Maps

Overheard in Bird and Beckett, a great local bookstore in San Francisco, a woman looking for maps, nobody sells them anymore. The sales person commiserates, there are no map stores anymore (I’m thinking, Rand Mcnalley in North Beach is long gone). And what of it? Don’t I just use Google maps myself? Except maps aren’t just for finding your way from here to there. In writing the question is whether you should have an outline before you start writing and if so, how detailed. One author counseled that you want a map of the territory ahead, not the exact path. Because writing isn’t that straight forward, but you still need to have a sense of where you’re going and the territory ahead. But also maps are needful for what isn’t there. At one extreme, those ancient maps that ‘here be monsters’ or closer to our own eras, with helpful cartoon illustrations of wonderous things along the way. Bill Buxton in his book on design wrote “You have to leave big enough holes to let imagination come into play.” Google maps look too complete, too stolid. Now, I am not adventurous by nature, I’m just a bookworm, maybe Google maps are still enough to stir the blood and quicken the heart of adventurous souls—Samarkand and Uttar Predesh, Istanbul, Prague, Budapesh, the Escalante. I always expect that software hidden behind the Google maps will keep it updated, fill in the mysterious. A paper map is different, somehow they beckon, ask me to fill in the blanks.