Quotes from Peter Turchi

To ask for a map is to say, "Tell me a story."

Most writers I know move back and forth between the rational and the intuitive, though there are some who approach writing very rationally, and others who claim not to think their work through.

To ask for a map is to say, "Tell me a story.

A story or novel is a kind of map because, like a map, it is not a world, but it evokes one (or at least one, for each reader.

No matter how serious the tone, literature offers pleasure in its construction as well as in its content

The purpose of a story or poem, unlike that of a diary, is not to record our experience but to create a context for, and to lead the reader on, a journey.

ARTISTIC CREATION is a voyage into the unknown.

Nevertheless, in every piece we write, we contemplate a world; and as that world would not otherwise exist, we create it even as we discover it.

A map may be beautiful, but if it doesn't tell us what we want to know, or clearly illustrate what it means to tell us, it's merely a decoration.

To learn how to read any map is to be indoctrinated into that mapmaker's culture.

More ominously, Native American tribal areas were not included on early European maps of the Americas, giving readers of those maps the impression no one lived there—at least, no one of consequence. No landowners. These are the kinds of blanks that fire Marlow's imagination in Conrad's Heart of Darkness—the blanks that certain minds found to be a call for colonialism and conquest.

In the nineteenth century, maps often indicated watering holes for horses.

The first lie of a map—also the first lie of fiction—is that it is the truth.

How we see depends, in part, on what we want to see.

Every map intends not simply to serve us but to influence us.

As readers, we are content, even delighted, to be lost, in the 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 any story or novel is to be lost: the journey can't begin until we've been set down in a place somehow unfamiliar.

The challenge is not only what to select for telling and how to present it, but how to evoke, simultaneously, the Theater of the World—how to make the leap from ego-vision to omnivision.

We compile mental maps that are wildly skewed, a mental atlas so large and complex that we can never fully convey it to anyone else. Then we live in the world those maps create.

Nothing can remain immense if it can be measured.

A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.

We need to keep in mind the distinction between realism and reality. To confuse the two is to lose sight of the difference between art and life.

The desire to replicate the—or a—viewer's view is realism's reason for being.

Our descriptions are an acknowledgment of our unspoken agreement with the reader that we are not simply telling a tale but evoking an imaginary world.