Forum: Author Hangout

Hi everyone, happy to be here! I have a question that I think I can get advice on here?

One of the stories I'm writing right now involves a game of hide and seek on a college campus, and I feel like there needs to be a strong sense of place and geography so that readers can follow in their heads how the characters are moving around.

It occurred to me that maybe including a simple map of some sort to at least show the visual relationships between the parts of campus would be helpful. I can figure out the technical parts of including it in a post or ebook or whatever; that shouldn't be too hard.

The main issue I have is that I am a terrible artist (there's a reason I use words lol) and I really don't know the best way of going about drawing even a schematic sort of map would be. It's unfortunately a fictional college with a geography that fits the story, so I can't just grab a map from a real college, sadly. So I do need to draw it myself somehow.

Should I just use a bunch of boxes and lines in PowerPoint and screenshot it? Are there good programs for these sorts of things? What do people advise?

I've done similar exercises by using a spreadsheet program and used the inbuilt grid lines to have everything kept to perspective (mostly). Once finished I colour the background to hide the lines, highlight and copy the finished map and paste it into an image manipulation program at a high resolution to create a JPG image I can include in the story.

I have not used any in ages, but there are still probably some freeware-shareware map making programs made for RPG players and dungeon masters.

The ones I used were pretty easy, and could make decent maps for inside or outside.

Thank you all very much; this has been very informative!

One option is not to include a map, but to write with a simple map beside you. If before the start of the game (or even during the game), you include comments peppered throughout the story along the lines of "I went down the stairs in front of the library and turned left to get to the sports field" and "Then I had to run all the way across campus from the sports field to get to my lecture on time."

The reader will pick up what you want them to know without getting bogged down in too many intricate details of the specifics of, for example, exactly how far apart the buildings are and in what order they appear.

Most university campuses that I'm familiar with (ie in Aus but I'm sure its the same almost everywhere), consist of a hodgepodge of different buildings, put up at different times using different architectural styles. Things rarely fit together neatly, though mostly different "schools" within the university will be located in the same area.

For your purposes, if you want one building to have a dark and gloomy external stairwell going down to access a basement, but then the next building to have a ground floor that is open plan and surrounded by glass windows and automated sliding glass doors, then go for it.