I’m drawn to stories about places. Robert Louis Stevenson’s first successful novel began with a map.
Treasure Island was not his first book, but it was his first successful book. He wrote it at age 31 after a string of failures.
Stevenson was in Scotland at a place called the Late Miss McGregor’s Cottage. A schoolboy came home for the holidays “and with the aid of pen and ink and a shilling box of water colours, he had soon turned one of the rooms into a picture gallery.“ Stevenson, instead of working, joined in the play.
On one of these occasions, I made the map of an island; it was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance ‘Treasure Island.’ I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe.
The map captured his imagination, and soon he had characters tromping around on it. John Silver was based on a friend. Stevenson simply deprived his friend of his finer qualities and left the raw stuff: strength, courage and quickness.
Such psychical surgery is, I think, a common way of ‘making character’; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way.
Stevenson began work on The Sea Cook, a reminder that when it comes to titles the first thought is not always the best. He wrote a chapter a day for 15 days and then was stumped. After an anguished-filled break, he picked up the manuscript again and was astonished that the story flowed. Again, a chapter a day.
I have said the map was the most of the plot. I might almost say it was the whole. … It is, perhaps, not often that a map figures so largely in a tale, yet it is always important. The author must know his countryside, whether real or imaginary, like his hand; the distances, the points of the compass, the place of the sun’s rising, the behaviour of the moon, should all be beyond cavil.
Stevenson believed in making a map or sketch of the place before starting the narrative. If he set a scene in a house, he’d draw the floorplan.
• Source: “My First Book: ‘Treasure Island’” is in Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays on the Art of Writing; London: Chatto & Windus, 1905, pp. 111-34. Project Gutenberg has it here:
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