Make a list of names that you might like for your landmarks. Then after adding what towns, castles, and rivers that are in your story, you will need to start filling in the dead space, otherwise your map might look a little barren. But the fun part is, as you do more and more drafts, your map will start to clean itself up and start to look more like a map! This is tedious and, in my opinion, the least fun part. As you refer back to your story and start transferring landmarks to your map, you will need to make changes (more than likely, A LOT of them, LOL!) Like, “Wait! I need a castle here, and this river needs to move.” And instead if erasing your little heart out, place the tracing paper over your original drawing, copying what you like and changing what you don’t. Now this is where the tracing paper or vellum comes in. Once you’ve got something that you generally like as your footprint (the outline of the continent and maybe some general towns from you story etc…) then it is time to start adding lakes, castles, towns, villages, rivers, mountains, roads etc. It looked terrible! (That’s the way it’s supposed to look at first.) I started out with just a bunch of circles, squiggles, and lines. Image courtesy of Kevin Anderson, Flickr Creative Commons
I think I just liked the way it looked and it was surrounded on three sides by water and islands (which I needed lots of.) 😀 How I started was by picking a continent (fantasy novels, for some reason, usually have one super continent as their world to start out.) My inspiration was Greece.
*Reference Maps (Atlas, globe, print-outs of real life maps, your favorite fantasy book with a map.) That is actually what I used to color my map.) 🙂 *Markers, colored pencils, or crayons (I was only half-joking about the crayons. METHOD #1 HAND-DRAWN MAP (This is always the first step, even in the following methods) I am no artist, believe me! Here is a step-by-step how I created mine. And don’t worry, you absolutely do not have to be Michelangelo to create a map. I’m going to talk a little about my experience with creating my map for MER, soon to be released in late December, along with other methods of either creating or obtaining your map. (Hey that’s not such a bad idea! Hahaha!) Hell or high-water I was going to have a map for my book, even if it meant handing my two-year-old a paper and crayons, and calling the scribbles my map. And despite my inhibitions, I dove in head first.
When I first started writing my young adult fantasy novel, MER, I was like “A map seems way too difficult.” But I REALLY wanted one. It is also very helpful for the author and the development of their fictional world. An ongoing trend for fiction and fantasy novels is having a map for the reader to follow along with, just after the title page in the book.
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