Into the Cave

One of the classic stages in the telling of a story is The Cave, an episode where the heroine enters some dark, secluded space, and faces the deepest fear they carry inside themselves.  If you start watching for it, you'll find Cave scenes in many books and films. Classic examples include the Malabar Caves in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, and the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when Luke Skywalker ignores Yoda's warning and enters a cave where he encounters an apparition of Darth Vader that turns out to have Luke's face. 

Entering a cave is the central event in my eXtasy Books series, The Fair Warrior Chronicles. Six students hike up a mountainside, party, get horny, pair up, and use the cave as a dark place to have sex. A mysterious, chilling power ravages their minds. They leave the cave changed forever, and take years to discover the odd powers it has given them and the threat it has equipped them to face.

Entering the cave is so much a part of fiction that sometimes I write myself into one before I realize it.  That happened with Minotaur, the first of the Fair Warrior stories.  I wrote my characters into a dark space where they could fool around.  Then I realized where I was in terms of story structure, and made the cave a place where they encountered dark truths.