Now, with Tolkien, that history and geography already existed in his writings before The Lord of the Rings. But in my fantasies, I have often mentioned events or places which I didn’t yet know anything about — for example, some of the later exploits of Ged mentioned early in A Wizard of Earthsea. These were, when I wrote them, merely words — “empty” nouns. I knew that if my story took me to them, I would find out who and what they were. And this indeed happened…

In the same way, I drew the map of Earthsea at the very beginning, but I didn’t know anything about each island till I “went to” it.