WRITING – Page 4 – Claire Rousseau

Recycling an old story

Posted on October 11, 2012January 4, 2014 by Claire

This November, I’ll be bending the Nanowrimo rules a teensy bit to recycle an old story.

I wrote the initial draft of Stars Shine Brighter for Nanowrimo in 2008, a mess of rushed ideas, mixed up English and French, entire epic scenes condensed to the words ‘[insert space battle here]‘ and truly horrendous writing.

I can say without false modesty that there isn’t ANY salvageable prose in that draft.

Some of the ideas and characters however, have stayed with me and developed over the past four years. I wrote a few extra scenes in that universe for a piece of Creative Writing coursework, kept about five different story notebooks going, restarted from the beginning several, even discussed some of the concepts and ideas with my Dad (who, it turns out, enjoys hard sci-fi!).

I started dissecting that first draft with Holly Lisle’s excellent and gruelling online editing course, How To Revise Your Novel. But around Lesson Eight, when it was time to decide what to keep and what to cut, to create a solid basis upon which to re-write, I realised that there was nothing in the text I felt like keeping.

So I put Stars Shine Brighter firmly on the back burner and let it stew until I felt ready to have another go at it. For a while, I wasn’t sure I would and I was surprisingly okay with that.

After FTL came out though, I couldn’t get the feel of proper, old time Sci-Fi out of my mind. I also found the game thought-provoking in some ways. Though quite comfortable and traditional is some ways (though not easy!), FTL also has weird stuff going on.

My boyfriend, who loves to immerse himself in a game’s narrative, pointed out that it was a bit weird that your ship, mandated by the Federation, should be so small and crappy and that the enemy fleet, the Rebels, should be so numerous and powerful. Shouldn’t the rebels be a tiny force? And if so many decide to join the Rebellion, is it because the Federation are actually the baddies?

I realised how much more interesting of a story I’d have if my characters, instead of being ragtag space pirates on the run from an army trying to arrest them, were actually part of an army that turned out to be ‘the baddies’. A lot of the themes and ideas I want to play around with fit a lot better with this scenario and I’m incredibly excited to start exploring it.

Onto plotting and outlining then, and bring on November!

NaNoWriMo is nigh!

Posted on October 7, 2012January 4, 2014 by Claire

October to me is the time of wearing several layers of sweaters, celebrating my Dad’s birthday and getting ready for NaNoWriMo.

National Novel Writing Month is a seat-of-the-pants literary challenge taking place every November. Participants aim to write a brand new 50,000 words story in 30 days.

It’s now an international event, with many local chapters, including here in London!

I was introduced to Nano just after I moved to the UK and joined all four of the lovely people I’d met by then were doing it too. As it turned out, peer pressure is a corner stone of Nano (in a good way, I promise). Since then, I’ve been month-noveling furiously every November.

Keeping up the pace all month is difficult (in fact I always fall behind) and can be frustrating, but there are also exhilarating moments when your story behaves itself, everything is coming together nicely and you have enough points on your Costa card to get your sixth coffee of the day for free. Plus they have all the yummy Christmas drinks already in November. And on the less-inspiring days, there’s nothing better to spur you on than the sound of everyone else in the room typing like the wind. Guilt monkeys are also a corner stone of Nanowrimo.

Now of course neither you nor I will produce a masterpiece worth millions this November, but I know that I’ll be writing. I’ll be writing a lot more than I usually do. I’ll be taking risks, exploring silly ideas, taking dares and coming up with the kind of insane things one can only dream up when on a coffee drip. There will be some dreadful crashes, but I can guarantee there will also be some good stuff.

I know this because four years ago the most writing I had ever done were the first pages of one fantasy epic (complete with red-headed elves with apostrophes in every other character’s name) and about three Harry Potter fanfictions. I’ve now written four novels. They’re all very short, mostly unfinished and not that good, but each of them is a bit better than the last and crucially, the writing that I do outside of November is also massively improved.

So whether you’re new to writing or an old hand I think you should give Nanowrimo a shot. The worse thing that can happen is you ending up with a story you won’t reuse, but you’ll still be 50,000 words of practice better off than before.

Too close to my own work

Posted on September 15, 2012January 4, 2014 by Claire

This week, I was really hesitant about whether or what to read out at Writer’s Group. I felt I should read something because I’d already skipped one week, but since I worked on the plot last week a lot has changed. A large chunk of chapter one and the whole of chapter two will have to be re-written, only NOT right now.

I had already read the prologue and I was still working on chapter three, so I settled on the opening of chapter one, a pretty slow-paced tidbit about our main character’s living arrangements. I almost didn’t write it in the first place because I can’t help but feel I will have to cut it in the future. I’m self-conscious about the writing style, of course, but I also worry that the scene is too quiet for the opening of the book.

I wanted supportive advice about this, so I took the plunge and got better feedback than I’d expected. We got rid of some less-than-Victorian words, swapping ‘cagey’ for ‘disreputable’ – definitely a plus! And someone said my description were atmospheric, which was just really, really nice! I often worry than I come across as a bit flowery and long-winded (because I love making flowery, long-winded English!), so it was great to have my description vindicated.

I guess this proves that I’m really not that good at appraising my own work. I don’t know if it’s because I’m too close to it or because I still put ridiculous expectations on my poor first draft, in any case I thought I would get more criticism regarding where the story is going. Then again, not everyone has been working on this for a whole year.

I’m now working on chapter three, where the gore and creepiness really start. I’m thoroughly enjoying writing it and I think I’m decent at the gore and creepiness, so I can’t wait to finish it up and read some of it in a couple of weeks’ time.

Plot Rehauling!

Posted on September 10, 2012January 4, 2014 by Claire

The first time I threw together the words ‘naturalist’, ‘plant swarms’, ‘secrecy’ and ‘upcoming disaster’ in a notebook is dated June 18th, 2011. I’ve considered The Paradise Swarm my main work in progress since then. Meaning that at this point, I’ve been working on it for over a year.

And I realise that in that year, I haven’t accomplished that much story-wise. I have done a whole lot of planning, spent a lot of time world-building in the vaguest terms and written a lot of words that got thrown out, but I realised there still wasn’t much of a plot. I had cool scene ideas, but not a great grip on characters, nor a strong thread around which to weave the story.

Then last week, @TheJonFoulds and I sat down and poked at the holes in the plot and characters with a stick. I can come up with ideas all right on my own, but there is nothing that works better for me than bouncing ideas off of someone else. Especially someone who has an annoying knack for spotting things I did wrong, and a very good instinct for story structure. He also likes being needlessly cruel to his characters (and sadly, mine), which does raise the stakes.

Chapters I had to put my foot down at some points, because some of his suggestions simply clashed with who the characters I created fundamentally were, but most of the advice was invaluable. Two hours after we started with ‘So what *does* your main character want most of all?’, we had re-plotted the story from start to finish.

I now know what will happen past Chapter Three, which is a good thing because I’m writing Chapter Three right now. I’ve also been able to put down a whole bunch of new chapters and scenes in my Scrivener file, so that it actually looks like I’m working on something substantial. I love how my Scrivener file looks now: like I’m going somewhere with this!

Butt in chair = no interwebs

Posted on August 25, 2012January 4, 2014 by Claire

I love the internet. I adore it madly and unashamedly. How could I not?

All the mostly-accurate secondary source knowledge you could ever want, for free at your fingertips; all the fanfic and fanart about all the most obscure fandoms, even that one show from the seventies; all the political discussion you could ever want, and those debates you wish you didn’t have to go into, because c’mon people, it’s 2012; all the most depressing and most inspiring things you can imagine (which is, of course, the first rule).

And when you’ve had one of THOSE days at work, 24 hours video feeds of kittens playing in their pen at a shelter, and the infamous Tumblr of pictures of Tom Selleck with waterfalls and sandwiches. Guys, it has a theme song!

I love the internet like I do chocolate. That is, in a fairly uncontrollable manner. If I want to make sure I don’t eat a bar of chocolate an hour before dinner, I have to not have any in the house, and if I want to write, I have to disable the wifi on my laptop, or go somewhere that has no wifi. I can and I do write at home sometimes, but these sessions are invariably short and end up interrupted by email or twitter. So I go and write at the coffee shop, but I really wish I didn’t have to.

John Scalzi wrote a book on writing titled ‘You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop’. I haven’t read it yet, but I do believe he has a point. Coffee shop writing doesn’t strike me as a way to build a career; though it definitely works for some people (Connie Willis mentioned it). I should be able to write in my house, because I have a story to tell and I want to tell it – but my house is full of shiny things and I have all the willpower of a tadpole.

So I’ll be working on writing at home more often, and I’ll be getting Scalzi’s writing book. I love his fiction as well as the title of this one, and I don’t think I can go wrong with taking advice from the President of the Science-fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.