Maps

I was stuck. And being stuck in the middle of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, slows down the race for the 50,000 word count—not a good thing.

I was stuck because I couldn’t nail down what exactly happened at my crime scene. That was important info to have. Writing a mystery involves essentially coming up with TWO stories: the one that happened and the one that appears to have happened. Or so I was told early on.

For my first novel, Clouds Over Bishop Hill, I was the classical PANTSER. I constructed my plot, found my story, and developed my characters as I wrote. I wanted to do it differently for the second time around. It became very important for me to figure out who was who, who was where, how they got there, and where did they park those cars.

To that end, I spent an afternoon digging through my stash of Bishop Hill maps. I’d started a collection many years ago just for a day of need like this.

I found what I wanted and taped four sheets of paper together to give me a nicely laid out Bishop Hill of a size that would be useful. I raided a Bananagrams game for letter tiles, and voila, I had a way to move characters around to test out likely meet ups and such. 

So, I say, when imagination and mental agility fails--do go back to the basic visuals.

Note: the map in the upper left shows how Bishop Hill was originally laid out. There are sections of village streets that are now grass covered and still passable.  A lot of streets never made it past the mapping stage.