The Power of Map Creation
I’ve been trying to write about the relationship between mapmaking and the worldbuilding process for a while. It’s been a repeated game of putting finger to keyboard and failing miserably. The main reason for that is that the subject is much broader than it seems. Even for someone who has made maps for years, and is comfortable rambling about subjects at a moment’s notice, it’s intimidating in scope. But we’re all a little trapped in our own homes and heads at the moment. It’s a fine time to be talking about the act of creation, and imagining worlds other than this. So here we are.
Let’s talk about Maps.
The Map is a big deal in the creation of fictional worlds. With the proliferation of graphics editors, and the platforms on which to share our creations, they are arguably even more of a big deal than ever before. It’s not just that published fantasy works will have An Official Map attached, it’s that people with works-in-progress will have made a decent attempt at An Official Map before they’ve even seemingly finished their first draft. Oh look, here’s a hobbyist with no intention of using their fictional setting for any published works who has personally put together a jaw-droppingly beautiful, professional quality map. The minute you venture into any worldbuilding-related community these things will be everywhere.
It will soon feel like any worldbuilder or author worth following has A Map. Does this mean you have to have A Map?
When you see the level of attention and engagement these pieces of work can get, it can definitely begin to seem obligatory. The current internet is dominated by a relatively small number of highly used sites and apps, most of which involve sharing content and visible metrics of engagement. One soon begins to notice that worldbuilding content that comes with high quality maps gets, on the whole, more engagement than that which does not. For those without pre-existing skills in digital graphics or traditional art this, at best, smacks of gatekeeping. The numberless corpses of maps judged to be poor quality, ignored by everybody, is testament to that fact.
Let’s say it out loud. Feeling you have to make a map because you’ll get more upvotes, retweets, likes, shares, reblogs, or views is not a healthy mindset.
No, you don’t have to have A Map.
There are plenty of reasons why making, or commissioning, a map for your ongoing project might make sense. Maps can be working documents just as much as they are pieces of visual art. If your work involves a lot of Proper Nouns in the form of locations and regions then it can prove a handy resource for readers, and yourself, to keep track of these things. Alternatively you might want a visual component to your work and lack the experience or confidence to post things like character art, but possess enough experience with digital graphics to produce a map you feel good about sharing. Or you might want to invoke a particular atmosphere for the work, even heavily stylising the map in question to best fit the intended mood.
And then there are those of us for whom mapmaking is itself part of the creative process.
This is when things get more complicated.
If making maps is intrinsic to your creative process we’re no longer dealing with simple questions of peer pressure. Instead we’re getting into the specific qualities of cartography, above and beyond its relationship to creating fictional worlds. This is a creative field that has history, and it’s this part that makes our topic so cavernous. Maps, and mapmaking, hold specific power beyond being attractive graphics in an era of tiny screens and endless scrolling. Because they hold power, maps are not neutral. Let’s get into why.
Maps proclaim certainty over what they depict. This city is here, that other city is there. This river flows from here and ends there. This area is divided administratively and politically like so. This street is named thus. These people live here, those people live there. This is reality. Anything that the map does not depict within its bounds is less important, unofficial, or wrong. That certainty then allows claims of ownership, both by its decisions over what is official and by the demonstration of knowledge that it implies. This is a form of what we call reification: a material representation of an immaterial thing, and the process of making something seem more ‘real’. This is a power that has been used to give reality to epidemics, the plight of the downtrodden, the existence of the overlooked, but also to homogenise the complex, marginalise the unwanted, and to deny the inconvenient.
When it comes to creating a map for a fictional world this is heady stuff. We are giving an unreal place a kind of official existence and exactitude by the sense of certainty that maps impart, whilst also asserting our creative ownership over it. We are bringing our created world into reality, differently than through prose. We are also potentially visiting the misuse of maps on our creations, if we’re not careful. Let’s take societies that are labelled as barbarian, uncivilized or nomadic, fictional and otherwise. These tend to be presented on Official Maps two ways. The lucky ones get to be homogenised blobs with coloured-in borders similar to a ‘settled’ nation or kingdom of some kind, with totally arbitrary depicted borders and an unfounded depiction of unitary statehood. Most of them, however, are demoted to being a floating text label, often in italics, showing that this society was located in *gestures with wavey hands at general area*.
Individual maps also don’t leave a lot of room for competing claims over reality or diversity on too small a scale to demonstrate. This process can actively encourage a worldbuilder to create big homogenous blobs on the map, as this speeds up the creation process and makes large scale maps easier to produce. By doing so we’re often unconsciously erasing subcultures, non-sovereign nations, and cultural variations before they’ve even had a chance to come into existence in this created world. We lose our chance to present a world where borders and ownership don’t neatly align, among other missed opportunities. And where there are more complex realities in our prose, or in our heads, we often do them a disservice by presenting the kind of neat cartographic reality that would have appealed to a 19th century imperial power.
None of this means that Maps Are Bad, or even that Maps That Show Borders Are Bad. It means that the information we put in our maps, and how that’s presented, is something that should be carefully, and conscientiously, considered. It means that the creativity and invention of maps can be pushed further than presently. It means that we don’t have to replicate what has gone before, even when it’s aesthetically pleasing or popular. All acts of creation benefit from deliberation, and thinking outside the box. In the case of worldbuilding, our maps improve from making this extra effort just as much as any other aspect of the craft.
When’s the last time you saw anybody make a map from the perspective of a nomadic horse-riding culture? A map that focuses on their needs and behaviours, that shows the migration routes of different subcultures and important landmarks along the way? When’s the last time you saw a map that revels in disagreement and ambiguity about what things are called, who they belong to, that champions the street and the vernacular? Have you ever seen a pair of contrasting maps that show starkly, maybe irreconcilably, different visions of the subject matter? None of these ideas rely on gatekeeping via digital graphics skill either, this is ambition of concept which doesn’t rely on the perfection of its execution.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to get better at making maps. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to get your work more attention by sharing maps. But what I’m claiming about the power of mapmaking still gives no ground to the notion that you have to have a high quality map for your worldbuilding to count, or for your world to be worth paying attention to. In an online environment that prizes numbers getting higher, and displays many of those numbers publicly, that is still not a measure of the quality of your interactions or its impact. Nor is it a measure of how ‘good’ your world is.
What your world will benefit from is imagination, forethought, and pushing out of the easy paths that popular online content has already trampled into the long grass. Whether mapmaking is part of your worldbuilding process, or a necessary moment for a singular purpose, it can never function as an easy ticket to worthiness, or as a stamp of recognition. But we are presented with a far greater opportunity than that. By choosing heartfelt expression we are given the chance not just to reify the world which we have created, but to amplify everything that is exciting, considerate, and innovative about it. If you treat it as an opportunity to be radical, mapmaking can be a radical act. So why not take the hand that is offered?
If you do take this path, there is a decent chance your work might not fit in with the hot property of today’s internet. My honest belief: so be it. When you push confidently and consistently towards conscientious innovation you will draw just as much attention, perhaps more, than those going down the well trodden path. And when they do, you will know that it’s your world and your vision that drew their notice, not how closely you managed to imitate a world atlas from 1958 because that’s what everyone else is doing. Make a map that you want to make, when you want to make it, because you want to make it. And if you don’t want or need to make a map then don’t. Any suggestion of obligation to produce a map for a created world, professional quality or otherwise, should be treated with the contempt it deserves. Go make awesome things.
