Travel Muse Magazine

Maps have always been a way to share stories. They’re advice from one traveler to the next to go this way and see that there. We often take their storytelling purposes for granted as we rush to get from point A to B. When you think about it, a map can reveal a lot about the people who make them and “what they value,” as Sarah Pearse notes in The Wilds.

The Wilds is a mystery novel, book 3 of the “Detective Elin Warner” series by British writer Sarah Pearse. Released in 2024 as a hardcover and last month in paperback, I picked it up this past spring purely because it was set in Portugal and I was planning for my own upcoming trip to the country and trying to read everything I could find set there. (There’s sadly not enough! Read my book guide for what I’ve found so far here.) It was a solid story. But what really struck me was a seemingly inconsequential passage in the opening section of the book, which details the backstory of a character that is at the heart of the novel, but isn’t much “in the story,” as she’s the missing person.

The character talks about making a sort of biography map to mark “places where we’d left little pieces of our soul” (p.8) that show such things as a bakery where the character spent one-on-one time with her mother and the beach where she learned to swim and had an important conversation with her mother. Pearse’s character liked to have her friends draw their own maps because they note “places that make them feel alive. Free” (p.8).

What a great idea! I was inspired and immediately set out to make my own map. As I was doing so, it occurred to me that this would be a great start of semester activity for my college writing students too, as a way of introducing themselves to me and the rest of our class.

Read more about Pearse’s The Wilds on Goodreads, where it gets a solid 3.7-star rating.

If you want to make your own map, perhaps with your own children or friends or even just for yourself, I’d suggest using either Padlet or My Google Maps. Both are free and both have a way for you to add photos plus short text easily on an interactive map online and share with anyone else you’d love. I could also be fun to use this idea to plot your own novel and make a biography map for your own main character as a way to get to know them and their motivations, perhaps what brings them to where they are in your story.

Another great idea I love with these sorts of maps… using them as vacation planning tools. I just enter everything I come across that I may want to do on a blank map and slowly build my itinerary. I also have my family add to the map too. It makes it easy to see what everyone wants to do, gets them involved in the process and makes it really easy to then even plan your own customized walking tours.

Embedded below is an example of the “bio map” I created with Padlet to give you some ideas of where to start your own. You can see an example of how I used My Google Maps to create a custom itinerary in this Paris story I wrote last week.

Note: If you buy The Wilds through the above link to Amazon, we may end up making a bit of cash off the sale as an Amazon Associate, which would be cool. It won’t be much, but everything we make on this site we use toward bringing you more website content!