Tagged: map

With Both Hands, And…

A map is a very handy thing for a writer. It can help you gauge how long someone’s journey would take, or remind you of the river between points A and B. If you’re using a real-world locale, then you’ll want to keep your depiction in line with reality. If your locale is your own invention, then you’ll want to keep your depiction internally consistent.

Way back at the start of things for As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #1, we created a map of the main setting, which is a place we made up. Over the course of actually writing that book, we annotated the map with a great many pencil marks showing adjustments and additions. It’s become sort of a mess.

So, as part of our preparations for diving into prose on As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #2, Kent is updating the map so we have a clean version to work from. The more we write about the place, the more we learn about it ourselves, so we assume we’ll need to do more map updates when we get to books 3 and 4 as well.

A writing partner is someone who helps you keep your bearings.

Cartographer’s Blues

Sometimes there’s a lot of drawing involved in being a writer.

One of the artifacts we generated in our pre-writing for the Ghost Series is a map of the principle setting. It’s a rather complicated map, not only because the setting itself has many interesting quirks but also because the map shows how things change over the course of about a century.

But, Kent didn’t mind taking that on. It let him relive his dungeon-master glory days a bit, and simultaneously offered an excuse to use lots of layers in the Illustrator file.

We’ve included maps in some of our actual books. So far, this one is for our own use during the project, and we haven’t really decided about sharing it with our readers. All we know for now is that it’s going to be a living document that will be updated as we make new discoveries about our locale. In other words, the map that shows how things change over time will, itself, change over time.

Another trick we might use is building it in 3D with modeling clay. The terrain is quite unusual, and flat drawings might not suffice for making sure we both picture it the same way. This is something we haven’t done on past projects, but it fits our penchant for the tangible and the colorful.

A writing partner is someone who’ll help you chart the unknown.

The Plot Rainbow is Like The London Tube Map

One of the techniques we rely on heavily for our pre-writing process is the rainbow. It gives us a map to follow. Each row uses a color to represent a character, and the columns reflect the passage of time. Because our stories tend to be large and complex, our rainbows can get pretty unwieldy, taking up the entire hallway, and, more recently, forcing us to use both sides of our ginormous whiteboard.

The power of this tool is that it helps us visualize the flow of the story, to spot characters who are underutilized and debug the timing of events. It’s proven itself to be well worth the hassle. But, keep in mind that the rainbow isn’t a calendar. The objective is to focus on the important beats, which means the columns’ durations are all likely to be different. The rainbow distorts time in a manner reminiscent of how the map of the London Underground distorts space.

london tube map
The iconic London Tube Map designed by Harry Beck.

By discarding concern for geographic accuracy, the London Tube Map becomes more meaningful by showing more stations. Riders need to know which stations are on each line, and in what order. That’s enough for them to use the system to get where they’re going. Do the people riding the tube sometimes need more spatially rigorous information about these places? Surely. That’s just not the job of this particular map. Likewise, writers do sometimes need specific dates. Fortunately, we have calendars for that.

That the columns of the rainbow grid aren’t fixed units of time is not a bug. It’s a feature. But like any other part of the process, having an extra pair of eyes will definitely come in handy to make sure everything’s lining up. A writing partner is someone to help you keep all your stations on the proper lines.

Inside Out

Due to the weird way we work, the book we are currently plotting will be the middle book in the Music Trilogy. The gap that it will fill is fairly large, so we’re not overly constrained, but there is a finite time period where it can be set, and there are several threads that lead into and out of it that can’t be changed. They can perhaps be adjusted slightly, tuned up a bit. But certain people have to survive the middle book, and certain events have to happen. There’s a forcefield around them.

This is an on-steroids instance of the Pantser’s Complaint. Those who eschew outlines often cite the feeling of being limited, and a loss of motivation to discover the story. With all the big decisions made, they find it hard to engage with the project anymore. Here, we have significant constraints in place before we even get to the outline stage. Oh noes!

But to us, the thrill of composition remains. We love finding captivating ways to say all the things we’ve decided should be said, and we really like not having to make those decisions on the fly.

Seen from a higher altitude, the actual outline is proving very interesting as well. It’s like we have a map showing our start and end points, with just blank paper in between. We’re not trying to create the shortest or safest route. We want something with plenty of unexpected twists and turns and washed-out guardrails to let us plummet to the jagged rocks.

So even though we’ve put the squeeze on ourselves this time by working our way in from the edges, it’s coming along quite nicely. And, predictably, this is something we feel works better with two of us. These early-stage activities are where our partnership feels most dynamic, because the work consists of having conversations.