Map Room 8: Scale, Folds, and other Distortions

This installment introduces a series of wrong behaviors into our mapmaking. Wrongness is one of my favorite compositional principles. (And by wrongness of course I mean rightness: moving the composition against the grain of the accepted rules not for the sake of being contrarian but because there’s a strong invitational pull in another direction that comes with an inbuilt trust that something about it — something I’ll understand better later, perhaps — is right.)

Today’s map messes with the orderliness and continuity of the space it represents. Though it loses in rational consistency, it gains the potential to host multiple intertwined logics, perhaps a better form of realism than a rationalized, homogenous, well-behaved grid-tethered article.

As with many of the other installments, it’s possible to point this map toward either story world and story’s form. If it has anything to offer, it is permission—to move, to jump, to expand, to vanish, to link.

I’ll give the prompt now so it can act as a holding place in mind as you read the following bad cartographic advice. I’ll repeat the prompt at the end, too. 

For a story in progress or a story you would like to dismantle and remake:

Draw a map of your story world  — the regions it takes place in or thinks about or is somehow composed by. 

Or: Draw a map of your story as a kind of floor plan: each passage/chapter/scene/[insert your name of unit here] as its own chamber.  

Let your map embrace two or three of this installment’s variables. Let your map teach you something about the freedom of movement you might embrace. 

SCALE

Most maps rely on a standardized coordinate system projected onto real space in order to create an anchoring grid upon which the map’s content is plotted. The grid homogenizes the relationships between things in the map under a basic rubric of distance. In order to function well, this kind of map needs to have a defined, consistent scale. One inch will always correlate to a set amount of real mileage. We have conventions for changing scale within the same map with the “area of detail” box, but the conversion rate and relative scales are strictly controlled. 

A wrong behavior in scale would be to refuse a consistent unit. In wrong scale, an inch of paper or screen space could correlate to worldspace variously. Wrong scale lets the grid go freeforming, fitting more or less life within its graphic borders as needed. We could imagine a  ruler running along top or side of map looking something less like this: 

|__|__|__|__|__|__|

and more like this:

|__|____|___|___ ______||_____|  _  | | ____________|

What does it mean for the time or space of your story if its map allowed such elasticity? Would it partake of more of the actual weirdness and variety of lived life? After all, we experience time and space in antirational durations and expanses, whatever the GPS satellites tell us about how far our blue dot of self has advanced toward a destination. 

To play this variable, let your scale warp, wobble, shift. Give it some vicissitudes. Let it help you play some intermittent music.

a fold space

FOLDS

Space is continuous even though we can speak of it as if it’s divided. The fold marks an edge in continuous space that allows for the intuitive sense of sectioning (this side of a line and that side) and yet does not cut or de-cohere. Imagine a sheet of paper with origami folds, so that it conceals a hidden pocket. The fold itself is a short, pressured territory: a crease. The fold, unfolded, retains a mark of that pressure. Run your finger over the fold into the folded-under paper, and you reach an underside, a hidden side, a pocket. Folds can be folded into further folds, making them a compositional principal of a kind of special hiddenness. Folds develop something from simplicity into complexity: in the embryo, invagination (folding) is a structural event of differentiation that leads to organ formation. 

Imagine a mountain rising sharply from the ground. The slope of the surface changes, and with it, depending on how large this mountain is, the type of vegetation and exposure of rock layers. A tunnel blasted through the mountain allows a traveler to bypass the folded earth and proceed in a straight line. 

Or, think of caving. Picture a small aperture in the ground. You can step across the edge of the fold and continue along in daylight, but slide your body over the edge and lower through the opening and perhaps there will be a chamber there, or a cavern. 

What if your map held a transitional crease that was both a threshold into continuous space (the mountain, the cave), and a threshold of functional division. What crosses the fold without seeking its over- or underside? What crosses the fold and follows it up or under? You could actually fold your paper or puzzle out the cartographic riddle of how to get continuity and discontinuity into one graphic. 

JOIN

This wrong-mapping principal imports itself from furniture making and the many ways to bring pieces of wood into a corner or joint without the use of screws or glue. The idea is to use the map to join two regions that wouldn’t otherwise be continuous, using the joinery technique of cutting notches, prongs, and negative spaces in the meeting edges that will slot into each other, allowing the wood to interlock in a stable joint. 

The beauty of this kind of joint is not simply its economy and nestling made to match fit, but the way that each piece of wood forms a negative space for the other to fill. The join space has pattern, rhythm, counterpoint. It has a gesture of offering and receiving.

What if you made a map that joined two or more formerly discontinuous territories, and so creating an edge space and interchange between them? By what logic will you find the shape of the notches and hollows? Is that logic imposed or does it emerge from each candidate edge? What is the special experience of the corner? What would you join?

dovetail joinery

PASSAGE

Passage, like join, is also a variable of connecting two spaces, but the space of passage itself is not a meeting place but a short (or long) region to be mapped. Passage is an in-between space, an interior that connects. Corridor as a space of transition. Stairwell as a mixing zone set apart from the purpose of the floors it connects. There is a transition of energy, perhaps a sense of gauntlet or shedding or sneaking or seeking or forced removal.

What if your map, instead of mapping landmarks and resting places, included the passages between these things? All spaces lead from one place to another. What makes a space a space of passage in particular? What could designate passage space graphically? What about a map of all passage? What would it mean for your story to spend time in passage?

PORTAL

A portal requires two maps with an identical or related mark somewhere on each. Portal is a specific location where one worldspace, continuous in and of itself, gives access to another. A portal can be passed through — the wardrobe in the Narnia series is the classic example: instead of a wall there is a door. The brick column leading to Harry Potter’s Platform 9 3/4 is a portal too, although the platform itself is more like a fold space than a separate world. A portal is often, though needn’t necessarily be, a stable landmark, different in each of the two world spaces, but reliably connecting to the associated point in the other place. Its most important function is to act as a small frame through which one gains access to somewhere very else. 

The principal of portal is instantaneous transport, a transitionless transition. What if you chose a place on your map to become a portal? Is it marked? Is it secret? What other place would it call up? Do you want to map the place on the other side of the portal?  

DISTORTION

We have a set of laminated place mats at my house for the kid’s edification, including different maps of the world drawn by different logics of projection. The kid’s favorite is a world map where each country has its customary spot in the globe, but its proportions have been distorted (in terms of measurable space) to reflect relative population. In this map, one square of grid = a million people. So Canada, while geographically huge, is a small flat line across the top of the USA. Mongolia is barely visible in a little fold of China’s north. Russia loses quite a bit of heft. 

The principal of distortion allows you to magnify and diminish the relative scale of things within your map, according to where you want your attention to flow. 

What if you measured something non spatial and then gave that measurement a spatial representation on your map? What would you magnify and what would be distorted, and how, to make room for it?

WORMHOLE

The last variable is wormhole. The wormhole is a hypothetical space, both passage and portal, in a sense. Wormholes are predicted by Einstein’s general relativity, but none have been found except in sci fi. It is thought that a wormhole is double mouthed. The wormhole as hypothesized in science and imagined in sci fi is a place of intense pressure and danger. Wormhole will cost you. It bridges vastly distant locations in a short span, but without guarantee that a body can survive the transition intact. Wormhole may be an obliterating transition. The experience of traveling the wormhole is, like death, beyond our knowledge. But since stories can move anywhere, why not entertain one? How does the hole open in your map? How do you know you have entered the mouth? If you were to survive it, to where would you be delivered?

THE PROMPT AGAIN

These are the variables of Fold, Scale, Join, Passage, Portal, Distortion, Wormhole, introduced as possibilities for a map without a fixed grid.

We are now ready to become cartographers of the wrong. 

For today’s map, allow yourself to play with two or three of these variables. 

Draw a map of your story world  — the regions it takes place in or thinks about or is somehow composed by. 

Or: Draw a map of your story as a kind of floor plan: each passage/chapter/scene/[insert your name of unit here] as its own chamber.  

You might also revisit something you have mapped in an earlier installment, finding out what changes in the represented space (and its offerings for writing), if you indulge some of these variables. 

As you map, let yourself be led by pleasure. 

When you have drawn your map, study it for a while. Then take notes on what it can teach you about what is possible and what matters to you in the world, and the telling, of your story. 

Write into the part of the map that unnerves you or entertains you the most.

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?