The town I grew up in bears little resemblance today to the place it was ten years ago. New subdivisions have arisen along what used to be country roads. New shopping centers now exist in areas where few people once lived. The local municipalities have replaced stop lights with roundabouts at intersections that see heavy traffic.
Traffic along the I5 corridor has become unmanageable. Why is this so? All one has to do is look at a map.
The Puget Sound Basin is a narrow, winding corridor of valleys that run between the Cascade Mountains and the Salish Sea. This lowland stretch of valleys and rivers has been the trail from the Columbia River in the south to British Columbia since before Europeans arrived here. Indigenous people used this route as the main trading trail for thousands of years.
Unfortunately, Mother Nature didn’t plan for eight-lane freeways, and adding more lanes to I5 is not feasible.
We on the West Coast live in an active earthquake zone, so a double-decker highway isn’t a popular idea with those of us who must travel it. Their danger here was made apparent in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake – Wikipedia.
Cities grow where there is access to fresh water and sufficient food to supply their population. In the lowlands of Western Washington State, food from both land and sea and fresh water are plentiful.
So how does this long-winded discussion of the history of my local terrain relate to worldbuilding?
No matter what genre you are writing in, maps are excellent multipurpose tools.
Maps show you the world. If you are writing a contemporary story set in your town, printing out a Google map keeps you from forgetting how long it takes to get from one point to another. I live in Olympia. Seattle is seventy miles north and Portland is around 112 miles to the south.
If my characters need to go to either city, it will take all day to go there, meet the appointment, and return to Olympia. They might even plan to stay overnight rather than drive home in the dark and pouring rain.
I write fantasy. In my world, people travel on foot and on horseback, but if they must go somewhere far away, they won’t push themselves to go more than twenty miles a day, unless there is a valid reason.
That distance is doable, assuming the weather is good, the road is fairly decent, and the characters are healthy. Small villages will crop up at intervals of five to ten miles apart, places where travelers might purchase food, or maybe even find shelter for the night.
Otherwise, they will be camping.
I love maps. My own maps start out in a rudimentary form, just a way to keep my work straight. I use pencil and graph paper at this stage, because as the rough draft evolves, sometimes towns must be renamed. They may have to be moved to more logical places. Whole mountain ranges may have to be moved or reshaped so that forests and savannas will appear where they are supposed to be in the story.
Perhaps you think you don’t need a map, and maybe you don’t.
However, if your characters are traveling and you are writing about their travels, you probably should make a rudimentary map. All you need is a few lines scribbled to indicate a trail or road, an indication of where mountains and water lie in relation to the trail, and a few marks indicating where the towns are.
I always make a map because, if am not really on top of it, the spelling of town names might accidentally evolve over the course of the first draft. Maudy will become Maury (this did happen), and distances will become too mushy even for me. The map is my indispensable tool for keeping my story straight.
What should go on a map? When your characters are traveling great distances, they may pass through villages on their way, and if these places figure in the events of the book, they should be noted on the map. This prevents you from:
- Accidentally naming a second village the same name later in the manuscript.
- Misspelling the town’s name later in the narrative.
- Forgetting where the characters were in chapter four.
Events and confrontations might impede your characters. Make a note of where they occurred.
If they are pertinent to the story, you will want to note these locations on your map so that you don’t contradict yourself if your party must return the way they came:
- rivers
- swamps
- mountains
- hills
- towns
- forests
- oceans
If your work is sci-fi, consider making a map of the space station or ship. Billy Ninefingers, is set in a wayside inn. I made a drawing of the floorplan and little map of the village because the inn is the world in which the story takes place. As far as distances in space go, I am not qualified to explain what is possible or not. For that, you need to do some research and look at current theories.
If you are writing fantasy, I suggest you keep the actual distances mushy because some readers will nitpick the details, no matter how accurate you are. Yes, you wrote it, but they don’t see it the way you do. This is because their perception of a league may be three miles while yours might be one and a half.
Historically, a league was the distance one could walk in an hour. Even though a league has no finite length, some readers will become so annoyed by this that they will give your book a three-star review, simply because they disagree with the length of time your character took to travel a certain distance.
Huw the Bard is a good example of that. In the novel, Huw, (pronounced Hugh) takes two months to travel between the city of Ludwellyn and the village of Clythe. In his story, Huw Owyn is walking through fields, woods, and along several winding rivers for the first half of his journey. Somedays, he is unable to travel at all.
He must backtrack as frequently as he goes forward in an effort to sneak around those who are hunting him. It’s only safe for him to walk on the main road once he makes it to Maury, weeks after fleeing Ludwellyn.
©connie j jasperson 2014 – 2026
It is a stretch of road that he could have done in two weeks if he had been able to stay on the main road. But that inability to make progress creates opportunities for tension and mayhem.
Many readers (like me) love finding fantasy novels that include maps. If you are writing fantasy but feel your hand-drawn map isn’t good enough to include in the finished product, consider hiring an artist to make your map from your notes. Because I am an artist, my pencil-drawn map always evolves into artwork for the book.
Your mind is the medium through which the idea for a novel or story is filtered, and words are how it is made real. The key to making both fiction and non-fiction real for the reader is subtle but crucial: worldbuilding. Maps, no matter how rudimentary, are the foundation of worldbuilding in my writing process.
Mood and atmosphere are separate but entwined forces. They form subliminal impressions in the reader’s awareness, subcurrents that affect our personal emotions.
Subtext is a complex but essential aspect of storytelling. It lies below the surface and supports the plot and the conversations. It is the hidden story, the secret reasoning we deduce from the narrative. It’s conveyed by the images we place in the environment and how the setting influences our perception of the mood and atmosphere.
We want to avoid excessive exposition, and good worldbuilding can help us with that. Let’s say we want to convey a general atmosphere of gloom and show our character’s mood without an info dump. Environmental symbols are subliminal landmarks for the reader. Thinking about and planning symbolism in an environment is key to developing the general atmosphere and affecting the overall mood.
When we are designing the setting of a scene, which aspect of atmosphere is more important, mood or emotion? As I have said before, both and neither because they are entwined. Our characters’ emotions affect their attitudes toward each other and influence how they view their quest. This, in turn, shapes the overall mood of the characters as they move through the arc of the plot. And the visual atmosphere of a particular environment may affect our protagonist’s personal mood. Their individual attitudes affect the emotional state of the group—the overall mood.
We can create an atmosphere and mood that underscores our themes and highlights plot points without resorting to info dumps. We can lighten the mood as easily as we can darken it. When we design a setting, color brightens the visuals, and gray depresses them. Those tones affect the atmosphere and mood of the scene.
Intelligent creatures communicate in their own languages with each other, sounds that we humans interpret as random and meaningless or simply mating calls. But scientists are discovering their vocalizations must have meanings beyond attracting a mate, words that are understood by others of their kind. This is evident in the way they form herds and packs and flocks, societies with rules and hierarchies.
We humans are tribal. We prefer living within an overarching power structure (a society) because someone has to be the leader. We call that power structure a government.
Power in the hands of only a few people offers many opportunities for mayhem. Zealous followers may inadvertently create a situation where the populace believes their ruler has been anointed by the Supreme Deity. Even better, they may become the God-Emperor/Empress.
In a novel or story, each scene occurs within the framework of the environment.
The Dragonriders of Pern series is considered science fiction because McCaffrey made clear at the outset that the star (Rukbat) and its planetary system had been colonized two millennia before, and the protagonists were their descendants.
The scenes we are looking at today have two distinct environments to frame them. In both settings, the surroundings do the dramatic heavy lifting. This chapter is filled with emotion, high stakes, and rising dread for the sure and inevitable tragedy that we hope will be averted.
Sallah enters the shuttle just as the airlock door closes, catching and crushing her heel. She manages to pull it out so that she isn’t trapped, but she is severely injured.
This is an incredibly emotional scene: we are caught up in her determination to seize this only chance, using her last breaths to get the information about the thread spores to the scientists on the ground.
Robert McKee tells us that emotion is the experience of transition, of the characters moving between a state of positivity and negativity. 
These visuals can easily be shown. Grief manifests in many ways and can become a thread running through the entire narrative. That theme of intense, subliminal emotion is the underlying mood and it shapes the story:
This is part of the inferential layer, as the audience must infer (deduce) the experience. You can’t tell a reader how to feel. They must experience and understand (infer) what drives the character on a human level.
As we read, the atmosphere that is shown within the pages colors and intensifies our emotions, and at that point, they feel organic. Think about a genuinely gothic tale: the mood and atmosphere 
However, there is an accessible viewpoint just at the entrance, and we can go there and just absorb the peace. Several years ago, I shot this photo from that platform.
Action and interaction – we know how the surface of a pond is affected by the breeze that stirs it. In the case of our novel, the breeze that stirs things up is made of motion and emotion. These two elements shape and affect the structural events that form the plot arc.
So, how can we use the surface elements to convey a message or to poke fun at a social norm? In other words, how can we get our books banned in some parts of this fractured world?
Creating depth in our story requires thought and rewriting. The first draft of our novel gives us the surface, the world that is the backdrop.
Power structures are the hierarchies encompassing the leaders and the people with the power. Government is an overall system of restraint and control among selected members of a group. Think of it as a pyramid, a few at the top governing a wide base of citizens.
The same sort of God complex occurs among academicians and scientists. Some people are prone to excess when presented with the opportunity to become all-powerful.
Fantasy is and always has been my favorite genre. I became a fan when I first read the Hobbit at the age of nine. I have read countless works written by people who understood how to construct a plot and set it in a believable world. These classics trained me to notice contradictions in what I read, whether in a magic system or elsewhere in a book.
I can suspend my disbelief when magic is only possible if certain conditions have been met. The most believable magic occurs when the author creates a system that regulates what the characters can do.
Superpowers are both science and something that may seem like magic, but they are not. Think Spiderman. His abilities are conferred on him by a scientific experiment that goes wrong.
While an ordinary life is comforting to those of us who simply long for peace and stability in our daily lives, we read for adventure. The story must take an average person, someone who could be your friend, into an extraordinary future.
Unfortunately, maps have fallen out of favor thanks to satellite technology and the GPS in our cell phones. Many people don’t know how to read a map.
If you are designing a fantasy world, you only need a pencil-drawn map. Place north at the top, east to the right, south to the bottom, and west to the left. Those are called 
Use a pencil, so you can easily note whatever changes during revisions. Your map doesn’t have to be fancy. Lay it out like a standard map with north at the top, east on the right, south at the bottom, and west on the left.
Many towns are situated on rivers. Water rarely flows uphill. While it may do so if pushed by the force of wave action or siphoning, water is a slave to gravity and chooses to flow downhill. When making your map, locate rivers between mountains and hills.
Maybe you aren’t artistic but will want a nice map later. In that case, a little scribbled map will enable a map artist to provide you with a beautiful and accurate product. An artist can give you a map containing the information readers need to enjoy your book.
In my part of the world, the native forest trees I see in the world around me are mostly Douglas firs, western red cedars, hemlocks, big-leaf maples, alders, cottonwood, and ash. Because I am familiar with them, these are the trees I visualize when I set a story in a forest.
We know from bitter experience that weather affects the food we produce and influences what is available in grocery stores. Abnormal heat waves across temperate states, category 4 hurricanes along the Atlantic seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico, and category 4 tornadoes down the center of the US and Canada, and even deep freezes in Texas and the deep south have been our lot in the last five years.
Once you have decided your historical era, terrain, and overall climate, research similar areas of the real world to see how weather affects their approach to agriculture and animal husbandry. Look into the past to discover ancient agricultural methods to see how low-tech cultures fed their large populations:
Also, if your story is set in a particular era, how plentiful was food at that time? Famines occurring all across Europe and Asia over the last two-thousand years are well documented. Egyptian, Incan, and Mayan history is also fairly well documented so do the research.
We have witnessed monumental changes since the turn of the millennium. We know California teeters on the edge of disaster, that a water shortage threatens the lives of millions, as well as one of the largest agriculture industries in the US.
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 
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