A special delight for many book lovers is to open a cover to find a map secreted inside. It is filled with the details of land about to be ______. A writer’s map hints at a fully imagined world. At the beginning of a book, it’s a promise of what is to come. In the middle, it’s a guide through the fictional environment. And at the end, a map is a ______ of all the places the ______ has taken you to.

A new book, The Writer’s Map, contains dozens of ______ maps. Some were drawn by ______, while others were made by artists to ______ places that writers have ______ in their stories. “All maps are products of human ______,” say Huw Lewis-Jones, the book’s editor. “For some writers, making a map is absolutely ______ to shaping and telling their tale.”

The book features essays by authors and mapmakers, many of whom ______ Treasure Island, a novel about a magical treasure hunting ______ on the high seas. It contains one of the most well-known ______ in literature. The author first sketched the map in 1881 for his stepson. A red X ______ the place where the treasure was ______.

The ______ of Treasure Island inspired other writers to ______ maps in their own stories. This is an experience ______ shared by map-loving writers. For some writers, map making is a ______ way to pull themselves into their own work. “I always ______ my way into stories,” writes Abi Elphinstone, author of the Dreamsnatcher books. “I begin every story by drawing a map because it is only when my ______ start moving from place to place that a plot unfolds.”