How Writers Map Their Imaginary Worlds | Hacker News Reader

How Writers Map Their Imaginary Worlds

atlasobscura.com

147 pointscrunchiebones36 comments

Okay, here's my excuse to vent a personal pet peeves. :-)

If you're going to publish a map of your imaginary land, map out the watersheds and make sure they make sense. You don't have to include those details in the final map, but they should inform the final map.

Real rivers go somewhere. They don't just stop in the middle of nowhere.

Then you'll enjoy this "guide" from /r/imaginarymaps: https://i.imgur.com/Vy0FS8F.png

The "rivers never split" rule is BS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_bifurcation

Yeah, that's a weird thing to be wrong about. There's an abundance of cities built on where multiple rivers meet.

That's two rivers merging, not splitting.

Not in terms of the "guide" linked to. It looks at rivers as something creeping up from the ocean to higher lands. It's a perspective where a river travels upstream, even if it flows downstream, if that makes sense.

The author is saying two streams travelling up never split, only merge. I'm saying they do split [0]. An upstream split is a downstream merge.

[0] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/45.7293/4.8128

Plenty cities are located where rivers meet, however I'm struggling to think of any where a major river splits?

Staten Island could be seen as between two ends of the Hudson.

Alexandria and Cairo are at the Nile delta.

The Mississippi River merges/splits with the Red River/Atchafalaya River at the Old River Control Structure.

The Orinoco River and Rio Negro are connected via a distributary, although this is the upper reaches of both rivers.

Deltas are commonly very large and involve several streams. The mouth of the Amazon River is more or less 100 miles distant. And the Brahamaputra and Ganges river delta involves 100s of channels that more or less crisscoss the entirety of Bangladesh.

I'm pretty sure the image is satire that happens to provide a semi-workable description of how watersheds work.

Did you actually read it? Everything in it is wrong.

The only instances I know of rivers naturally splitting is in river deltas. These form from sediment accumulating at what was once a single river mouth. The islands in a delta have consistent properties: they are flat, consist of soil and silt rather than rock, and are usually marshy.

Anything that deviates from these rules is usually wrong. Rivers don't split around two sides of a mountain, for example.

ahem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_streams_of_Idaho

underground is somewhere...

But does it show up on a map?

No, but they ultimately feed into a river that does.

My opinion: Features like this have no business being in a fantasy map unless the author has an above-average grasp of geology.

Or there's a magic portal somewhere. That's fine, just don't pretend it's natural.

My personal pet peeve (or is it peef? ;-) ) is that nearly all imaginary maps fit neatly into a rectangle, making the best use of available space. Sometimes it ends in perfectly straight mountain ranges, long coastlines with no islands etc. Just scroll a bit through https://twitter.com/mythicmaps to see what I mean.

And mountains. With right angles, like those in Middle Earth [0]. Although to be fair to Tolkien, Ilúvatar probably wasn't bothered about credible plate tectonics.

Actually, ignoring the issue of whether Middle Earth was geologically feasible, Tolkien went to great lengths to make sure that the story was consistent with the geography, e.g. in terms of making sure character times and locations were synchronised across the many plot strands. The LOTR map was specifically created to help him keep track of it.

[0] https://www.tor.com/2017/08/01/tolkiens-map-and-the-messed-u...

This essay[0] on the consistency of Middle Earth by the author of The Last Ringbearer[1] really explores the topic as well

[0] https://ymarkov.livejournal.com/273409.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer

Plate tectonics wasn't a generally accepted theory until well after Tolkien made those maps, anyway.

Even without the underlying theory, though, you can still look at lots of real-life mountain ranges and see that they generally align themselves to continental contours and not geometric shapes like boxes.

Indeed. Actually the cosmology of Middle Earth (which is the first part of 'The Silmarillion' and barely mentioned in TLOTR) does require, to put it charitably, a certain suspension of disbelief. I'm paraphrasing somewhat... (spoilers)

The creator, Eru / Ilúvatar creates a great theme and the Ainur (spirits) are then invited to create a music from it. The evil Morgoth (Sauron's boss) sows discord by breaking Eru's harmony. Eru then stops the music and the various spirits manifest in the world (Arda) created from it. The world is initially illuminated by stars and then the light from two great trees. Which Morgoth destroys, although their light bearing fruit are used to create the Sun and the Moon. The Valar (the most powerful good Ainur) create the westerly island Valinor, which (after a lot of misery which forms the main subject of the Silmarillion) Ilúvatar eventually makes inaccessible by sending a great wave, changing the shape of all the lands of Middle-earth.

Hence my comment that plate tectonics (or whatever geological processes were understood in the early 20th C) wasn't an overarching concern for Tolkien. But once he'd made this world, he made sure that the LOTR characters would see the same phase of the moon at their respective parts of the story.

The Okavango is Africa's 4th longest river. It flows into the Kalahari desert, becomes a swamp and dries out.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okavango_River

Again, it doesn't just stop--it ends in a swamp. (An "endorheic basin", to borrow from Wikipedia.)

I'm complaining about fantasy rivers that literally just stop.

> Real rivers go somewhere. They don't just stop in the middle of nowhere.

Yeah? Have a look at the Morghab River in southern Turkmenistan. It flows from some mountains in Afghanistan out into a desert, where it splits up into a delta and just sort of... stops. The satellite view on Google Maps is striking. (There are several canals connecting to the delta now, but historically the river stopped in the middle of nowhere.)

Rules of thumb like this aren't laws, just patterns which have exceptions. (That said, yes, imaginary maps are sometimes ridiculous.)

in the Languages of the Night, a collection of Ursula K. LeGuin's essays on writing, there is a section(IIRC I read it more than 20 years ago) where a famous fantasy magazine editor had asked her to go into how she mapped out her world and created all the documentation beforehand so she could refer to it when needed, her process as it were, and she replied something to the effect of this is not how I do it.

The description of how she did it was that when it became time to have that information, she looked it up in her mind and it came to her, what we might describe as making it up as she went along but which was more like querying her unconscious knowledge of the places and people she was describing.

For the Wizard of Earthsea books, there's an afterword (at least in the later editions I have around the house) where she says she just sketched out the map first even before any characters, and filled it in with the stories as she went.

(How many more stories would she have written in that world? I wonder)

Also: collection to her maps

http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Maps/Index.html

as well.

> How many more stories would she have written in that world? I wonder

Earthsea is one of the most underrated settings for roleplaying games...

> Philip Pullman (author of the His Dark Materials books): “Writing is a matter of sullen toil. Drawing is pure joy. Drawing a map to go with a story is messing around, with the added fun of coloring in.”

It's the other way for me - in writing I can invent nonsense, and call it reality, and that's just how it is.

However, the moment I start to create a map, I need to either consider the environmental factors of mountain and river placement on local geology, or invent an entire weather system that explains why it's acceptable for the forest to live where it does, because it'd be a desert in our world.

> One of life’s great treats, for a lover of books (especially fantasy books), is to open a cover to find a map secreted inside and filled with the details of a land about to be discovered

Quite honestly the reason I read fantasy at all.

There is an active fantasy map drawing community over on Reddit in /r/Worldbuilding, Maps range from truly amazing... to quite awful.

https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/search?q=flair_name%3...

/r/mapmaking also has a lot of activity!

I was active on The Cartographer's Guild[1] forum for quite some time as well. They had a huge amount of tutorial content for those looking to get started.

[1]: https://www.cartographersguild.com/

Many (but not all) fiction authors are known for creating elaborate files of characters, plotlines, scenes, and of course, maps of the world or town or place where the story takes place. But if you have thousands or even millions of people reading your work, someone will find the inconsistencies in the carefully crafted milieus. I think it was fantasy author Piers Anthony who in the intros to his series books used to tip his hat to some of the readers who had written into him to flag the bugs.

Having tried my hand at writing quest-based far future fantasy (unpublished), I can say that for me the map starts out first in my head and then migrates to paper where it undergoes many revisions as the writing progresses. It didn't seem super hard, and because I wasn't super precise about distance covered I think there is a lot of flexibility. I noticed that George RR Martin's map in the "Game of Thrones" world can also be vague - other than the wall, distances between places aren't really articulated and it often seems that the distance from north to south of the realm when described in as people travel around is roughly equidistant to east to west, even though on the map Winterfell to King's landing looks to be so far apart. And, I might add, the lack of a map for the cities and other places across the sea is maddening - I just have no frame of reference for the location of the Dothraki Sea in relationship to Braavos, Valyria, etc.

Here is a similar article in the same spirit about how Andy Weir mapped his moon base for Artemis: https://www.space.com/38725-artemis-andy-weir-author-intervi...

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