I’m currently working on two pieces of writing. One is the third novel in the Terra Trilogy and the other is the third installment of the Ice Dragon Series of short stories. Working on these two projects has made me question how I know where I’m going and how do I know where I am in relation to everything else in both these stories. It brings to mind the question of how we know, in our real life, where we are in relation to the rest of the world.

In this day of GPS and mapquest etc. this might seem like a very easy question to answer, but it wasn’t always this way, just like I wasn’t always able to have a sense of where I am in a story. Yes, surveyors took it upon themselves to survey the world. Countries (and scientists) agreed on the prime meridian that impacts all our time zones. But the 20th century has primarily been concerned with improving the precision of mapping and in particular with ensuring the pinpointing of places on the map in relationship to the rest of the world. The US Geological Survey was involved in this through most of the 20th century.

Why is this important? Well, think about it. Without standard understanding of how everything relates to everything else, weird things happen, like bridges getting built from each shore that don’t meet in the middle, or highways that have weird jogs in them because the measurements allowed the two ends to miss each other. It might not be important to you, but the cost overruns of such mistakes make having a common context for measuring everything important because it stops these types of things from happening.

In North America, the result of the surveying is those nice little brass discs (known as monuments) set in concrete or rock dotting the landscape . Each of these little brass discs serves as a known point for all subsequent surveying in the area. How did they know the individual location of these monuments? They took meticulous measures of distance through triangulation surveys and also measured the azimuth—the direction of Polaris—to set each monument’s position.

Throughout America, broad swaths of land were surveyed independently to create grids of known locations. They measured locations not only horizontally across the landscape, but also vertically, in relation to sea level, but the challenge was knowing that all these grids fit together. The result was the selection of a single monument at a ranch in central Kansas, Meades Ranch, as point zero for all grids across the country. Meades was chosen because it sat centrally in the US and it lay close to the crossing of two major survey lines across the US – one from Canada to Mexico and the other from the Atlantic to Pacific Ocean. Interestingly, today Meades Ranch has been superseded by global positioning that uses the center of the earth as the central point of reference.

The use of that central point for mapping draws me back to my thoughts on plotting a novel or story. I once heard the wonderful writer, Nancy Kress, talk about plotting. Now I don’t know how you feel about plotting—some people are all for detailed plotting of everything in a novel, while others prefer to fly by the seat of their pants (Pansters) and write into the mist of their imagination. Nancy Kress seemed to offer a third alternative that didn’t hold a writer’s imagination down, but also gave some structure to writers so that all that lovely mist didn’t turn into a dense blinding fog. Ms. Kress suggested that writers need to write down what they think is going to happen in the novel. Just brainstorm them out. Ask yourself what is the beginning (the inciting event) and what is the midpoint (quiet often a reversal of some sort), and how do you think the story will end (the climax)? Once you have those key points identified, you can easily place them on a plot line and them locate all your other plot ideas on either side of the midpoint—a lot like being able to measure your location from Meades Ranch.