they are waterproof. This means that I can stain and distress my map after having drawn it, rather than being restricted to only doing it beforehand.

Paper:

And so, let’s move on to talk about paper. As I said, you can draw on anything you wish, and I’ve drawn maps on everything from handmade papers, to fabric, and wood. But, my preference is a good quality watercolour sketchbook. I like the thickness of the paper, the texture of it, and I like that I can soak it in coffee, or spray it with water.

Colour:

I don’t use colour in many of my maps, but when I do, I tend to use the Winsor & Newton watercolour markers with a refillable water brush pen to mix and apply the colours. This allows you to get very soft, subtle shades, and they mix

really beautifully, whether you want to create a solid mixed colour, or if you want a gradient from one colour to another.

I also use Ranger’s Tim Holtz Distress Crayons. These can give a bold colour, if applied directly to the paper, or they can be used in the same way as watercolour markers for a more subtle wash. You can also blend them with blending pads, or your fingers if you don’t mind getting messy! They’re incredibly versatile.

The other colours I use are Uni POSCA paint markers. These come in a large range of sizes, from huge, chunky markers to fine liners. I tend to use these when I’m drawing on alternative surfaces, such as wood. They give a bold, bright colour on a variety of materials, and can also be watered down.

Ageing the Paper:

I use all sorts of different things to age the paper. One of my favourites are the range of Tim Holtz Distress Ink and Distress Oxide pads by Ranger. I use a blending pad to stain around the edges of the map. The Distress Oxide gives a darker, thicker coverage than the ink, and it also reacts wonderfully to water, which brings out many different colours in it. But it’s a little less predictable and controllable than the ink.

I also use Tim Holtz Distress Spray Stain, also by Ranger, to squirt droplets across the map. Just note that this takes a long time to completely dry, and I usually leave it to air for 24 hours or more.

And then, there are the classics; coffee, tea, rust, and burning. I use lit incense sticks to burn the paper, as I find it far more controllable than a naked flame. It

smoulders the paper, instead of catching it alight, and you can easily leave burn marks without it burning all the way through the paper, especially if you’re using thick paper.

So, these are the tools and tricks that I use, and I encourage you to have a play with them. But, in the long run, you need to find the tools and methods that work for you. The ones that you prefer using, and the final effects you like to create.

LAND

When I’m drawing a map, I always start with drawing the coastline; laying out the land against the sea. Adding islands, and inlets, channels, and coves. This is, essentially, the main outline of your map, so it makes sense to start here.

Take a look at some coastline on a map. It doesn’t matter where in the world you look. It’s not a smooth line, it’s jagged, and it moves in and out raggedly, creating headlands and points, as well as bays and natural harbours.

To draw this, I hold the pen tightly and stiffly, tensing the muscles in my hand and arm. I jolt my way along the coastline, creating a rough, rocky edge. It takes some practice, so don’t worry about getting it right first time.

After drawing the coastline, I add islands. Again, if you look at islands on a world map, you’ll find that they come in all different shapes and sizes. Remember, you might also have islands that have been created unnaturally; by magic, or ancient battles between giants. If you’re creating a fantasy world, or an alien one, or a post-apocalyptic one, you aren’t bound by the geology of our world.

There are many ways in which islands are formed. It might be due to volcanic activity, or tectonic plate shifts. It might be because of erosion, with the sea separating a piece of land from another. It might be due to glacial retreat, or sediment deposition, where the sea has carried earth and rocks from elsewhere. Or it could be due to coral reef expansion. And so, there are many types of islands, created in many different ways. So don’t get too hung up on making it look ‘accurate’. Just have fun experimenting.

And always be thinking about your story. What landmasses do you need? What kind of proximity do you need between different countries and kingdoms? Can you use the layout of your land to make your character’s journey more difficult? Or to help them along the way?

Try out drawing some landmasses. I want you to scribble, and play, and experiment. Get it wrong, get it right, learn. Use a smart, new sketchpad, or feel free to grab a scrap of paper that can go in the bin afterwards. Whatever makes you comfortable, go with that.

SEA

Once you’ve drawn in all of your land, the space that is left becomes your sea. There are lots of different ways to depict this, so I really want you to have a play around, and see what you prefer.

Here are a few different methods for you to play with.

Unlike the jagged edge of the coastline, the sea is curvy and soft-edged. You can trace your pen, flowingly, around your coastline to create the sea, either in a consistent line, or by lightly letting it skip across the paper, creating a line with uneven breaks and varying thickness. Or you can choose to partially or fully fill the space of the sea with either heavier, more graphic lines, or lighter, more subtle ones.

Just be aware that, whichever style of sea you choose, this will set the style for your whole map. If you choose a heavier, more graphic design for the sea, you want to keep this same graphic style for the whole map. It will make your map look consistent and balanced. Likewise, if you opt for a more subtle, realistic style, stick with a similar look for all of the elements of your map.

Have a play, adding sea to the coastline you’ve already drawn.

MOUNTAINS AND HILLS

The next thing I do, is work out where my highest ground is. This is important for drawing your rivers, so I like to do this first.

Mountains are created when tectonic plates move, pushing together, and forcing the land upwards. And so, mountain ranges form in lines. In another world, one with magic, or rock giants, or dragons sleeping underground, you might have mountains formed in other ways. Perhaps, then, they can be in circles, or spirals, or even form letters or runes. But this is something that would need to be explained in your worldbuilding, and explored in your story.

I’ll show you two different ways to draw mountains: individually, and as ridges.

To draw individual mountains, begin with a pair. Make their outline jagged and rocky, like your coastline. Vary their size, and the angle of their slopes to create some interest and variety.

Next, give them a front edge. You can make this line smooth and curvy, or a sharp-angled zig-zag. It’s all about experimenting to find the style you prefer.

Then, give your mountains some 3D definition by shading one side. Again, have a play and see what you like. You can use dots, lines, full shading, or something else. Try to match the style of your mountains to the style of your water: delicate and realistic, graphic and bold.

Next, we’ll turn those two mountains into a whole range. You can add some individual mountains, or groups of three, just to mix it up a little. Remember to create your mountain range in a loose line (unless the shape has been influenced by something other than natural tectonic plate movement). You can place the mountains tightly together, or more roughly and randomly. It depends on the overall feel you’d like your mountains to have.

And you can take a cue from your society; do they view the mountains as an imposing, ominous presence, or as a welcome and generous giver of essential resources? You can reveal clues about your world through the actual stylistic choices for your map.

Rather than individual mountains, you may wish to create singular ridges of mountains. This can take a little more practice to get the look you want, and gives a very different finished look than the individual mountains.

Begin with a jagged line, just like drawing your coast. Give it plenty of welldefined peaks and troughs.

Next, add some gently curved lines to define the front edge of the mountains. Use your top line to guide where to draw downward lines, as if you were drawing folds in fabric. Keep them light and broken, rather than solid stripes.

To create the rear side of your mountains, use that top line again to define where you would be able to see the back edge. Give it some definition with some shading. I prefer dots, which give the colour some variation, but you might prefer lines or solid shading. Solid black makes for a much more imposing mountain line, which may, or may not, be the feel you’re looking for.

You can then build up a full range of mountains with ridges of varying lengths, or you might want a single ridgeline running the full length along. As with the single mountains, you can pack them together tightly to create a more compact and oppressive feel, or further apart for a more casual effect. It all depends on what you want to achieve. What you want your mountains to say.

In exactly the same way, you can create hills. You might want them to represent a moorland, or grazing pastures, or simply to fill an otherwise empty space.

Hills are shorter and more gently curved than mountains, and I give them a little shadow along the bottom for more depth and definition. As with the mountains, you can group the hills however you choose, and as tightly or loosely as you like.

Have a go at drawing mountains and hills. Try out different styles, and find what works well for you and the map you wish to create.

RIVERS AND LAKES

There’s a few things to remember about water, and the most important one, to keep repeating to yourself as you lay out your map, is that water always flows from higher ground to lower ground. It is as subject to gravity as you or I.

Of course, in a world with magic, you might want to have a waterfall that flows upwards, and you absolutely can do that. But it’s probably exhausting for the team of royal wizards tasked with controlling the flow 24-7. It’s nothing more than a vanity project for the king, and while it draws a lot of income from tourists, it also takes its toll. Exhausted, over-worked, stressed out wizards who are constantly needing time off to replenish their magic. So, for the sake of those wizards, always remember that water, naturally, flows downhill.

And that journey downhill will lead the rivers, eventually, to the sea. So, always remember which way your water is flowing.

Another thing to remember about rivers is that they often join together, but they very rarely split. You can have a delta, of course, at the coast, where the river splits into a web of smaller rivulets, depositing sand and mud between the streams, but they’re not overly common, so use them sparingly.

Also, water, like humans, likes to take the easier path. If something’s in its way, it will simply flow around it. Hills, rocks, trees. If the land slopes left, the water flows left. If it slopes right, it flows right. Yes, over time, water can rip its way through anything, creating great ravines through rock, but it takes many more years than your story is likely to cover. But in your map, you can draw in the effects of ancient waterways, whether they still flow or not.

Let’s have a word about lakes too. Just like any other water, they are subject to gravity. They pool in dips and dents, or grow out from river bends. While they might have several rivers feeding into them from the top, they tend to only have one river leading out at the bottom. Obviously, at the lowest point, as gravity pulls the water downwards.

There are lakes that don’t flow out into a river, simply sitting in the landscape. Just be aware that these tend to be salty, picking up minerals from the rock, and having no way for them to flow away again.

When you’re drawing your rivers and lakes, match the style of them to your sea. This will make all the water on your map consistent, and easily distinguishable from other elements. You can make them delicate and graceful, or you can use bold, heavy lines to make them stand out.

Your choice might depend on the kind of society you have. While water is, of course, of great importance to all life, if your society relies heavily on fishing, and harvesting reeds, and growing rice, their preoccupation with water can be shown in your map, by highlighting those water sources.

Remember that many of your towns will be gathered alongside the rivers and around the coastline, so keep that in mind as you draw your water routes. Consider crossing points and places where people might have re-routed rivers, created reservoirs, drained land, or used it for the irrigation of crops.

You might want to include a mega river, long and wide, and place several towns along it. Perhaps your main city is clustered on either bank, with numerous bridges spanning it. Maybe all of your water sources are bunched together in one half of your land, while the other half is arid, dry, and devoid of civilisation.

Have a play with drawing some rivers and lakes. Any that you like, you can trace into your final map. Have fun trying out some different ways to illustrate the water, and maybe even try drawing some rivers that seem impossible!

FORESTS AND WOODLAND

In the years since I started learning to draw maps, my forests are the element that have changed the most. And that’s the thing; you’re free to learn new techniques over time, adapting and evolving your style as you go.

Begin as if you’re drawing an island. I like to make the edges jagged, but you might choose to make them curvy and cloud-like instead.

Next, draw some trunks to help your forest stand up. Think about where they would and wouldn’t be visible, drawing them straight down from the canopy of leaves.

You may wish to add some shading around the bottom, either with the same colour or a lighter colour, just to give your forest some depth.

Now you can add some definition to the leaves. Use scratchy curved lines, little letter ‘c’s to add some shading. You can start with heavier shading on one side, fading it out as you move across the forest. Or you can focus the shading all the way around the edge, fading it towards the middle. For an evergreen forest, you can change the ‘c’s for upside down ‘v’s (a circumflex ^).

Another way that you can show definition is with lighter lines, stretching, with breaks, across the width of the forest, much like drawing waves. Make them curved to give the canopy of leaves an overall shape. Just one word of warning; avoid this method if it looks too similar to how you’re drawing your water. You want the forests to be easily distinguishable from lakes, so make sure they look very different.

You can also add small, individual trees around the edge of your forests to break up the solid shape of them.

If you’re opting for a more graphic style of map, there are other ways to draw forests. Remember that there is no need to illustrate every single tree in your woodland. You can use just a few trees to represent an entire forest. You just need to suggest the whole thing.

You can draw collections of trees, oversized to the scale of your map, to represent a larger gathering of shrubs. You can use different shapes for different types of trees, and you can add shading, or even draw a winter forest, or a longdead woodland.

It can take some time to get forests right, so don’t fret if they’re not coming out how you want them to straight away. Just play, and try things, and take a break before trying again.

MARSHES, DESERTS, AND DESOLATE SPACES

Sometimes, you might end up with large, empty spaces on your map. Expanses of uninhabitable land, or places where the only towns are clustered around the edge. Wildlands, scrubland, moorland. Deserts, glaciers, rocky plains. Marshes, bogs, and grasslands.

Of course, there’s no problem with having empty spaces on your map. You don’t need to cover every inch of it with illustrations. But, perhaps it looks too empty, giving your map an unfinished look. Or you want to aim for a busy, highly detailed map. There are some ways that you can fill those gaps.

Let’s start with deserts. Huge expanses of sand, and nothing much else. To represent the sand, I use a series of dots. I tend to group them in threes for no other reason than liking how it looks. But you might prefer to make them more random than that, or group them differently.

You can add small stones scattered around, just to break up the sand a little and add more interest.

Or you might choose to put in rocky ridges or sand dunes. You can draw ridges similarly to the solid mountain ranges, starting with a shaky line, and using that line to dictate where you add downward lines, like drawing creases in fabric. Add some extra stones to give it a rocky look.

These shallow ridges can also be used in empty rocky places, or in glacial areas, perhaps with the addition of long cracks through the ice.

You might choose to add some cacti or dry shrubs. You could add sand dunes, drawn in the same way as hills. Remember that dunes are created by the wind blowing the sand around, so use long, sweeping lines, all pulling in the same direction.

Of course, it might be that your desert has an oasis, complete with a large pool and green vegetation. Or it might have a temple in amongst the dunes, or a sprawling city that has tapped into the resources of the desert. But these are some handy tips for breaking up the empty expanse of a desert.

Switching from dry to wet, let’s look at some ways that you can illustrate boggy marshland.

You might choose a more simple representation for marshes by simply scattering some marsh grasses across the space. If you’re filling spaces with grass elsewhere on your map, make sure the marshland looks different to distinguish it from grassland.

Alternatively, you might like to draw the waterways and rivulets that make the marshland what it is. There are many different types of wetland, and the water pools, puddles, and flows in lots of different ways. An online search for photos of marshes will show you countless different landscapes. If you feel confident, you can have a go at illustrating some.

I tried, and after quite a lot of attempts, and a lot of abandoned sketches, I settled on this snaking river. The rivulets branch off at the outer curves as the main river meanders back and forth, with smaller and smaller branches of water coming off them, all snaking around one another.

As before, the way in which you choose to illustrate your marshland can give a hint about the way your society views it. It might be a vital and important source of natural resources and food, it might be an important wildlife reserve. Perhaps it’s a place of stagnant water full of disease, heavy mist that leads travellers off the path, superstitions and stories about ghosts and dark magic.

In your map, you might have large spaces of grass. Plains, moors, pastures. In fact, plains are one of the major landforms, covering more than one third of our planet’s landmass. You might have animals that roam vast expanses of grazing land. Don’t mistake large areas of grassland for useless or wasted land. They might be of great importance to your people.

I tend to start by treating grass the same way I treat sand; scattered groups of three to represent short grass, lengthening the lines for longer grass. Again, remember to differentiate the grassland from other land types.

Perhaps your society has large expanses of farmland and grazing land, with their economy heavily reliant on agriculture. Section the land into rough, uneven shapes, striping it for ploughed fields (alternate the direction of the stripes to show distinction between the different fields), and illustrating grazing fields with grass.

You can thicken the borders between the fields to create hedgerows, or add dots at regular intervals to represent fences.

Consider how your society might use these spaces, and what they might take from them. Think about how they might try to control and cultivate them, and how they may have changed over the generations.

Just because somewhere might be a difficult place to live, it doesn’t mean people don’t live there. Maybe there are cultural or religious reasons for living somewhere remote. The most desolate spaces of your map might be the most important; criss-crossed with powerful ley lines, peppered with standing stones, or even home to a city built up around monasteries and temples.

Or there might be hidden value in the land; gemstones, healing plants, underground waterways.

Try out drawing some empty spaces. Try out different grasses, draw some ridges, add some fields.

TOWN MARKERS AND OTHER LABELS

There are countless ways to show where your towns and cities are on your map. It depends on the style of your map, the amount of detail and space already on it, and whether your map covers a wide, zoomed-out area, or a smaller, closer focus.

You can, absolutely, keep it simple with nothing more than a small circle or square. You can use small squares to represent buildings, to show the sprawl and spread of towns, embracing their irregular shapes. Or you can go for something far more complex. It’s entirely up to you.

If you’re feeling confident, you can go for something far more ambitious.

If you want to create town markers like these, think about which illustrations will fit the feel of your map and your world. What’s important in your society? What’s important in their history? You might want to use flags and banners, or crests and coats of arms. You might opt for shields, or metal plaques, or broken wooden signs. Maybe even bones, or bottles, or ship’s sails.

Choose something that matches the world you have built, something that matters to the people who live there.

And if you’re feeling really fancy, you can create individual markers for each place, illustrating an important or unique aspect of that town, be it a particular building, or a landmark in the surrounding landscape. Just be aware that such markers take up a considerable amount of space, so you might want to keep the rest of your map quite sparse.

Of course, it’s not just towns that you’ll be labelling. You might also be marking down names of countries, forests, rivers, oceans, mountains.

You can write place names in straight lines, or you can shape them to the landscape, and curve them along rivers. Just be wary of letters ending up upsidedown, and you might want to keep any sideways text on a similar rotation as one another, like the spines of books.

Remember that the placement of your labels might interfere with details such as the lines depicting water, or the shading on your forests, so you may wish to add labels as you go, or leave the extra details of the landscape until last.

You don’t need to do anything fancy, and if you want your landscape to be the main focus of your map, you probably want to use a plainer, simpler method for labelling. Fancy, heavily illustrated labels will pull people’s attention, so only use them if that’s where you want the attention to be. Otherwise, keep it simple, and let the landscape be the focal point.

And you can choose whether you put your labels inside, in amongst each landscape feature, or if you keep them separate, wrapping them around the outside. Have a play, and see which works best with the rest of your map.

Try out some different types of markers and writing styles. Go back over your previous illustrations, and add labels to your forests and mountains, and coastlines.

SPECIAL POINTS OF INTEREST

Your map might have special points of interest; locations that have an important role in your story that you wish to highlight in the map. Remember, your map does not need to be a perfectly to-scale reproduction of the real landscape. Your map exists to enrich your story, and to tell stories of its own. No one is ever going to try to actually navigate their way around your fantasy world with it.

When you go to a theme park, or a zoo, you’ll find a map inside the leaflets. They’re attractive and bright, aiming to catch your eye (and imagination) as much as to help you navigate the park. There are elements they wish to highlight, and you’ll see that the gorilla’s enclosure, or the nocturnal house are bigger than the scale of the map. They’re zoomed in. The roller coasters are huge, the drop slides massive. It’s not seeking to be a perfect reproduction of reality, it’s designed to attract you to the parts that interest you. It’s designed to draw you into the adventure.

In the same way, you can highlight items in your map by playing with the scale. You can have giant waterfalls, out-of-scale buildings, humongous bridges.

Or you can use those town markers again to mark other important places; singular buildings, river crossings, local attractions, religious sites. Just remember to keep the style of your map consistent, whatever labelling methods you use.

Have a go at illustrating the important places in your map. Think about whether you want to highlight them more than your towns and cities, or if you want to keep all the labels the same.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Once you’ve decided on the style of your map, and all of your different elements, it’s time to put it all together into one map.

First, think about where things need to be in relation to each other. If a particular event in your story needs to happen on the coast, make sure it happens there. Or if your characters need to cross mountains, make sure they have two locations with the mountains in between. It seems obvious, but it’s easy to get carried away!

And consider the spacing on your map. Don’t bunch everything into one corner (unless you’ve created an apocalyptic scenario where 90% of the land becomes uninhabitable). Use the full space, spread things out. Think about where your labels are going so that they don’t get lost into the details.

Make sure your map is clear, and easy to understand. Walk around it with your fingers, and check that your characters are able to travel everywhere they need to.

Add in some little Easter eggs for your readers to find. Add in some jokes, or red herrings. Add in side-stories, and surprises. Have fun playing, and try not to get hung up on making it perfect.

Like everything, it takes practice. So allow yourself the mistakes, the stumbles, the re-draws. Allow yourself to be bad before you become good. That’s why we invented erasers.

A WORD ON INFO DUMPING AND LEARNING CURVES

Once you have completed your worldbuilding, and you are ready to start writing your story, you need to consider how, and how much, of this information to include.

Don’t think that you will be including every ounce of what you’ve worked on. You won’t. You shouldn’t. I know, I know, you worked hard on it, but it wasn’t wasted, even if it never makes it into your book. It helped you to understand your world, so that you can write about it in an informed, attached, and immersive way. So that you can make it all the more real for your readers.

An ‘info dump’ is the term used for when a writer pours out information onto the page as if they are writing a history text book. It’s dry, it’s dull and, more often than not, it’s confusing.

I’m sure you will have heard the old adage ‘show don’t tell’. This means that you should be showing your readers your worldbuilding, through action and dialogue, not simply telling them via a historical lecture.

The absolute best way to teach your readers about your world, is through action. This might be your character clashing with police, or it may simply be them navigating the world.

Let me expand on that: if something in your world is absolutely normal, however far removed it is from our world, if you character treats it, and reacts to it, as if it is entirely regular and everyday, then you are teaching your readers about your

world through action.

Say, for example, centaurs are a common sight in your world. If your character treats them with no surprise at all, talking to them as if they are another human, then your readers learn that centaurs and humans live alongside one another equally. Or perhaps your character ridicules, or bullies the centaurs. Or they treat them with respect, or fear. This is what you are teaching your readers about what is the norm in your world. Through action. This is the ideal way to show your worldbuilding.

It’s not always so easy.

And so, the next best way is through dialogue. Again, avoid huge blocks of information. This is no different to info dumping, you’re simply letting the history lecture come out of a character’s mouth. However, they can have a conversation with a friend about a historical aspect of the world, or a cultural aspect. A conversation. Not a lecture.

Sometimes, however, you need to break the rules.

I’m not saying that you must never simply tell your readers information. Sometimes it’s necessary. Sometimes it’s even the better option. But do it with careful consideration, and do it sparingly. Rules are, certainly in creative pursuits, meant to be broken.

If you’re concerned about whether or not you’re getting the balance right, the best way is through the use of beta readers. Beta readers read through early, prepublication versions of books, and give honest feedback that allows the author to

improve their story. If you’ve got the balance wrong, beta readers can tell you.

Another way to learn this is through reading, reading, and reading. Take careful note of how other authors handle the dilemma. How they get the balance right, and how they get it wrong.

The other way is simply through practice. The more you write, the more you drill down into your personal style and voice, the better you are likely to get at it.

The way in which you give worldbuilding information to your readers also depends on the complexity of your world, and how different it is to ours.

If you’re writing about earth, whether in the present, past, or future, there are many things your readers will already know. They understand about time, and seasons. They know the animals, the plants. They know what humans are like, and how they interact. The learning curve of your world may be quite a gentle one.

Everything in your world that is different to our real world, adds to the learning curve of your book. Every mythical creature, every imagined technology, every drop of magic, and every jargon word makes that curve a little bit steeper.

You want to ease your readers in. If, in chapter one, you expect them to learn everything about your world and its history, learn who the characters are, and absorb their struggles and goals, they will be exhausted by the time they get to chapter two.

Tell them what they need to know. They don’t need 5 million years worth of military history. They may need flashes of it, but not the entire thing. Be gentle with them. Don’t make them do too much work, and don’t leave them floundering around your story loaded down with too much knowledge.

Again, these are things that you can learn and improve on with the help of beta readers, by reading, reading, reading, and by simply practising your craft. You will find your way, I promise, but I can’t tell you how to do it, because we are all different. And our stories are different. And our voices are different.

You might write short 50,000 word novels, and leave a lot of the deeper worldbuilding out. You might write 150,000 word epics, with readers who expect a much more immersive experience. Practice, experiment, and you’ll find the right balance for you, your books, and your readers.

IDEAS DUMP

As you work your way through this book, you are bound to have flashes of ideas popping into your mind. Character and story ideas, that don’t quite belong with the workbook prompts.

Don’t lose them; those little flashes are important.

Instead, reserve a few notebook pages or create a document as something of an ideas dump. Some of these may never make it into your finished book, but, you never know, you may be able to recycle them into other stories.

No idea is ever wasted…

WANT EVEN MORE WORLDBUILDING?

Our adventures don’t have to end here…

You can explore the rest of my series of worldbuilding guides for authors, guiding you through the basics of worldbuilding, helping you to create magic systems and religions, to write dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, and to create histories rich with myths and monsters.

Find more information on all of my workbooks and other worldbuilding services at stepbystepworldbuilding.com

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ABOUT ANGELINE TREVENA

Angeline Trevena was born and bred in a rural corner of Devon, but now lives among the breweries and canals of central England with her husband, their two sons, and a few turtles. She is a dystopian urban fantasy and post-apocalyptic author, a podcaster, and events manager.

In 2003 she graduated from Edge Hill University, Lancashire, with a BA Hons Degree in Drama and Writing. During this time she decided that her future lay in writing words rather than performing them.

Some years ago she worked at an antique auction house and religiously checked every wardrobe that came in to see if Narnia was in the back of it. She's still not given up looking for it.

Find out more at stepbystepworldbuilding.com