CF WELBURN
Dreamer
I love a good map. Close my eyes and I can still see Tolkien's lonely mountain flanked by Smaug, and Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea deserves to be framed on a wall... (Interestingly enough I read somewhere that the whole concept of Le Guin's Earthsea started by drawing the map, and then creating the story from there...)
But can they make a world seem too safe? Too explored? Should we not wander lost, finding out what's over that ridge, beyond that dark hill in words, and not in a predefined image? Imagine earth before we knew what lay across the ocean. That sense of wonder we can now only get by looking at the stars...
As a reader I used to pause the story to flick back to the map page to see exactly where this city or region we were being introduced to lay. Recently I've found myself doing this less...
I'm toying with the idea of including a map, on say page 536 (random number), when the adventurer becomes privy to the information (or perhaps having charted it themselves after personal hardship and exploration).
Why should the reader know more than the protagonist whose world we are merely visiting?
Of course this is all relative and highly dependent on the style, POV... If we're talking about worlds with millennia of history and politics, then it helps to see them defined... Westeros or the Malazan Empire or even the entire planet of Arrakis for example...
What are your thoughts in general, and related to your own writing projects?
But can they make a world seem too safe? Too explored? Should we not wander lost, finding out what's over that ridge, beyond that dark hill in words, and not in a predefined image? Imagine earth before we knew what lay across the ocean. That sense of wonder we can now only get by looking at the stars...
As a reader I used to pause the story to flick back to the map page to see exactly where this city or region we were being introduced to lay. Recently I've found myself doing this less...
I'm toying with the idea of including a map, on say page 536 (random number), when the adventurer becomes privy to the information (or perhaps having charted it themselves after personal hardship and exploration).
Why should the reader know more than the protagonist whose world we are merely visiting?
Of course this is all relative and highly dependent on the style, POV... If we're talking about worlds with millennia of history and politics, then it helps to see them defined... Westeros or the Malazan Empire or even the entire planet of Arrakis for example...
What are your thoughts in general, and related to your own writing projects?