One of life's great pleasures for a lover of books (especially fantasy books) is opening a cover to find a secret map full of details of a land about to be discovered. You fantastic maps of a writer suggest a fully imagined world. 4z2db
At the beginning of a book, a map is a promise. In the middle of, a guide. And in the end it's a reminder of all the places history has taken you. In this article, we will explore stories of how famous fantastic maps of literature were created.
The literature of fantastic maps 1m6u4o
A new book called The Writer's Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands (“The writer’s map: an atlas of imaginary lands”, no Portuguese translation), contains dozens of fantastic maps that the writers drew or that were created by others to illustrate the places they created.
“All maps are products of the human imagination”, he writes Huw Lewis-Jones, editor of the book. “For some writers, making a map is absolutely fundamental to the art of shaping and telling their story.”
The book includes the map of the Utopia de Thomas More, which, when published in 1516, contained the first fantasy map in a work of fiction. The book also has the fantastic maps that were objects of obsession for many children: the Middle Earth, the mysterious narnia, Hundred Acres Forest, the roads that Milo explore in The Phantom's Toll.
But there are also more treasures here: the sketch of Mordor, J.R.R. Tolkien, on graph paper; sketches of CS Lewis; unpublished maps from the notebooks of David Mitchell, who uses them to help imagine the worlds of his books, as Jacob's Thousand Autumns from Zoet; the route of Jack Kerouac em On the Road (a fantasy of a different kind).
Among these maps, the treasure island is a landmark, “one of the most iconic literary maps ever”, writes Lewis-Jones. He appears more than once in the book's essays, written by authors and cartographers. Robert Louis Stevenson first sketched the map in 1881 as a distraction for his stepson, and a red X marks the spot where the treasure was buried.
This map ignited a cartographic instinct in generations of writers. This is a common experience for map-loving writers – the map in one book begets another.
In an essay, Cressida cowell, author of How to Train Your Dragon, writes about being inspired by maps drawn by the brontes when children, “in tiny, beautiful books that were in themselves a fascination, for the writing was as small as if created by mice.”
Creating imaginary worlds 4e4723
For many writers, cartography is a practical endeavor that draws them into their own work. “I always dedicate myself to stories”, he writes Abi Elphinstone, the author of the books Dreamsnatcher. “I start every story I write by drawing a map because it's only when my characters start moving from place to place that a plot unfolds.”
Mitchell doesn't print maps in his books, but he needs them to get through writing. "If I'm describing a character's ascent of a mountain, I need to know what she'll encounter along the way.", he writes. But also: making maps is fun.
Philip Pullman (author of the books in the series “His Dark Materials”) speaks: “Writing is a matter of moody toil. Drawing is pure joy. Drawing a map to accompany a story is playful, with the added fun of coloring. ”
Mitchell also says: "While I was busy dreaming up topography, I didn't have to get my hands dirty with plot and character mechanics." And Elphinstone confirms: "It's one of the most liberating and exciting parts of the narrative."
But turning ideas into maps is not an easy task. Did you know it wasn't the writer GRR Martin who drew the maps Westeros and the other lands of the universe of "Game of Thrones"? Jonathan Roberts, a draftsman and also a theoretical physicist, was in charge of transposing Martin's ideas to paper and creating 12 maps for the writer.
Mapping has many other difficulties. s Hardinger, a British writer of children's books, explains the problem of having described in her writing an island with an outline that "it resembled a biped with a bird's head".
His first attempts to map the place seemed wrong. “Actually, deg something that looks both like a bird-human hybrid and a plausible landmass is a lot harder than you might think.”, she writes.
Sometimes, writes Hardinge, the worlds she dreams of are "unmapped." But even these stories create maps in readers' heads. “Imaginary places can offer us new types of discovery”, writes Lewis-Jones. A map helps shape a reader or writer's idea of a fictional place, but ultimately its boundaries are limited only by their t imaginations.
