Map versus Story

[Redrobes]

To me, the story helps drive the map, and the map helps drive the story.

ditto.

I think the more ways you look at the same thing the more facets you can bring to bear on it. I dont write books but I do write software which is kinda wordy but we all make diagrams to sort out in our head how to make it in a succinct and clean way. Some people are more visual than literary and vice versa but few people are all of one and none the other.

It bugs me in books when there is a logical inconsistency and it also bugs me when the visual aspects don't seem to line up. It also awes me in books when they are strong in both too. You can usually tell which writers like their maps and which don't cos some of the characters wander aimlessly with almost no references to anything that pins them to a location and for others it makes a big deal.

I'm reading Tolkien at mo with the Hobbit and he is always referencing whether the sun is setting behind the Mistys or rising in the morning from them or that Gandalf had to travel X number of hours to get to a point where he could cross a river, he knows how much rations they need and when they will run out and so on. He clearly had the map done when he wrote it and knew where they were on it at all times and used it to add to the text. I also think that the Mistys running all the way up the middle (an improbable geological effect) shows that he needed that barrier so must have had an idea about the story requiring them going underground to find Gollum and the ring before the map was drawn up too.

To and fro between them developing them in turn or together. Therefore I abstain !

[Larb]

I say story mostly. Especially as I make more and more maps. Ages ago, I'd just throw down a map and then try to come up with a story to fit it.

But lately, I like to think of a story behind features (particularly in city maps). Why a city wall is in a certain place. Why it was built where it was. Whether it was a planned city, or just grew up, etc etc.
History has some place in this. Cities like florence and its towers that were used as district control points. Old city wall towers that, as a city expanded, weren't torn down but just reused while the walls they were connected to were.

I like to do it for city buildings in my key as well. Like on one map I named a brewery "Vallin's Company", and I thought about how it might have been an old army officer who, after being discharged, formed a brewery with a few of the same men from his company. Little things like that.