Turchi’s premise is that a writer is a cartographer — you decide what to include, what scale to work at, where to put the edges, and how much blank space to leave for the reader. He runs it through actual maps: Portolan charts, projections and their distortions, blank spaces marked unknown, the difference between a map that guides and a map that seduces. Then back to writing: Exposition as legend, structure as projection, the first line as the coastline you start from. It’s illustrated throughout with historic maps and it will make you think about your own drafts differently.
Maps of the Imagination