“Fictitious maps give form to a thing—the imagination—that has no form. They are mysteries and answers to those mysteries.” The New Yorker publishes a piece by Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell in which he describes his creative process, which since childhood has meant to Start with a Map—something he calls “a displacement activity,” but in the same breath he says “mapmaking and stage-sketching can be necessary aspects of writing.” Mitchell’s essay is an excerpt from a forthcoming book edited by Huw Lewis-Jones: The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands (University of Chicago Press, October), which sounds right up my alley.