HOW DOES MAPPING HELP
deserts, forests and cities fills the world with purpose and starts to create a realistic-looking artefact. Mistakes made can also be of benefit to the plot and narrative. For example, if extra lines are drawn accidentally or a town has been placed far from any others, there is space for artistic license to make these into a story. If there is an abandoned trail it could have been deserted after a guerrilla warfare group used it in an ambush, and the isolated town could be used to excommunicate criminals as punishment in the country’s justice system.
TO CREATE A FICTIONAL WORLD? Ruby Large (WHS) Many famous literary works started off as a blank piece of graph paper and an idea for a fictional world to be created. J.R.R. Tolkien produced three maps and over six hundred place names for his ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy [1] which became one of the bestselling series in history with over 150 million copies sold worldwide [2]. He is one of many successful authors to utilise the practice of cartography in the establishment of a fantasy land, along with names such as Robert Louis Stevenson who wrote ‘Treasure Island’ with the initial inspiration of a hand-drawn map and childhood favourite C.S. Lewis who invented Narnia. But why is this technique so popular among authors and why does it make for more developed novels and fruitful book sales?
With the process of mapping for a fictional piece clear, the question lies in the purpose of the creation of such an artefact – why wouldn’t the author simply write their plot and skip this sketching? The answer is simple: this physical expression of the world inside the author’s head is invaluable when delving deeper into the story’s setting and background. The writer can use their map to discover more about the land which they have pictured, which is the main aim and luxury of using cartography to compliment literature in this way. Even a simple structure like the borders of the land probes into why that line was laid in that precise place. Was there dispute or war over territory? How are foreign relations between this country and its neighbour, and how does this impact the everyday lives of the citizens? Does uncertainty of safety plague the ruling body and make a totalitarian state in which inhabitants cannot cross the threshold to leave? Questions like these help the author to flesh out and contextualise the history of the world that they are creating which makes for a much more three-dimensional and realistic setting. It helps to understand what they are wanting to put across to their readers in regard to the landscape (political and social as well as physical) and history and in this respect, cartography is undoubtably very important for the production of a fantasy world from an author’s point of view.
With the market for novels becoming more and more competitive, readers gravitate towards stories with an easily visualisable and truthful world and deeply considered and nuanced characters. Although there are many techniques which can achieve this, mapping is a simple way to produce ‘evidence’ for the fictional land to exist as they imply the realism of what the author has created [6]. It adds another layer of credibility to the novel which allows full immersion for the audience.
The process of literary map-making is an extensive and varied one [4]. Authors generally decide to depict a country or full land map instead of a city or street one in order to get a full view of the world they are creating and its geography. Once borders have been established, the addition of features such as mountain ranges, rivers,
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