Revisiting Geography

By now, you might have decided to change a lot of the way the world is shaped. Perhaps you've decided to change certain factions and need to put them closer together. Or maybe you just have to have a volcano explode in the middle of your novel... who knows?

Today, revisit your geography. If you haven't checked out some of the geography-related sites, do so. If there is one aspect you think will be important (for example, if you have a race of seafarers, and ocean currents are crucial to their survival), check up on it and make sure you're on the right track. If you decided to add in a non-real event, like a magical cataclysm, decide where that happened and how or if it changed the landscape of your world.

Exercise:

Redraw the map if you need to. It doesn’t need to be exact—when they put the map at the front of your beautiful book, the publisher will hire an artist to re-do it anyway. If you have no idea how to re-draw your map, get out a black marker and go over any pencil marks from your original that you will be keeping (like contours of the coast)-- leave out any lettering, as they won't show through well anyway. Put a second piece of paper over the first and trace over the black lines in pencil. Write in place names and any additional map key icons (little trees for forests, upside-down V's for mountains, etc.). Draw in your roads and rivers (remember: blue is always water on a map), and your cities, towns, and settlements.

Related Exercises: