Metaphorical maps

One of the fairly common writing metaphors draws a connection between writing a novel and taking a road trip. You see a lot of comments like “You don’t need to see the entire highway that leads from Chicago to Denver in order to drive to Denver; you only have to see as far as your headlights light up ahead of you” and “You don’t have to take Interstate 80 all the way from Chicago across Nebraska; you can get off and take back roads if you want.”

Generally, at some point in this metaphor, maps will come into it. Usually this is in regard to planning your metaphorical writing-road-tip or as a way of finding alternate routes when your plan breaks down because of road construction or a washed-out bridge or something. It’s used as an argument for everything from the wisdom of pre-planning your story to the idea that you don’t have to stick to the plan.

It is a good and useful metaphor, and I’ve used it many times myself. But a couple of weeks ago, I was looking at hydrology maps for Minnesota in an attempt to help my father figure out what river he wants to go kayaking on next time he comes to visit (he tried kayaking for the first time on a recent trip to Texas, and loved it) and it occurred to me that I could push the metaphor a whole lot farther than I ever had. So naturally, I am going to.

The first thing I thought about was what you can do with a basic road map. There are five basic things that a standard road map is good for: 1) figuring out where you are now; 2) figuring out where you are going in relation to where you are now; 3) figuring out how to get from 1 to 2; 4) finding an alternate route when the one you picked in #3 turns out to be blocked; and 5) spotting possible interesting side trips that you could take while you’re on your way from 1 to 2 (because if your route happens to take you right past the Grand Canyon or the Golden Gate Bridge, you might want to stop and take a look at it while you’re in the area).

The writing-as-road-trip metaphor usually focuses on #3 and #4 – figuring out how to get from where you are to where you want to be, and finding alternate routes if your original one is impassable. This is fine as far as it goes – it is, after all, what most people usually use real maps for – but it leaves the people who have other uses for maps floundering.

Writing does not always work in a neat, linear, straightforward fashion. Every so often, it seems as if your characters fall through a hole in space and emerge somewhere entirely different, somewhere that has no resemblance to anything you thought was going to happen or anywhere you expected them to be. At this point, I often find it very useful to have a map – something that tells me the lay of the land overall, that I can use to figure out where the heck in the vastness of possible plot-twists my characters are.

Sometimes, they turn out to be just over the hill from my original plot, and it’s fairly easy to get them back on track. Other times, they’ve jumped over hundreds of miles, in an entirely different direction from the one I thought they were going, or even halfway into what I thought was going to be the sequel. The first step in figuring out what to do from there is to figure out where “there” is in relation to everything else. Only then can I start deciding on the next move: back toward the original main plotline? Off into the unknown? Some combination?

Maps are also useful as a way of evaluating my progress. For that, I need to know where I think I’m going; knowing that, I can keep an eye on how close I am. If I’m 60% of the way through my expected word count (whether that’s 30,000 words or 130,000 words) and only 25% of the way through the plot, I need to make some adjustments somewhere (probably in terms of switching to a destination that I can reach in the remaining number of words I have). And I really do need to check on this periodically, because if I wait until I’m 80% or 90% of the way through my expected word count, I’m probably going to have a lot of trouble picking an alternate destination and making appropriate adjustments, whereas if I discover it at 40% of the way through, I may be able to pick up the pace enough to get where I wanted to go without running too far over.

The side trips, though, are where I really get useful return on the time I spend making up my map (that is, working out some degree of writing plan and backstory in advance). I don’t need a lot of details or an in-depth rundown of every possible tourist trap within a hundred miles of my intended route, but a general idea that there’s some interesting backstory involving the guildmaster’s sister and the missing uncle or the librarian-mentor’s scandalous younger days allows me room to spot interesting possibilities when I’m in that neighborhood.

The first problem with all this is, of course, that the “map” one uses for planning one’s writing journey has to be made up by the writer. For some writers, this is problematic: either they’re the sort who finds making up a plan or road map to be too close to writing the story and being done (i.e., planning in too much detail kills every possibility of actually writing the story), or they have severely limited time and energy to put into writing and can’t bring themselves to put effort into drawing up a road map without some assurance that it will justify using valuable writing time doing it.

Which brings me to the second problem. The writing-as-road-trip metaphor is where all this looking at maps and plans generally starts, and so the kind of map people talk about is a road map. But there are lots of other kinds of maps, and they are useful for different things.

The hydrology map that I was examining for my father, for instance, doesn’t show roads or state boundaries; it just shows rivers and watersheds. As a map for planning a road trip, it’s not much use. As a map for spotting possible destinations that fit certain criteria, it’s just the thing. If I’d been looking for places to go mountain climbing or skiing, a map showing differences in elevation would be more useful than the road map or the hydrology map. And if I’m trying to decide what to plant in my garden, I need the planting zone map that will tell me what is hardy at my latitude.

From a writing standpoint, what this means is that there are a lot more possible ways to look at planning a story than just trying to sort out the plot. What kind of map or prewriting you need to do depends on what you need to know. A road map won’t help you figure out what to plant in the garden or which streams in your area are suitable for a beginning kayaker. A hydrology map won’t tell you where the odd, interesting museums are (though it may give you some idea which areas are prone to having bridges wash out). Possibly what you really need to know is not what the plot is or where it is going, but what sort of fashion statement each of your characters prefers to make and what colors look good or bad on each of them. Maybe you need a street map of the town center, or maybe you need a drawing of the fountain in the palace courtyard.

It doesn’t matter whether the thing you do leads you toward a plot outline or not. Whatever will make this story easier or more interesting for you to write is the sort of prewriting and planning you want to think about doing.