I had always been the kind of writer who waited until a good idea came up, and then worked it around in my head until I deemed it complete enough to write down. This was how just about every one of the stories in my first collection, Dream Escapes, came to be, and it also explains why more than a few of them are described as "dreamstories"; on the rare occurrence that a nighttime dream would stick around into the next day and still make narrative sense, I felt the need to capture it somehow, as if my own mind had thrown me a creative freebie.
It wasn't until I took an adult creative writing class (during my unemployed period, after Borders closed down) that I realized I was going about my process all wrong. I surprised myself with what I was able to come up with when we did our free-writing exercises, in which we took a random item from a box and had ten minutes to make up a story about it on the spot (several of these are now listed as the first few "Fast Fiction" items on this very blog). I began to realize that when I showed up to the page and trusted myself, more often than not inspiration would meet me there, and automatically start taking on forms that I would never come up with if I left it to my rational mind.
After the class ended, I experimented with just grabbing any random image that hit me the right way (and, in the process, learned to recognize that when it happened) and making a story out of it. Over the next year or so, I imposed quick-turnaround deadlines on myself and ended up with what are now my eight "We're All Light" mini-ebook collections. I was almost uniformly pleased with results, but I also started wondering what else I could do if I applied myself to it with the same discipline.
I had tried writing novels before, but my still-underdeveloped writing muscles felt like they needed a pre-made structure to follow, a safety net to fall back on if I lost my way or my drive. That's why my first few semi-finished original works are based on other works that I admired: the general tone and shape of my screenplay "Syzygy" (which is actually posted below) was based on Tom Waits' Bone Machine album, although it changed a lot along the way; my novella "28 IF" is based on -- and fully incorporates -- the Beatles' Abbey Road; and my unfinished Wizard-of-Oz-in-Hell novel "Nadir" is clearly superimposed on Botticelli's map of Dante's Inferno.
With a few dozen short stories under my belt, however, I felt like I should give a bigger, more original, project a try. And it was an intriguing experiment... could I take the make-it-up-on-the-fly ethos I was using for short stories and spin it out into a novel? The results are the 150,000 words I've just finished. And now that it's over, and I know what happened to everyone, I've come up with what I think is a fitting title... which I will reveal in just a minute.
Before that, a side note here: Let's not fool ourselves. Short stories are fun, but in today's writing game, novels are where it's at. For a long time we could claim that internet attention spans would make people tend to gravitate toward short stories, and ebook portability would favor any length of work evenly. But unfortunately, the trend that literature has been following for the last forty years hasn't changed much: novel-length books are the fuel that stoke the fires of bigger business. Take a look at the biggest media-spanning hits these days, and you'll find that almost none of them sprang to life originally as film and/or television. Nearly everything is based on a book, a story, a comic book, etc. But I am confident in saying that the reasons I think this project has been successful (and in my mind, "successful" can be equated with "not given up on") never included the thought of making money off of it. If I had gone in with that mindset, I would have quit a long time ago. Nor would I have posted the first draft in its entirety here on this site -- a move that I did to keep myself on task and to not overthink things, which is another metric by which I think I was successful.
So, as for the title. I've got this weird penchant for wanting to name my big works after obscure words that most people don't know (opposed to my short stories, where for some reason I'm content to use rather nondescript words and short phrases). I've got some kind of half-formed idea that it's a way of taking a tiny piece of the language and kind of owning it -- I suspect that if I really investigated it, probably as many people are alienated as intrigued. But I can't seem to turn away from the practice, much as I couldn't turn away from many of the plot twists in this story as soon as they sprang into my head, as if I had merely unearthed them instead of invented them. And to that end... I've decided to call this novel "Oubliette".
Ever since I saw Jim Henson's movie Labyrinth when I was 14 I always liked the sound of that word... and the fact that it was always so hard for me to figure out whether it was a real or fabricated word in the pre-Internet age kind of fascinated me. Now I know that it derives from the French verb oublier -- "to forget" -- and is an underground prison cell with the only door being in the ceiling, out of reach of the prisoner, which is what the word is used for in that movie. I've always pictured the pocket universe containing the Deertail Lodge as being something like a cosmic snow globe, which in turn triggers images of the all-purpose magical crystal balls that the Goblin King juggles... it's an intriguing cricross of impressions in my mind, and the fact that it's a little known, cool-sounding word just cements it, and convinces me that I'd never be satisfied with any other title.
The story itself didn't start with an image, but instead, a song lyric from Harry Connick Jr. In his song "Just Like Me" (from his criminally underrated mid-90s funk albums), he muses "The world keeps spinning/Mountains vary, but the valleys [are] the same". I modified this into Harmon's first line of dialogue. I quickly found I had a ski lodge setting in mind -- a kind of place I personally know nothing about, but that's where my mind goes when thinking about mountains and valleys. I had no idea where the story was going to go, how many characters there were going to be, what the conflict was going to be or how it was all going to resolve, but I was off and running.
In reality, it was a process no more magical than the short stories that came before; it was a matter of showing up to the page every day and trying to push things forward. Some days were very productive, on others I gave up in frustration. The only difference was that I couldn't say "The End" and leave things hanging anytime I wanted to. It's part of the beauty of the short story that you can do this, and sometimes it's even the point. But at the Deertail, I was responsible for every choice, and only in the rarest instances could I decide not to follow up on something weird that I threw into the mix when I couldn't think of anything else.
In the end, every character met an end. Whether what happened was right or fair, satisfying or not, isn't really mine to decide now.
So now all that's left is to go back and revise. I've already got a short list of continuity items that I need to correct: the inconsistent placement of the moon in the sky, the incorrect name I gave to Kerren's mother in Chapter 1.1 before I truly knew who she was, etc. And I'm sure I'll come across threads that I never followed through on and can scrap, or ones I can expand on, or clarify better. Most importantly, now that I know the end of the story, I can properly tell the beginning. But in general, I don't see any major structural changes; I think this one is pretty much done.
So what's next? I have a handful of kernels for new short stories, and when they're comlete they might serve as the catalyst to put out a physical collection of stories from my ebooks, something a person can put on their shelf. There are also a few unfinished novels from years ago that I just might have the confidence and tools to finish now. Whatever the answer turns out to be, the results will end up on this page first, one way or another. And as always, I thank you for showing up. I'd be doing this anyway, but knowing that someone's paying attention just makes it all that much more fun.
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