A Case for Losing the Maps

Centering Stories on your Protagonists

A worldbuilding practice many fantasy writers (especially new ones) utilize is drawing a map of their secondary world.¹ If they publish their novel or collection, they might include it on one of the first pages or inside the cover. These maps broadly indicate the major nations and biomes we might see in the story or series. Some elaborate maps may also have the major factions listed and the territories they control. While this can be an interesting artefact for readers and most certainly help authors visualize the scope of their world, there are two major issues I could see with including or relying on these sorts of maps:

1. If writers plan on publishing traditionally, it’s unlikely editors, agents, or publishers will be bothered to refer to the map when reading a manuscript—their focus is on the content of the story itself and if it’s compelling enough for them to buy and publish.

2. Whether publishing traditionally or independently, a map of a secondary world may only be a distraction or vestigial organ especially if none of the territories labeled play a large role in the narrative.

Although there have been previously published fantasy stories that have included maps (Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire, the recent Elric collections) and have been very successful critically and commercially, the aim of this post is to help new writers (or writers starting a new project) avoid the trap of getting stuck in the worldbuilding phase of their stories. My advice here is to focus on your protagonist’s journey, their immediate surroundings, and the destinations they’re heading towards.

The first benefit of ditching the map and centering solely on your protagonist is that you and your readers don’t have to worry about what’s going on in the neighboring country (unless it has some immediate bearing on the plot). Leading the story with the protagonist’s point of view without visual aids or meta-exposition (e.g. glossaries that outline the story’s major factions or dramatis personae) can help writers focus on what the hero does immediately to kick off the plot. Limiting the scope to the protagonist also further endears the writer and the readers to their journey and development across the story. This opposes the need to “cut-away” to show a scene with another character whose arc will only intersect with the protagonist by book three and no sooner. I exaggerate but for the novice writer, it is best to understand how to develop a single character’s story before trying to juggle an epic cast.²

The Berserk manga by Kentaro Miura is a great example of a secondary world that doesn’t have a map and is largely focused on a single protagonist—however, the cast grows following the “Lost Children” chapter of the “Conviction Arc.” My brother mentioned how he wanted a map to see what the world of Berserk looked like, but I argued that it was better to leave the top-down cartography ambiguous as it helped me as a reader focus more on Guts and his personal quest as he wanders through the world rather than know what his journey from Point A to Point B looks like. We’re entreated to the natural surroundings, obstacles, and encounters as they emerge and thus share in the surprise and the assessment for solutions Guts (and his companions) experience. Although wider-scale conflicts and a more ensemble cast are added to the story, Berserk remains centered on Guts and the characters and events that overlap with his own journey and struggles.

Another series which is absent of maps is Suzanne Collins’ The Underland Chronicles which take place in a subterranean world far beneath New York City. The Underland is comprised of massive caverns and tunnels, an underground sea, a jungle, and volcanic wastelands. None of it, however, is mapped. For an in-world explanation, it would likely be a monumental feat for the human inhabitants to undertake and the talking animals they coexist with either don’t have the technology or desire to make such maps. Again, this helps the story focus entirely on the protagonist Gregor, an eleven-year-old boy from New York City who finds himself in increasingly fantastic and distressing situations in the Underland. His fish out of water perspective naturally helps introduce the audience to the new world he finds himself in; he and the readers are literally stumbling through the dark but as the series unfolds, we manage to piece the world together through Gregor’s experience in tandem with seeing how he changes as a character.

As most fantasy stories are set in periods where information and maps of the known world were either unavailable to most or unreliable, it would make sense for protagonists to rely on information they gather from people local to new areas they enter. Travel in the middle ages usually relied on following landmarks and often—as is the case with Ireland and Scotland—these landmarks would have stories associated with them. This genre of stories in medieval Gaelic literature is known as dindshenchas (pronounced dind-hen-uh-chas) “place-lore”, which assigned stories behind how landmarks all over Ireland and Scotland received their names. These names also were not static and changed based on other events that happened during historical or even mythological periods. We have dedicated manuscripts³ of this genre but during the era of its use place-lore would have been memorized and transmitted orally. This method of communication would be how travelers received directions; they would know, for example, that the cairn commemorating a famous battle would be a stone’s throw away from a river where a lovesick maiden drowned.

Place-lore and oral communication, I believe, is how more fantasy protagonists should navigate the worlds they inhabit. A poor medieval traveller would mainly have to rely on knowing how to find true north, recognize landmarks (and their stories if his culture had a tradition of place-lore), and maybe the odd road that set him in the general direction of where he was headed. Place-lore can also make for a relatively unobtrusive method of delivering exposition about the lore of a fantasy world that’s pieced together as the protagonist travels throughout it.

The Corum series of novels by Michael Moorcock use place-lore largely in the latter half of the series, which is appropriate considering the more overt Celtic themes in the last three books (The Silver Hand Trilogy). Corum’s world is unmapped and he frequently relies on verbal directions and learns the stories of the major landmarks and sites along the road of his quests. The most notable are the “places of power” such as the circle of stones Craig Don and Cremmsmound where a version of Corum that is worshipped as a god is buried. When writing my senior capstone project in college, I wrote about how place-lore essentially “haunts” landscapes with “ruins” of previous ages and generations—the stories essentially being the ghosts and ruins occupying these spaces. Moorcock’s stories frequently deal with the march of time and the crumbling of old races, and the place-lore of his worlds are embodiments of this theme; his heroes come upon ancient ruins and sites long after the collapse of the peoples or entities that erected and inhabited them, yet still find power or secrets therein.

Fritz Lieber’s Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, set in the sprawling city of Lankhmar, offer ideas as to how an urban setting without a map might be handled. Throughout the stories we get names of the streets and allies that the duo have to navigate, but no formal map.⁴ The uncertainty and anxiety of exploring the wilderness remains true for exploring a massive urban center where hidden alleyways, cellars, and alcoves can swallow an unwary pedestrian and leave no trace. What is more is that an inhabitant of Lankhmar could find out more about the lay of the neighborhoods and sprawl by exploring, meeting the right connections, and following dicey yet promising leads for work than simply looking at a standardized map. This also introduces the perfect chance for protagonists to meet companion characters, antagonists, or other side characters to round out the cast of a story.

For new writers or anyone who is working on a new project based in a fantasy world, I would encourage you to try to resist creating a map for your world and instead focus primarily on the protagonist’s immediate world around them. As they travel, build the world around the protagonist—in the sense that they are uncovering new truths and encounters in the territories beyond the boundaries they were once confined in. Make your world feel lived-in by providing the lore and history of places, combined with what other characters in the story know about these places to relay to the protagonist (and the reader by extension). Overall, this method creates a more organic, boots-on-the-ground experience than the top-down view of a world designed by a chronic planner. Remember that the readers should be as surprised as the protagonist when they discover something new about the world, and maybe you as the writer should be surprised about your own world as well.

As a bonus to this post, I’ve included a prompt to incorporate this advice into a short story or scene: Drop your character in an unfamiliar area (maybe they get lost on their journey, come into a new city, or they’re left for dead). From there, they must find what they’re looking for (work, a McGuffin, escape, etc.) by using interactions with other characters who might be there or place-lore if they can recognize any landmarks from the stories they know. Have the area and/or landscape unfold as the story or scene progresses, no need for maps at all, just describe the world as it emerges before the protagonist’s eyes. If you publish this story, on Substack or elsewhere, feel free to drop a link to it in the comments below!

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1. “Secondary Worlds” are invented worlds such as Middle Earth, as opposed to our own “Primary World.”

2. I might also cover this epic cast trope in a future post if there is enough interest.

3. If you’re interested in reading translations of place-lore stories and poems, I highly recommend reading The Metrical Dindshenchas translated by E. J. Gwynn. This link leads to the CODECS Van Hamel database which is a valuable resource for Celtic scholars.

4. Goodman Games published a variant of their game system Dungeon Crawl Classics that takes place in Lankhmar and has formalized map. For tabletop roleplaying games, maps are extremely helpful, but for the purposes of this post I will be focused on fiction.