Creating a new, fictional world requires a lot of planning: outlines, lists, brainstorming, and character sketches. But one thing I've also found to be very helpful for my new novel is the creation of maps! Maps have been crucial for me to visualize and better understand the world that I am creating — and especially helpful in keeping things straight.
Much like the benefits of outlining your novel before you start, visual representations of your fictional world truly add a lot to an author's ability to conceptualize the story before you really dive into writing. But for me, these maps have been particularly helpful during the writing process itself. Of course, I am not talking about full-color, picture book ready images here. But the more I have gotten into my story, the more detailed my maps and pictures become.
Regardless of what your visuals actually look like, the first benefit of these artistic representations is your heightened ability to visualize what your character is actually seeing. When you first determine the spatial relations of things such as a castle, the size of a city, or of an important room within the story, you then have a better sense of just how long it might take your character to get from one side of the city to another; or just where that secret key should be placed within the room so it is just above eye level. The more I understand the world in which my characters inhabit, the better descriptions and details I will be able to provide. And the better descriptions present within the text, the more my reader will ultimately be able to visualize the world herself.
Not only do these kinds of illustrated aids help me better visualize my characters' world, but they also allow me to keep my story consistent throughout the narrative. If your character only walks down a certain street once somewhere in the first third of your novel, and then, in the last third, you want to have her walk down the same street but head in a different direction it can be easy to forget if she originally went to the left or to the right. So, instead of constantly having to flip back through my pages to uncover this little but important detail, or having to flip through to find many of the other such details present in your book, referring to the map that you've created can be a great help. Not only does it provide consistency, which is definitely a key component of world building, but it also saves you a lot of hassle. It's easy to refer to the map of the square, or the palace, or the kingdom itself in order to make sure I am accurately describing the placement of a certain landmark in relation to another, or how a character would get from one place to another.
One trick that I've found to help me keep things straight as I work through my novel and refer to my variety of maps I've created is the use of cardinal directions, meaning north, south, east, and west. By placing a small compass rose in the corner of my visuals, I've been able to easily understand where everything is geographically and most importantly where things are in relation to one another. In terms of consistency this becomes highly important. Although I do have one map representing the entire world of the story, when I am working on both creating and writing about specific locations such as the castle or the city square, I want to make sure it all lines up correctly. Much like I need to make sure I know if my character took a right or a left to get to her friends house, because I know my character will be traversing the city many times throughout the story, and even go beyond the natural city limits later on in the book, I've found that using the cardinal directions has also proved helpful in remaining consistent.
Writing visually is a key component of all good novels. You want to make sure to place your reader inside your world, allowing them to get a true feel for the place. Maybe I'm not an artist, but your visuals really don't have to be. All you need is a basic sketch of your place, some labeled sections, and really, you're good to go.
These are all tools to help you understand the world better anyway. Because in the end, we're all creating something out of nothing — a place out of no place — so we want the world to be as well thought out and clearly conveyed as possible.
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