EPTThen you're sitting at home writing your little story and it hits you, you need a mountain range! So you keep working on the map until you're satisfied some more. Maybe you start coloring in a forest, and a river, and all that jazz. Bam! Now you're done and you can finish your estranged doll dedicated to the Starbu-, rather, finish writing your novel.
Or maybe you didn't bother with a map at all and were just using that as an excuse to sit there wishing she would serve you a hot “cinnamon dolce crème frappuccino with extra whip cream” whatever that means you sick-o. Just go over and say hi... it's not that hard.
While other writers will disagree I think it's pretty important to have a map of your world especially if it is going to permeate throughout a number of related short stories or novels. The reason for this is to keep your story consistent. If it takes four days to ride from A to B early in the story but takes a few hours for someone else going from C to A at the same exact distance the story just doesn't make any sense. Having an atlas will help you in this endeavor.
When it is known how much time has passed since they began their journey make sure the distance covered is realistic, I cringe at the amateur mistake of saying your adventurers are now on the east coast... Well if the east coast is a thousand miles away from the starting point and it's only a week into the journey that means they had to have walked over a hundred miles a day. You can't even ride a horse that far that fast (for the record, most modern day horses can travel about forty miles a day depending).
It's kind of like watching any Hollywood hacking scene. It just doesn't work like, there aren't any fancy pants graphics showing what's infected and it's kind of like how I am with stories in general but fantasy specifically. It has to pass the test or else I’m totally turned off. Most expert writers avoid the chronological pitfall altogether and just say something along the lines of “the adventurers got there when they got there!” which I guess is ok, but it doesn't give a scale of how far they actually trekked.
So I started writing my novel with a map I had created in about five minutes in paint. I was pretty satisfied, I knew the borders of the kingdoms and I would make the terrain up as I went along. Well this proved to be a big mistake for me. I figured a three day's ride was far enough, but how far was my character actually going? It's supposed to be a secluded camp but if it's only three days from the capital city it's not all that secluded...
That's when I decided I was going to go and spend some quality time with my map and create the “official” world. That way, I knew the distances and everything would fall into place. Here is what I've come up with.
Spoiler for size.
+ Show Spoiler +
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/AwVuz.jpg)
Things that need to be worked on:
- Overall polish esp. around the edges of land
- Kingdom borders
- More rivers
- Subtracting some of the desert space
Opinions cartographers?
