The Cave

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 | The Writing Life

I am not sure if all writers experience The Cave, though I suspect a lot of us do. I have heard Karen Essex mention it in passing online, so I am not the only one. My time in The Cave is when I get deeply involved in my work, when I hit about the 1/4 point in my novel’s first draft. I have hit that point with my latest work, TO BE QUEEN, and I find myself disappearing from the rest of the world, becoming more and more drawn into the world Eleanor inhabits, the world she and I are creating together.

The joy of historical fiction is that it is fiction. While I base what I do on what is known about the living people who bear my characters’ names, I can never know the truth of their lives, the experiences of medieval people,  not how they looked at the world, or why they did what they did.

That is where my characters come in. They sit with me while I work, and we explore what might have been. Eleanor’s voice is as clear in my ear as any living person’s I have met, though I know that to say so is hubris: the Eleanor who lived and breathed in Poitiers over 800 years ago might not recognize the woman on the page of my novels. But I hope she would.  I hope she would be pleased.

As I write, I wait for alchemy, for magic, that my work might breathe life once more into the dead. To see the world as it was when Eleanor lived, to give the readers of today insight into how Eleanor lived and what she loved and why she made the choices that built her life.

I will never know if I succeed at this. Eleanor of Aquitaine will not rise from her resting place in Fontevrault Abbey to tell me. But as Sharon Kay Penman put it, I seek to honor the dead. I seek to honor Eleanor, the glory and the beauty of who she was, the courage she had to be a woman of strength in the world of men.

So I stay in the Cave, so that I might do Eleanor honor. If I serve her well, if I tell the best story I know how to tell, hopefully I will honor not just Eleanor with the telling, but my readers as well.

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