This is my post for this week. The subject is, as you may have gathered from the title, maps.
I'm writing about maps because they're actually very important to me as a writer. About 45% of the names in my book were either taken from or inspired by names of towns on a map. Makes me wonder how I even named characters before I discovered this. (Okay, scratch that. Before I discovered this, I was writing Star Wars novels, and about 95% of the characters in those books had already been named for me.)
Anyway, there's another way maps are important, especially when you're writing fantasy. Soon after I began writing Version Three of my current fantasy story, I drew up a map of the made-up world. To tell the truth, I did this because I was getting tired of mapping out the whole thing in my head all the time. So I drew up a physical map.
Having a physical map has its problems. Every time I started the story over, the map had to change slightly. (Fortunately, I had had the foresight to draw it in pencil.) I added towns, added geography, I even added a bay and group of islands.
And this is where I realize just how much I miss writing Star Wars novels. I liked the whole concept of different planets, and I liked writing like that. I didn't like having to give it up. Some of the towns almost became city-states because of this. Almost, but it never actually happened.
I did come up with a solution, though. Some of the towns have their own residents who draw their nationality from the town they come from. So it worked out in the end.
So, maps. Yes, maps are important to me as a writer. Of course, a lot of the other names in my book are drawn off of other things. One character even got her name from a character in Greek Mythology (more on that in my next post). And I'll always need the map I drew of my made-up world. Some of the names I have in my 'name bank' (a list of names I might use in the future) were taken from the names of towns on a map of the southeastern United States during the Civil War. Maps are very important, and not just so you know where you're going on the highway.
Next Week: An update on my Semi-Random Book Character Ideas
