Mapping Your Story: Stage 5 in my Olympic Novel Marathon

I have just watched the Olympic flame come up the Thames and I have  only covered 5 novels in my novel marathon.

Here for You

...  in this post - taking a breather - I thought  I'd tell you about the fact that I always work with some kind of map for my stories - sprawling across  my study wall fo a year or so to keep my imagined world before me. This is a my top tip today for those aspiring big novel writers out there.


For instance for   A Woman Scorned I gradually built up on a roll of wallpaper drawings of a street 18th and Ninetneth Century Century buildings in the West Auckland steet where the alleged murderer Mary Ann cotton had lived, I drew the people who lived there and pasted on images of 19th Century peopole and vehicles in the village street.

I  had made similar maps of people and place  for my first four novels which all took place in and around the South Durham town of Priorton. - my nom de place for the marvellous market town of Bishop Auckland where I live. (In later novels I came clean and gave Bishop Auckland its own name,..)

My editor at that time asked me to make a map covering all the first five novels. So I distilled all the maps and located all my characters. The map was part of the frontispience of KITTY RAINBOW the story - the first of a trilogy - which is my fifth novel and which I will post about next. Tomorrow I hope, marathon permitting....

On this map of The Priorton Novels I locate the characters and the home ground so important for these first five novels.I hope you can make it out. Scroll down on this blog page for inside info on the first four novels and watch out tomorrow for the story of the story of KITTY RAINBOW which started with a dream.

I am learning a lot in this marathon process.

I hope all this  entertains you Wx