8 September 2003
La rentrée - deuxième partie
I have an enormous library of research that has contributed to my planning. Every creative decision I have made - and am making - is supported by my memories of places I've visited, music I've heard, food and drink I've enjoyed ...
All of these sense impressions combine to build the world my characters inhabit. Recently I spent some time in Carcassonne - one of Labyrinth's most important locations - walking the route taken by one of my characters.
I was lucky - the weather was oppressively hot, horribly uncomfortable. Just as it needs to be in the scene in my novel.
I took a sequence of photographs along the way that I've printed as a contact sheet. Sometimes I let my eyes drift across them as I'm thinking. It's a good way of putting yourself as author in your character's shoes.
I have published some thumbnail sketches to characters from Labyrinth on this site. For me, I now know them so well that just their names – Alaïs du Mas, Bertrand Pelletier, Esclarmonde de Servian, Oriane Congost can summon them like shades before my mind's eye.
Characters have to built, you see, from the grown up. Their memories, their desires and their abilities must become as well known to you as – well, those of your brothers and sisters, I suppose. And this process of building reminds me of one of the Occitan proverbs in the Labyrinth research database. It says:
Pêiro à pêiro, së fan clapiés. (Stone by stone the piles increase.)
The saying refers to the pile of stones in the corner of every plot of cultivated land. The plough cuts the soil and turns it to the sun. Whoever is driving the bull or donkey from behind the share bends to the ground in one fluid motion, picks up a stone from the broken earth and tosses it into a corner of the field – always the same corner, so the pile grows and grows, season upon season.
It begs the question: 'Is the job progressing well – methodically, assuredly – or is it painfully slow?'
For a writer, often, it's often both at the same time!
Meet me in the Labyrinth ...
