Floor Plans: Movies to Books to Movies

Graphic design school, for all of its ups and downs, is worth it. There are three disciplines that I fell in love with that, oddly enough, have nothing to do with writing and only kind of use drawing-- package design, environmental design and... Well, I'm dropping the formality and just being blunt with 'floor plans.'

While I wouldn't say 3D spaces necessarily prove difficult in memory, it's more like they become 4D spaces akin to Portal where blue doors teleport you to orange doors and provide factually impossible movement. Even in my case, this is in a world where teleporting exists, just not everywhere it's convenient for me to pretend like I meant to do it.

It works both ways-- sometimes I'm seeing it unfold like a movie and my eyes are twitching unfocused as all the visuals are happening in my brain; sometimes the space is immediately a problem and I need a floor plan before my characters start trashing the place. Planning and pantsing, as you may know, can come in any order. Some writers can lean heavily either way, but being able to discern what your stories need is more important than deciding which 'type' you are. I'd save those distinctions for internet quizzes you take while shamelessly procrastinating on actually writing.

Why choose when you can be both?

Floor planning was hardly just a college discovery though. I vaguely recall my mom going to school for computer aided design and drafting just before I was old enough to start school myself. When I say 'computer aided', think more along the lines of a glorified calculator. Black screens, glo-green pixellated words. They were more like graphing calculators where you coded coordinates and watched as hitting Return drew out those lines on the screen for you (because it wasn't instantaneous). In fact, they were still using computers like that when I took a typing class in the early 90s. My mom had to buy these design stencil sheets to use-- triangle and square rulers and... Furniture. That was the one my little brain loved most. Little odd shaped stencil punchouts clearly labeled 'couch' and 'vanity' etc. I didn't really set out designing floor plans right then, but those stencils sparked an interest in shapes beyond the strictly geometric variety.

You should always have a lot of toilet shapes to choose from.

Fast forward back to years later when I'm actually writing AND finishing books. The first time I was tempted to make a visual aid for an interior space was at the end of my third book. There's a cottage that the new owner is settling into, awkwardly, and they were milling around in it, restlessly. I didn't want to go into every detail (which is an exercise I abandoned long ago-- great for creative writing or truly fantastical environments on occasion, yet naught but long-winded ego trips-- I'll elaborate on why as I go here).

At first, planning was just about the space, cardinal directions... How could I maneuver people through a building of many floors without sounding like a GPS? 'they turned north at .035 miles...' Even if you're writing a first-person story, the usual narrative blend of what they see and what they think could become tedious if you're just typing it out unplanned. Moving through an interior space gives you two starting points to expand the visualization: simple and complex. In a simple arrangement (think: single floor, efficiency apartment), you can start from the room or rooms you're working with. It's usually not architecturally impressive, but could have considerations concerning windows, doors, whether it's on the corner of the structure and what's below or above it that could be used. Simple starts with immediate needs and may not need to expand beyond them.

This is a simple room in a hotel suite. I didn't need too many details, just a basic idea.

Now, I know I've gone into floor plans before, but the complexities can get more complicated from there. Let's say you need a whole castle or some Byzantine wonder of architecture. That would be the complex. Not just on scale but also in deciding what is useful. Even just plotting a particular wing. I've known many a D&D DM that enjoys either using or making their own maps for campaigns and it is usually something that, unprepared, requires a couple-hour break even done roughly.

This would be a larger chunk of the same hotel. 

Now, in my 'complex' example, this hotel floor is considered ground level in the back where it goes out to the garden but the ground around it actually drops at points from back to front to make it seem like the entrance is one floor up from the front, a grand ballroom kind of entrance. Where you see the stage extend to the outside, it's actually built for the stage to be accessible with an outside facade and that terrace is also level. The side garden may be something I plot sooner or later, since the drops will include stairs and need to consider the landscape around it. It's a private luxury hotel so access to the gardens is restricted by a wall/fence boundary either way. Where the 'office' is you see an arch, which is actually a patio that goes down into the dropped front level. The office, while shaped by the main hallway, isn't accessible from it (there's an unmarked area to its left that is actually the lobby entrance; the office belongs to the hotel owner. I will add these details later). The ballroom is the main stage of the story but the kitchen is mentioned in passing. What I had to plan for was the secret hallway between the office and the ballroom as well as the layout of the ballroom itself.

What I definitely didn't want to do was work out such details within the story. It's not first-person and even in that case, the event itself would not allow for leisurely inspection.

You start with blocking in rooms as you need them (keeping in mind the shape of the building if needed). I usually do the floor plan on its own layer and lock it once set up. That way I can draw directly on it without disturbing those elements.

The next step is to take the floor plan at large and start making furniture assets. Doing this digitally, I start a new layer, (lock the floor plan layer!) and label the new one 'assets'. I sometimes reuse simple shapes and my 'key' often distinguishes those objects by color, as you've seen from the pictures. I'm using a bird's eye view so most objects are fine with generic geometric shapes. Occasionally, I'll resort to vector drawing to do curved benches, marvelous fountains, door indicators. These are the things that will help you integrate the environment without having to explain every detail. When the character enters through the southernmost door, they might notice the sudden vault of ceilings, but due to the layout of plants arranged around a massive center element (maybe a statue or fountain) there is more around it that they won't see but you need to mentally stage anyway.

If you're pantsing, this is where ego and excitement can make the draft come off as a creative writing exercise. Oh, there's a bookshelf over there with the tiniest of knick-knacks, how cute, and a grandfather clock! Oh, but the pendulum isn't working and-- what was I talking about again? You can be as fascinating with detail as you want but at some point, it may become difficult to distinguish what is building the mood and what is just prose that you're overly fond of.  And yes, I DO want to discover rooms like I'm just walking into them. However, the floor plan provides the basis of where my eyes are jumping around to, glazing over to sink into the scene, but pulling back to ask-- wait, didn't I just put a bookcase where there is already a couch? No matter how cinematic your brain is, it is also malleable with some details when 'something better' comes along. I like to eliminate the need for contradictions and story-damaging prose this way.

A few hours of planning can save you many more hours of outlining, style sheets and critical edits to catch those mistakes.

What I love most about my floor plans is that they often start out architecturally clean then can become a clutter of 'more assets' as I add more colored symbols that represent where someone might have left a sword or put down their poisoned drink. I can move these mobile assets and turn my imagination into a gameboard for strategy. I can choreograph fights that use the space and plan secret rooms and escape routes. I could do it before well enough but there's a solid confidence that I can better translate the space if I'm seeing how everything fits in it.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I consider scale very carefully. If I were a set designer, I certainly would but as a writer, shape and location are primary concerns. On occasion, I do make some adjustments for a sort of scale, but in most cases, the exact distance can be left to the imagination. Even the height of characters is mostly figurative. If I establish a female character as average height then a 'tall' female might come in as a head taller and a towering male two heads or more. The exacts might make it into a character dossier, but I'll use those in the same way as I do the floor plans-- to create figurative comparisons that minimize an info-dump.

Some writers might excuse it as their style or preference but it often becomes transparent that planning and editing was second to showing off their ability to describe all the things. As I've said, sometimes there's mystique in describing clutter and architecture but more often, I just see it as an attempt at depth that pads the ego but does little to nothing for the story. Some readers may like that kind of prose but since I am not one to soldier through that kind of padding, I try to minimize it or at least do a bit of pre-planning to minimize it. My audience will have plenty to do as I cut a path through these worlds-- belaboring it wouldn't do it much credit.

There's only so much I can do to show you why a visual aid like this can be valuable to a writer so I may do a video (just screen capping while I talk over it) and link it in later. I'm angling for a day when I don't have to run a noisy air conditioner so I can at least plan a video in the next two weeks. I hate doing videos where I'm talking to a camera but I can most likely at least be audible enough to pull off a screen-cap video. I've always wanted to do some tutorials that way so I'll see what I can come up with.

I have a few sketches in notebooks of floor plans and I did a library design for a class in school-- I'll add those below in an edit if I can dig those out. You don't really need ridiculous technical skill to pull this off. Hell, I've even used D&D maps for visualizations. These are more for your reference, but if you ever do want to put a professional on designs you can publish, then even a chicken scratch version with relevant text from the story is sufficient.

Writing a book is seldom about one aspect of imagination, no matter how focused you are. It's more often a combination of lofty goals. There's nothing wrong with picturing it as a video game or a movie, but if you are writing it as a book, make sure that you are using methods that work best for that medium. If you have some great idea for the movie/game version, keep it in a separate notebook. While some authors sign off on creative control, you may find you have the opportunity to be involved and your notes become canon to the new medium. Or you can keep these elements for a blog or website or an AMA/Q&A type fun-fact. Just as you might spark curiosity for sequels, there might be elements that are best withheld for baiting or teasing. Personally, I love when there's more to discover outside of the book world. I can appreciate when authors continue world-building and dreaming of their worlds. My love affair with my own worlds and characters doesn't stop when I hit Publish. All the little extra bits still wiggle and move beyond it.