When a map is a useful tool.

So, if you've read any fantasy novel you've probably noticed Fantasy authors tend to absolutely love maps. They'll make maps of continents, countries, cities, towns, castles, everything.

I personally think some of them go a little crazy with the maps, however. I mean, if you're writing a Fantasy epic like The Lord of the Rings, or something not so epic but still fairly big in scope, with many events happening in several locations but still all tied to each other then yes, a map is great.

Now, the question is why? Why is a map great if you have a story that is what you would call 'big' in scope?

Let me give you a few reasons:

1. It helps you decide how your characters go from one point to the other.
2. It's an awesome way for you to remember plot points and to add them or remove them.
3. It gives you a visual representation of where you are at any given point in your narrative.
4. It offers the readers a chance to become familiar with your world, and to visualize it.

That said, I thought I'd provide an example. As you know, I'm cowriting a Ranma 1/2 story with Daisukifox titled Lost Together, and the story involves several locations in China that are taken from the manga, and a few others that we had to create to help our story move along. Because of the nature of the story, which involves lots of travelling around the region by at least three different parties, a map became a very useful tool when it comes to planning story events.

And so, I decided to create a map for it, which I present below, and if you've read the story you'll see how some of the things 'click' a bit differently now.

Ranma 1/2's Bayankara region in China, the setting where the events mentioned in Lost Together take place.

There are many map creators available online, but I use inkarnate as the interface is the easiest to use in my opinion and the free account, while somewhat limited, does give you many options to customize your map.

Well, all that explained, the last I could say about this is that yes, maps are good tools to help build your narrative, but their usefulness depends entirely on what the scope of your story is.