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It often helps because fantasy books often involve quite a bit of travel. It is not strictly necessary for the novel to be coherent, but I have found the ones that I've read that lacked maps to be...
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#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T00:44:44Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/337 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
StrixVaria
·
2019-12-08T00:44:44Z (over 4 years ago)
It often helps because fantasy books often involve quite a bit of travel. It is not strictly necessary for the novel to be coherent, but I have found the ones that I've read that lacked maps to be worse off because of it. Namely, "The Blade Itself" by Joe Abercrombie is a good example of a book that lacks a map that really needed one. He talks about wars from the north and the south and cities far and wide, and the reader has no reference to where any of this is or how imminent of a threat it is. It goes a long way towards making that book fall flat. If you have a world where the characters travel or where threats are coming from afar, I would say that you should also have a map. If you're writing a fantasy story set in one city that only deals with the politics or something in that one city, then a map isn't strictly necessary.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2010-11-21T13:23:21Z (over 13 years ago)
Original score: 15