The First Thing You Do Is Draw A Map – Guest Post On TSRA’s Blog – Written By Jaq D Hawkins

I found this fantastic blog post about building worlds and drawing maps on The Story Reading Ape’s blog. It’s a guest post, written by Jaq D Hawkins. What a very informative post. Thank you, Jaq.

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I’ve been a Fantasy reader pretty much all of my life, but I’ve never been enamoured of maps. It isn’t that I have trouble reading them; I’ve travelled many real places relying on the navigation of accurate maps and find them very useful. However, a map of an imaginary place in the beginning of a new book is fairly meaningless to me until I’m well immersed in the story and the occasional glimpse back at the map at the front can provide perspective on where places relate to one another.

Even then, I’ve often held the opinion that lazy writing is what makes the image necessary, even though maps characterise the epic tales from such luminaries as J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin.

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