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How Writers Map Their Imaginary

Annotations

Worlds
SARAH LASKOW OCTOBER 22, 2018

Map by Roland Chambers for <em>The Magicians</em>, by Lev Grossman.

One of life’s great treats, for a lover of books (especially fantasy books), is to
open a cover to find a map secreted inside and filled with the details of a
land about to be discovered. A writer’s map hints at a fully imagined world,
and at the beginning of a book, it’s a promise. In the middle of a book, it’s a
touchstone and a guide. And at the end, it’s a reminder of all the places the
story has taken you.
A new book, e Writer’s Map, contains dozens of the magical maps writers
have drawn or that have been made by others to illustrate the places they’ve
created. “All maps are products of human imagination,” writes Huw Lewis-
Jones, the book’s editor. “For some writers making a map is absolutely
central to the craft of shaping and telling their tale.”

Map of the Island from The Swiss Family Robinson, by Johann David Wyss. British Library

e book includes the map from omas More’s Utopia, which when
published in  contained the first fantasy map in a work of fiction, as far
as anyone can tell. e book also has the maps that were the objects of
obsession of many a fantasy-filled childhood: Middle Earth, the mysterious
Narnia, the Hundred Acre Wood, the roads Milo explores in e Phantom
Tollbooth.

But there are more private treasures here, too: J.R.R. Tolkien’s own sketch of
Mordor, on graph paper; C.S. Lewis’s sketches; unpublished maps from the
notebooks of David Mitchell, who uses them to help imagine the worlds of
his books, such as e ousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet; Jack Kerouac’s
own route in On the Road (a fantasy of a different kind, no less obsessed
over).

Map of Walden Pond from Walden; or Life, in the Woods, by Henry David Thoreau. British Library
Among these maps, the one for Treasure Island is a landmark, “one of the
most iconic literary maps of all,” Lewis-Jones writes. It comes up more than
once in the book’s essays, which are written by authors and mapmakers.
Robert Louis Stevenson first sketched the map in  as a distraction for
his stepson, and a red X marks the spot where the treasure was buried.

Map by Munro Orr from Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson. British Library

at map ignited a cartographic instinct in generations of writers. is is a

common experience for map-loving writers—one book’s map begets
another. In one essay, Cressida Cowell, the author of How to Train Your
Dragon, writes of being inspired by maps drawn by the Brontës as children,
“in tiny, beautiful books that were in themselves a fascination, for the
writing was as small as if created by mice.”

Map of Verdopolis, or Glass Town, from The History of the Young Men: From Their First Settlement
to the Present Time, by Branwell Brontë. British Library

For many writers, mapmaking is a practical endeavor that pulls them into
their own work. “I always draw my way into stories,” writes Abi
Elphinstone, the author of the Dreamsnatcher books. “I begin every story I
write by drawing a map because it is only when my characters start moving
from place to place that a plot unfolds.” Mitchell doesn’t print maps in his
books, but he needs them to get through the writing. “If I’m describing a
character’s ascent of a mountain, I need to know what he or she will find on
the way up,” he writes. But also: Making maps is fun.
Philip Pullman (author of the His Dark Materials books): “Writing is a
matter of sullen toil. Drawing is pure joy. Drawing a map to go with a story
is messing around, with the added fun of coloring in.”

Mitchell: “As long as I was busy dreaming of topography, I didn’t have to get
my hands dirty with the mechanics of plot and character.”

Elphinstone: “It is one of the most liberating and exciting parts of

storytelling.”

One of Abi Elphinstoneʼs sketches. Abi Elphinstone

Mapping does have difficulties. Frances Hardinge, a British children’s book

writer, explains the problem of having described in her writing an island
with an outline that “resembled a bird-headed biped with long fingers.” Her
first attempts at mapping the place just looked wrong. “For the record,
drawing something that looks like both bird-human hybrid and a plausible
landmass is a lot harder than you might think,” she writes.

Sometimes, Hardinge writes, the worlds she dreams up are “unmappable.”

But even such stories create maps in readers’ heads. “Imaginary places can
offer us new kinds of discovery,” writes Lewis-Jones. A map helps shape a
reader’s or a writer’s idea of a fictional place, but ultimately its boundaries
are limited only by their joint imaginations.