These days, with smartphones in our pockets, it’s hard to truly get lost. Gone are the days of trying one route and then the next, of stopping to to ask for directions or letting yourself wander because you have no other choice. But is it always more beneficial to know where you are going?

“We all want to be efficient in some way,” says writer Peter Turchi. “Sometimes there’s a different kind of efficiency that comes from allowing ourselves to explore and get lost.”

Turchi is not talking about navigating literal roads of course, but rather, the process of creative thinking. He’s interested in the idea of “story as a model of information design,” a concept he explores in his book A Muse and a Maze. Creative writers can learn a lot from puzzles and maps, he believes.

Walk into a room with a map on the wall and you may very well find yourself gravitating toward it, leaning in, trying to make out the names of places and details marked there. A map tells a story. But to do that, every map must leave out certain details and put others in.

Every mapmaker must ask: What do I want my final product to do or say? How do I want people to interact with it? What process do I need to take to get there? In other words, lots of wandering and exploration needs to happen to arrive at an end result.

Imagining new worlds, fiddling with details and figuring out how to present it all as a finished product are challenges every creative professional and artist faces. “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,” Turchi writes in his book, Maps of the Imagination. “Then we live in the world those maps create.”

But how to actually build something from that wild terrain of ideas? Mapmakers give us a window into how our minds work, particularly during the creative process. I spoke with Turchi, whose study of maps has inspired writers, artists, and designers for more than a decade, about what maps can teach us when it comes to the creative process. Here are five key points to help you tackle your creative work with more confidence: