Leo Tolstoy once set out to write novel about the Russian defeat of Napoleon’s armies. As he researched the history leading up to the events of 1825, he decided to sketch out a few notes and stories that would give him a better grasp of the historical context of the Napoleonic Era in Russia. His research slowly began to consume him, and after a period of time, he realized that his trove of notes had become the story. So, ironically, the novel he set out to write about the Russian defeat of Napoleon was never written. Instead, his background material coalesced into War & Peace, one of the greatest books of the nineteenth century.
Tolstoy was a perfectionist, a master at world-building, insisting on absolute historical, social and scientific plausibility even though his work was fictional. He spent twelve years writing at least seven different versions of the manuscript, each of which his wife Sofia meticulous copied by hand. As a result of Leo’s and Sofia’s effort, War & Peace became a towering and influential work of global literature. When you read about other seminal masters of world-building (Victor Hugo and J.R.R. Tolkien come to mind), you find similar circumstances: authors whose unpublished background research and brainstorm notes far exceeds the volume of the actual finished book.
Without a doubt I am no Tolstoy or Tolkien, but I am learning to appreciate and understand the effort required to develop a plausible fictional universe as I work to develop a book series of my own. Like most modern works in the genres of epic fantasy and sci-fi, my stories, collectively titled Legends of the Known Arc, thrust unassuming, everyday people into unexpected and fantastical landscapes filled with wonder, beauty and peril. As exercises to develop the storylines, I’ve sketched enough historical, cultural and anthropological notes to fill a thick tome (or two). I’ve drawn countless diagrams, maps and illustrations to work out thorny relationships between competing cultures and technologies. I’ve filled whiteboards with crazy-ass ideas that have spawned even crazier ideas.
I find it fascinating to read interviews with great world-building authors and learn of the effort they put into developing the rich landscapes and complex societies in their books. I’d love to see the volumes of background notes, maps, etc. that someone like Frank Herbert or Anne McCaffrey or George R.R. Martin produced while they were developing their fictional universes. Only a fraction of this background material ever found its way into their novels, but without it, their stories wouldn’t be so rich, their characters and situations so compelling.
The Power of a Dot of Ink
My own fascination with the process of world-building began at age fourteen when I discovered the fold-out map of Middle-Earth in the back of my copy of Lord of the Rings. Hand drawn by Tolkien himself, the map set my imagination on fire and brought a whole new sense of emotional depth to the story. For some reason, having a map made it seem more real.
If you’ve read my blog, you know of my great obsession with maps and how it has influenced the course of my life. As a boy of eight or nine, I discovered my grandfather’s stash of yellowed and crinkled National Geographic maps from the 1940s and 50s tucked away in a bottom drawer in his study. It’s possible the discovery did more to define me than any other single moment of my life. As I unfolded that first map of Brazil and the Amazon Basin, I realized the universe was more grand and exotic than I had ever imagined. For every hour I spent poring over those maps, a burning determination grew in my gut: I would someday explore all these places myself!
My fascination only grew as I moved into my teen years. My grandfather eventually gave me his map collection, and I added to it every chance I got, sometimes even reverting to crime. More than once I surreptitiously purloined the map inserts out of the old National Geographic magazines in my small-town library (sorry, Mrs. Crabtree). Inevitably, I would find interesting or odd features and places on the maps, and look them up in my family’s treasured World Book Encyclopedia.
I still distinctly remember the moment when I found a small dot on the map of Arizona that said Meteor Crater. Whoa, what?!? The fact that there was a meteor crater in Arizona blew my mind. Weren’t craters only on the moon? I researched everything I could about it, and years later, on my first cross-country road trip, when I finally walked up to the rim of the crater and experienced it firsthand, the power of an intriguing dot of ink on a map was fully revealed.
The Middle Earth Dilemma
As much as I loved real-world maps, everything changed the day I first unfolded Tolkien’s map of Middle-Earth. Here was a map of places I would never be able to visit in real life! Only through the pages of the story and the imagination of the author could I climb the slopes of the Misty Mountains or gaze across the grassy, bouldered plains of Rohan.
I stared at the map, dumfounded. This was an entirely new thing. It troubled me greatly… and the more I thought about it, the more troubled I became.
This was in 1979. Tolkien had been dead for five years. There would be no more tales from Middle Earth! Without further stories, I would never be able to visit Khand and the Sea of Rhun and the Iron Hills. And what about Forodwaith or Ered Mithrin or the tiny little space marked the Withered Heath on the upper right corner of the map?
Just like the unremarkable map-dot of the Meteor Crater had turned out to be an truly remarkable place in the real-world, surely the Withered Heath was equally remarkable in Tolkien’s world. Why else would he have included it on his map? As far as I knew, it was only mentioned once in The Hobbit as “a place where dragons bred.” Seriously? I tried to imagine the splendid courtship rituals of mighty dragons taking place in a high-walled valley, complete with much splendor, fire and thunder. It was a story-worthy location without a doubt, but with Tolkien dead it would forever languish in obscurity.
Thus began a new obsession. Maps of the unreal.
Astounding Maps of Unreal Places
As a teen I studied every sort of fantasy cartographic work I could get my hands on, starting with Tolkien’s seminal map of Middle Earth. At first, pickings were slim, and all I could find were simple maps printed grainily in some of the fantasy paperbacks I read in the 70s, all obviously inspired by or patterned after Tolkien’s map.
That all changed when I was seventeen, with the publication of the entirely magnificent Star Trek Maps in 1980. When I opened the packaging and unfolded the massive sheets, I was confronted by something I’d never seen before. Not only did these starcharts fully bring to life the fictional galaxy of Star Trek, but they were also utterly beautiful. Unlike Tolkien’s charmingly simple hand drawn map, the huge, poster sized charts included in the Star Trek package were elaborately decorated and illuminated. This was art, but art with a purpose, a celebration of the imagination. To this day it is still one of the most stunning examples of infographic art I have ever encountered.
Hoo, boy, let me tell you I spent hours and hours poring over every little detail, utterly delighted to see the legendary places mentioned on my favorite TV show placed into context with each other. Look, there’s Vulcan and Andoria! Who knew they were so close. And look, there’s the Romulan Neutral Zone and the border outposts! And there’s Organia and Miri’s Planet and Tremaine’s rogue world. And there’s the Black Star that catapulted the Starship Enterprise back through time to 1969!
Created lovingly by fans with real talent, the Star Trek Maps dramatically raised the bar and influenced a whole new generation of fictional cartography, including a full-blown Atlas of Middle Earth, atlases of the DC and Marvel comics universes, The Essential Atlas of the Star Wars universe, not to mention hundred of lovingly illustrated maps of fictional places in the endpapers of science-fiction and fantasy books. In fact, it’s more common than not these days for an author to include a lovely map to help readers orient themselves in a fantastical setting.
Unreal Maps as Inspiration for Writers
In my upcoming book series, Legends of the Known Arc, the landscape of the story is a region of distant space called the Known Arc of the Halo. After an ancient and mysterious Cataclysm erased the central 90% of the galactic disk, all that remained was the Halo, a tenuous ring of stars encircling the outer rim that contained a pitifully few surviving civilizations. Even the Halo wasn’t completely spared as violent natural upheavals spread like a shockwave, causing stars to nova, planetary crusts to crack and oceans to boil, rendering almost all the surviving worlds uninhabitable. On the few populated planets spared total extinction, the collapse of advanced technology meant a return to stone-age conditions.
The book series is set in an era 10,000 years after the Cataclysm, as the surviving societies are clawing their way back to a spacefaring civilization. Like the Mediterranean region of Earth’s Dark Ages, the children on these worlds grow up amidst the grand ruins of ancient civilizations unimaginably greater than their own, in a world where the future is less appealing than the wonders of the past, and where artifacts and technological relics are revered as sacred items (of course, all is not what it seems, but you’ll have to read the books to discover the true nature of the Cataclysm and the cosmos that survived it!).
The first thing to do as we start to imagine this new storytelling terrain is… you guessed it, draw a map!
Primitive, yes, but it gives us a starting point to fire our imagination. For example, if I were standing on a world in the Known Arc at night, looking toward the devastated center of the galaxy, what would the sky look like? The Milky Way as we know it would be entirely missing. How depressing would it be to realize that my empty sky had once been ablaze with billions of stars? What would this depressing realization do to my psyche?
A person living in that much-diminished world would doubtlessly yearn for the lost glories of the past. What form would that yearning take, and what psychological consequences would result? What kind of culture would develop when the entire population is focused on celebrating a great loss? Conversely, what would life be like for a character in our story if they turned away from the past and decided to blaze a new trail? How would society, stuck in a state of universal remorse, react to them?
Thus is the power of a simple map combined with an active imagination. We’ve gone from the germ of a high-concept story idea to a place where we can start to explore the mindset of our story’s characters. Let’s take it further…
Like the Dark Ages of Mediterranean Europe, in the Known Arc daily life would be guided by the wisdom of sacred texts handed down from ages past. Large-scale organized religions would likely hold great political power, and it would be in their best interests to preserve the status quo. Indoctrination and adherence to prescribed rituals would be the weapons used by the clergy to maintain order and loyalty, and any deviation from this path would likely be be harshly persecuted.
The Cataclyst Pilgrimage
One of the most compelling rituals in Europe’s middle ages was the concept of a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage. In Europe (and western Asia) everyone was encouraged and expected to make the pilgrimage to a holy site at least once in their life, whether it be to Mecca or Jerusalem, Santiago or Rome. In the spacefaring world of the Known Arc, what would such a pilgrimage culture look like? Instead of walking in bare feet on ancient roads to Rome, the faithful might board church-owned transport ships that circulate among a series of holy worlds where they would visit ancient shrines and participate in exotic rites and sacraments.
Hmmm, a pilgrimage. What a great, tried-and-true storytelling format! Our protagonist is moving from exotic place to exotic place, surrounded by strangers, at the mercy of charity, thieves, and potentially adverse environmental conditions. It worked for Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, the first work of fiction in the English language, so why won’t it work for us?
Let’s explore the possibility with another map, a pilgrimage route we will fill with made-up names of planets and shrines.
The Many Worlds of the Known Arc
Just like that, voila, we have an itinerary for our protagonist as she moves through the arc of her story. But the worlds on the pilgrimage route as of yet have no substance. They’re just random, made-up names. We’ll need to know more about them before we can send our protagonist to visit.
In my case, I sketched maps of each of the pilgrimage worlds, basing them on some place I’ve visited in my real-world travels. Assinni was inspired by Rome and Athens, ancient seats of power that are now nothing but crowded and hot tourist destinations. Orbitus was informed by my experiences in the deserts of Israel and the Middle East, while Ragnu incorporates what I learned in Polynesia and the islands of the Indian ocean. In each case I cobbled together some rough notes about the planet’s appearance, culture and physical environment.
Suddenly, my grandfather’s old National Geographic maps, and the extensive travel they inspired later in my life, are coming in handy, becoming the fuel for my imagination’s fires!
We’re on a roll, but these few pilgrimage worlds can’t be the only inhabited planets in the Known Arc. There must be many, many others, right? And just like the real world, the layout and boundaries within the Known Arc would be defined by ancient and ongoing political, racial and religious rivalries. What might that look like?
Suddenly we’re forced to confront the invention of an entire set of imaginary cultures and societies, all existing together in the context of the universe we’re creating. It seems daunting because it is. The simplest way to attack the project is, you guessed it, to draw a map, knowing that it will help guide us in the creative process.
For my book project, I sat down with an obsolete copy of Adobe Illustrator and drew the following, making it up as I went, not really understanding the implications as I dropped dots on the map that represented entire civilizations (click the map image for a legible enlargement).
It took hours and hours of intense work, but when it was done I suddenly realized that the Known Arc had become real for me, just like Middle Earth had become real when I first unfolded Tolkien’s map. Every single one of these dots on a map were unlimited platforms for exploration and adventure. As a storyteller, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to visit these places and learn about their marvelous terrains, cultures and people. I now had a whole universe of places I could explore and write about! One thing I was sure of, on one of the remote worlds at the edge of my map, there existed a withered heath where dragons went to breed.
Transforming Imagination to Story
With a story platform in place, it’s finally time to switch from mapmaking to storytelling. To start, let’s select a random location on our new map, a tiny inconspicuous dot labeled Cloudtops Station, no more prominent on the map of the Known Arc than the tiny little dot of the Meteor Crater had been on my grandfather’s map of Arizona, or the Withered Heath on Tolkien’s map.
I began the first of my Known Arc stories here, at Cloudtops Station, which I decided was a spaceport orbiting a giant gas-planet called Almost. When I started writing, I knew absolutely nothing about Cloudtops Station other than the fanciful name, and that it, according to my map, appeared to be a minor stop on the pilgrimage route. It would be up to me to populate it with sights, smells, tastes, feelings and emotions–and some interesting characters.
In my mind’s eye I pictured a young woman with dark skin and a defiant attitude arguing with a ticket agent at a spaceport counter. Armed with the vast knowledge of the Known Arc I’d developed through days and days of mapmaking, I began to write:
The Rapture of Avatars
The girl at the baggage counter was tall and thin with the corded muscles of a marathon runner. Her skin was strikingly dark, like oiled gunmetal, and it glistened with sweat despite the artificial chill of the air. She was arguing fiercely with the counter agent, something to do with the weight of her carry-on bag, and her sharp words cut through the noise of the crowd. She obviously didn’t care that she was making a scene, or holding up the line. It was clear to Bryson that the counter agent wasn’t going to budge, but the girl kept arguing anyway.
Eventually she huffed and stomped away from the counter, glaring at the people who’d been grumbling impatiently in line behind her. Her eyes were the pale blue of a hazy summer sky, completely unexpected on a girl with such dark skin.
She struggled to lift her oversized backpack to her narrow shoulders, eventually giving up and dragging it across the floor. Bryson rose from his seat in the waiting area to offer his help. At first she scoffed, but he persisted. She studied him suspiciously. Her eyes roved from his tight haircut to his crisply-pressed clothes to his polished boots. Eventually, she grimaced and gestured toward the backpack.
Bryson discovered that he could barely lift the bag.
“What do you have in here? Rocks?”
She gave a mischievous laugh. Her name was Nkiru Anaya, which Bryson learned over a cup of coffee in the terminal lounge. She was a youth pilgrim, and the bag was indeed full of rocks. Rocks and scraps of metal. Bits and pieces of artifacts from before the Cataclysm.
Nkiru told Bryson that she’d begun her pilgrimage from Earth just six weeks earlier. She was traveling alone, an oddity. Youth pilgrims were almost always part of a group led by a church-sanctioned chaperone. She’d already visited Deepstone and Forniculus, she told him, where she’d collected the dubious treasures that now filled her backpack. She spoke breathlessly of her next destination, the massive reliquaries at the Regium Enclave on Assinni.
Suddenly, I had a story.
Postscript
In case you haven’t already guessed, this post isn’t really about maps or writing, it’s about the creative process, and how you should use anything that fires your imagination–like a map–as the inspiration for your ideas. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a good thing to be wildly obsessive about the things you love, as long as you can find some way to make your obsession constructive. Maps inspire me to travel and experience the wonders of the world firsthand. Maps once formed the basis of a business I started which led to a long a successful career in information technology. They also help me develop story ideas for my new passion, writing.
For you, it may be something different. Sports, perhaps, or science, or fitness, or maybe a burning love of Edwardian poetry. Whatever your constructive passion, you should never hesitate to keep adding fuel to the fire. Enabling your creative intensity can make the difference between a good life–and a great life. Anything that inspires you, no matter how silly it seems (Star Trek maps, anyone?), is a tool you can use to define and further your life’s goals.
In closing, a true story about the confluence of maps, storytelling and imagination…
My wife and I were once hiking in the Cotswolds of England, a real-world storybook location of ancient and beautiful villages, lush fields and wooded copses. I’d been following a hand-drawn map given me by a tour operator, but I’d managed to get us lost. The trail we were following led up a grass-covered hill populated by a sparse herd of sheep and into a dark and thick tangle of trees.
I am not making this up: the moment I stepped into the trees I was overwhelmed by a feeling of deja vu. No, not deja vu, but something else, something stronger. With every step I took, the odd feeling grew. I am not a superstitious man, but the intensity of the feeling sent literal chills into my gut.
The trail was very old, evidenced by the deep rut cut into the earth, trodden by many feet over the ages. Gnarled roots projected from the edges of the trail cut, and the dense trees that leaned above us, not threateningly, but not friendly either, swayed softly despite the complete absence of a breeze. This wasn’t a sun-dappled forest grove like back home in North Carolina. These woods had a palpable edge to them, something that spoke of a long, dark memory.
My wife even commented on my pensiveness. “What’s wrong?”
I tried to describe the creepy sensation to her. “These roots look like they’re going to reach out and grab us.” As soon as I said it, I realized the source of my anxiety. I knew these woods. I knew them by their smell, by the appearance of the trees, by the obvious sense of disapproval they cast upon us. I had been here before, in a literary sense…
‘But the Old Forest is queer. Everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak, than things are in the Shire. And the trees do not like strangers. They watch you. They are usually content usually to watch you, as long as daylight lasts, and don’t do much. Occasionally the most unfriendly ones may drop a brand, or stick a root out, or grasp at you with a long trailer. But at night things can be more alarming, or so I am told. I have only once or twice been in here after dark, and then only near the hedge. I thought all the trees were whispering and the branches swayed and groped without any wind. They do say the trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them in.‘
Looking ahead they could see only tree-trunks of innumerable sizes and shapes: straight or bent, twisted, leaning, squat or slender, smooth or gnarled and branched; and all the stems were green or grey with moss and slimy, shaggy growths….
They picked a way among the trees, carefully avoiding the many writhing and interlacing roots…. The ground was rising steadily, and as they went forward it seemed that the trees became taller, darker, and thicker…. For the moment there was no whispering or movement among the branches; but they all got an uncomfortable feeling that they were being watched with disapproval, deepening to dislike and even enmity….
–An excerpt from The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien
Now here’s the amazing part: I’d read Tolkien’s description of the Old Forest decades before, but the incredible imagery of his writing had stayed with me through the years. When we eventually came to the far end of the wooded copse and emerged, gratefully, into the sunshine, we found a battered sign. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was something like this:
“J.R.R. Tolkien regularly wandered these woods and the surrounding area, drawing inspiration for his poems and stories, including his masterpiece of epic fantasy, The Lord of the Rings.”
I instantly thought of the map in the back his book, and the small, inconspicuous area he’d labeled “The Old Forest,” and at that moment Tolkien the legend became Tolkien the man, a flesh and blood guy walking in this very wooded copse, delighting in the creepy sensations of the trees. I pictured him smiling, maybe taking a few notes on a pad that would eventually make their way into the enduring cultural myth that his writing would become. I also imagined that he was thinking of this very spot as he took his red felt-tipped pen and carefully drew the Old Forest onto his map, late one night at his writing desk, his pipe clenched between his teeth.
