Words and Coffee

What is this map hiding?

I’ve been making my way through Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer at a leisurely pace.   The author, Peter Turchi, juxtaposes the idea that maps need be accurate with the idea that a map reveals only that which is germane to its purpose (e.g., you won’t find mineral deposits on a U.S. road map). While each map provides information, it withholds it as well.

As writers, we must also include those things that drive our story, that inform it. Those things that are incidental must be left out of the story. As always, the trick is to identify which is which.

Turchi also touches on the necessity of being lost and the writer’s role as guide:

As readers, we are content, even delighted to be lost, in a sense that we are both absorbed and uncertain of where we are or where we are going, as long as we feel confident we are following a guide who has not only the destination but our route to it clearly in mind…

A prerequisite for finding our way through an story or novel is to be lost: the journey can’t begin until we’ve been set down in a place somehow unfamiliar.  And part of a reader’s willingness to be led is a willingness to be betrayed, outwitted, jumped from behind…

While we tolerate, even enjoy, some amount of dislocation, we also need to know where we stand in the world of a piece of fiction or a poem…

Every piece of writing establishes its basis for assertion, its orientation, and must immediately begin to persuade readers of its authority, its ability to guide.

The writer also starts out lost and must convince herself that she can guide herself through the story. She must explore the wilderness of her ideas and make sense of them so that she can guide others through the story as well. That’s pretty cool.

Maps of the Imagination, if nothing else, have forced me to look at writing from a wholly different perspective. The use of the map as a metaphor for writing works quite well, providing guidance of its own.

Sailing in Uncharted Waters has its Dangers

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A conversation between a subject and an artist about how the artist works:

I said, “It’s difficult for me to imagine how things must appear to you.”

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to do,” he said, “to show how things appear to me.”

“But what,” I asked, “is the relation between your vision, the way things appear to you, and the technique that you have at your disposal to translate that vision into something which is visible to others?”

“That’s the whole drama,” he said. “I don’t have such a technique.”

From A Giacometti Portrait by James Lord (excerpted from Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer by Peter Turchi)

Love this Cover Artwork

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I got home from a weekend out of town and found a little package on the front porch from Amazon. Inside: Finch, by Jeff VanderMeer, and Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer by Peter Turchi.

Finch is on my list of must reads for 2010. It just so happened that I finished The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss on Saturday (more on that in an upcoming post), so I jumped into Finch last night. So far it’s every bit what I hoped it would be. I’ll be posting a review of sorts once I finish and have time to digest.

Maps is a different thing altogether. Published by Trinity University Press, I had this book on my wish list based on a recommendation from VanderMeer (not personal, mind you, but from his book, Booklife). I’m excited about this one.

Image from inside Maps of the Imagination - What's not to like?

Check out the American Library Association’s blurb:

It’s not uncommon to compare the writing of a story to the mapping of a world, but no one has so fully, or so seductively and rewardingly, performed as extended a meditation on this illuminating metaphor as Turchi. A fiction writer, anthologist, and the director of the MFA writing program at Warren Wilson College, Turchi parses with equal insight, knowledge, and elan the making of maps and the writing of fiction. Both involve purposeful omission; both require compression; both are subjective in their perspective, orientation, and emphasis; and both create illusions.

Look for a future post on writing reference materials that I’ve found useful over the last few months.