Geography

I was looking at some game stuff today, cause that's what I do with my life, and I found this very well constructed map of the world of one of the series I'm in to, Monster Hunter. It was cool because Monster Hunter bases itself on a series of maps for different hunting areas, but aside from the occasional background image, those areas feel extremely disconnected from one another. But this map took all of those disconnected areas and was able to fit them together between years of games that have only been loosely tied together, creating one contingent world.

But while I was looking at that map, I realized how much thought was put into it, and how many small clues there were in the games that made that construction possible. All of these little details that were slowly and cumbersomely pieced together to make a world with any kind of structure and logistical rules. Things that I never really think about when I'm writing my stories, which makes it difficult to place events and places in any kind of logical system or map. While I'm busy building the characters of my world, I don't give a whole lot of thought to the world itself. And I mean, I love seeing the maps at the beginnings of books that shows the world and where things take place, even if I never actually remember the logistics of any of it. But the way I write, that wouldn't even be possible.

To be fair, that's probably something that you either plan way in advance, or you can correct and modify during editing. For me personally, it would probably work better in editing. Already knowing what kinds of events take place and what general kinds of areas I want them to take place in, I could figure out how that would make sense and change directions accordingly. Place different cities in the north or south, east or west. Build the world around the events, rather than the events around the world. That much planning would just... not work well for me.

But I'd like to have a consistent world like that. Something that has some kind of permanence. Make the world feel like it's alive, and make it a place that people would want to go. Man, if I ever heard something like that. "I want to live in that world." I don't think I could be happier as a writer.