Starting Out Lost

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.