The Place of Forgetting

Imagine for a moment if you will, being in a place from which there is no escape. A place where no daylight enters. No sweet smelling breeze stirs your hair. No birdsong lightens your heart as it falls upon your ear. You will not be fed, nor given water, though perhaps you find a trickle of water running down one of the rough, cold unseen stone walls of your prison and lap up the liquid. But that only prolongs your torture, because now you will live until you starve to death. And that takes weeks.

You are in the place of forgetting. A place from which there is no leaving. Your bones will lie here long after you breathe your last. You know this because you have tripped over the rattling bones of others who have languished here before you. Yes, and you’ve smelled the stench of the rotting flesh of those who are not yet reduced to bones. Smelled them, and dear God, even felt them, as you’ve circumvented this place, trembling hands outstretched before you in the dark.

You are in an oubliette. So called because those who are thrown down here are not thought of again. They are forgotten.

Castle Bouillon in France

In medieval times this was a fairly common way for someone who displeased a powerful noble to meet his end. So of course I had to have an oubliette in Sword of Mordrey. And of course someone (I’m not saying who) winds up there.

One of the most famous oubliettes from the medieval era is in the castle of Godfrey of Bouillon. Duke Godfrey was one of the principle leaders of the First Crusade. He eventually became the first ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem after it fell to the crusaders in 1099. He must have really wanted to fight in this war, because he pawned his castle in Bouillon to get the funds to do so. Castle Bouillon was one of the most desirable strongholds of its time. Nearly impregnable, with its triple barbican and crafty moat.

It has a perfectly wretched oubliette. It’s a windowless underground chamber, accessed through a hatch  in the ceiling. No provision was made for getting back out.

In modern literature and movies two of my favorite oubliettes are the one in the novel, Hannibal Rising, and the one in the movie First Knight. In Hannibal Rising the oubliette is a long well in the floor of a castle dungeon. Thomas Harris makes it especially haunting though, by the mention of a single word, scratched onto the wall at the bottom: Pourquoi?  (Why?)

The oubliette in First Knight is a deep cavernous room…with a high, narrow pinnacle that is reached by a removable drawbridge. Guinevere is deposited there, the drawbridge is removed, and there she languishes, on a platform from which there is no escape—unless you consider jumping to your death an escape.

And you might. You just might, after thinking about it for long enough.

Okay…back to you.

I know I’ve left you down in the cold dark. So imagine now:

A metal hatch creaks open in the high ceiling above you. It’s me. I poke my head down into the hole and thrust a knotted rope down into the darkness for you to climb up. (I do hope you’re in good shape.) You tip your face up to me and shield your light-deprived eyes from the sputtering torch clutched in my fist. A skittering of tiny nails in the lurching shadows at the very edges of the pit makes you jump and grope for the rope.

Yours are not the only eyes grown unused to the light, you see.

No. Don’t look around. You don’t want to know who…what, shares the pit with you. Just climb. Climb fast.

Writers: Have you come across strange settings/places in your research that made their way into your novel?

Readers: What settings most fascinate you in the novels you like best?

5 Reasons For Writers To Read

Reading will give you an edge on the opposition

I sat across the table from a guy who looked to be in his mid forties. He told us he was writing a spy novel. It was filled with action, he said. He’d come to this particular group because he needed feedback and wanted others to read what he’d written so far, and tell him where it was going wrong. He hoped he wouldn’t have to read too many other peoples’ work—he didn’t have a lot of time, and honestly, he hadn’t ever read very much. He didn’t enjoy reading.

I tried not to laugh. I looked around, but couldn’t find anything handy to throw at him.

The twenty or so other writers in the library meeting room stared at him in thoughtful silence. Then a young woman of about nineteen or twenty chirped up to say that she didn’t like to read either. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t like to read, she amended, it was just that it took her so long to finish a book that she lost interest, and so she never finished very many of them. She concluded that she was probably just too busy to read.

I felt my nostrils twitch.

You do realize you have to read to be a writer, I said.

The young woman looked at me as if I were a hydra and one of my heads had just bared its teeth.

The man looked first sullen…then his expression changed to dismissive. He refused to look at me. What did I know.

But my statement seemed to have unleashed the hounds. The stunned writers around the table all spoke at once. In a less civilized world I might have witnessed some violence,  a spanking, or an eye gouging. I think it is written somewhere; maybe in Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People: “Don’t walk into a room full of writers and admit you don’t like to read.”

Or maybe that was the bible…

Anyway, here’s what I believe: If a person wants to write they had better LOVE reading. It should be right up there with your top two or three favorite things to do. Eating, sex, reading. Or maybe: Eating, reading, sex. Something like that. You should have stacks of books all around you at home, and be reading through them like a paper mulcher chews through logs. The library, bookstore, or on line book buying joint should be your hallowed place.

Why?

1. You’ll probably actually enjoy writing, if you like to read. (And writing well is hard, so you better enjoy it.)
2. It will be a whole lot easier to learn how to write if you’ve digested 1000 or more good books.
3. You’ll  know what’s been done before, and how it was done.
4. It will keep you from making a fool of yourself.  (This one’s not true…I just wanted to have 5 reasons.)
5. It’ll keep you from getting your ass kicked by other writers. (This one is true.)
   

   Reading makes you sexy and smart

Ideally you need to have read many, many books over the course of your life. The reason for this is because you will have absorbed technique. Things like story arc and transitions, dialogue, and the fine balance between narrative and action. You will learn what works (from the good books) and what doesn’t (from the bad ones). These lessons are much easier to learn through osmosis than by being taught in a classroom.

You will have a huge bank of knowledge of what’s been done before to draw upon. And this knowledge will guide you. That nifty beat sheet will already live in your soul, and everything you write will automatically be holographically tested against it to see if it holds up…as you write.

If you’ve read widely, in many different genres, you will have a much broader knowledge base. And this will serve you well, enriching your writing, no matter which genre you choose for your own novels and stories. The best reads often contain elements of many genres.

A writer who doesn’t like to read is like a painter who doesn’t like to look. It’s like a musician who doesn’t want to bother to listen. It’s like a potter who doesn’t like clay. It’s like a gardener who doesn’t love dirt. It’s like a chef who doesn’t like to taste.

I get that some folks don’t like to read. But if you don’t enjoy books, why write one?

Go make a movie, or something.

Your son the famous painter might see you reading, think you look nice, and paint you

Check out these great links.

Here’s what Diana Gabaldon has to say about reading for writers.

And here’s what Joshua Becker over at becoming minimalist is doing to get a few books read this year.

Showing Up

When I got up to write this morning I really wanted to go back to bed. The house felt cold, the floor felt hard and cold beneath my bare feet, and outside as I stood waiting for Zeus to have his morning pee the night felt dark and damp and like any sensible person would be tucked up warm in bed.

Inside the house my husband sat in the big green over-stuffed chair in the kitchen, having his morning cup of coffee. He looked grumpy; he tweaked his back playing golf a few days ago, and hasn’t felt well since. After giving him a hug I made my cup of tea, measuring sugar and milk, then sat down at my computer.

My first feeling was that I was too tired to sit here and write…wouldn’t it be much nicer—not to mention easier—to just give in to the feeling and go back to bed? Did I really need to be up at this hour? I could always write later. (Not true, later there would be clients to deal with, emails and text messages, phone calls, and the muse silencing intrusion of bright sunlight.)

I opened the piece of Sword that I am currently working on and read through yesterday’s rewrites. It all bored me. The writing is fine, it’s just that I have read through this piece umpteen times and I’m sick of these rewrites. As I downed my first cup of tea these thoughts ran like a low murmur in the background. It took energy to ignore them, let me tell you.

Tired of working on the same piece of writing I have been for days, I opened a piece I had earlier in the week culled from the novel and saved into my rewrites folder. I had had some idea of deepening one of the main character’s flaws, of actually giving him a previous alcohol problem. (Bear in mind this is during Medieval times, so there wasn’t a lot of knowledge about this sort of thing back then, and certainly no A.A.) But I couldn’t think of how to work this in to the story line, and yet still have the reader feel sympathetic toward him, and believe in (or even understand) the transformation that occurs in him.

An hour passed. I poked around and played with this little segment of writing, mulling. Soon I was absorbed in the work.

As I sat there, my second cup of caffeine before me (this time coffee), I had one of those startling, sparkling moments of clarity, the kind we writers live for. I could see the thing in its entirety, its perfectness, and the little pieces I’d been mentally worrying, sorting and juggling for days fell into place like the colored pieces in a kaleidoscope.

It horrifies me to contemplate that I might have gone back to bed and missed this moment. That I might have stood up my muse and not shown up for our date. Really, it would have been so easy to be self-indulgent. And if I had, I would have missed this 6am epiphany. And who knows if it would have come to me another time? These moments are so transient, so ethereal. We run after them like children with butterfly nets, and if we are lucky enough to capture them they must be pinned down or they flutter off, and are forgotten.