“I sold my NaNoWriMo novel!” A Q&A with Julia Crouch
Julia Crouch lives in Brighton, UK. She is married to the actor and playwright Tim Crouch and they have three children aged 21, 18 and 11. She has participated in NaNoWrimo for two years. This is her third (though as her interview will show, “it’s a bit cheaty.”) In 2009 she sold her 2008 NaNoNovel, CUCKOO, to Headline UK as part of a three-book deal.
She has since sold French, German, Dutch, and Italian rights to Cuckoo and novel #2. The UK hardcover release date for CUCKOO is March 3 2011. You can learn more about her writing at http://www.juliacrouch.co.uk
Can you tell us a little bit about CUCKOO and where the concept for the novel came from?
It started with a story by a friend about the punishing two years she and her husband spent doing up a beautiful wreck of a house.
It was also inspired by Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay and Nick Cave’s album, “The Boatman’s Call”, which documents his obsessive relationship with PJ Harvey. I thought ‘What if your best friend came to stay and turned your steady Eddie husband into the Nick Cave that wrote those songs.” That was what I would call the starting point.
How complete was the novel by the end of NaNoWriMo 2008?
The story was all there—albeit in skeleton form. Before midnight on the 30th November, I got to write ‘the end’. I then drank a whole bottle of champagne all by myself. However, the ending was a bit abrupt!—it was along the lines of ‘and then they all died. The end.’ Draft two saw a new ending, with a much smaller body count. And then I added an epilogue, because my agent, who I got after the second draft was completed, was so worried about what would happen to the main character, who he had fallen a little in love with.
After Nano, I put the novel away until January 2009, then spent a couple of weeks procrastinating, not looking at it. I also had several other half-finished projects on the go, and I realised that if I didn’t knuckle down and get on with it, I would still be saying that I want to be a writer when they cart me off to the nursing home.
A friend mentioned someone called Jacqui Lofthouse, a literary life coach, and I got in touch with her: http://www.thewritingcoach.co.uk/. She was fantastic, helping me to set goals in hour-long, monthly phone calls. She also gave some valuable editorial advice on the beginning of the novel. After about six months, I was ready to stand on my own two feet, and just got on with it, with a newly-minted confidence.
What you can you tell us about books two and three on the way?
I finished draft one of novel#2 two days ago! It took a lot longer than a Nanowrimo first draft—I have been writing it for about five months, even though writing is now all I do (I was able to give up my day job of web and graphic design). It’s longer though, at 130,000 words. I am going to sit down and read it through tomorrow—very frightening.
Novel #2 is a thriller set in upstate NY. It’s about Lara, who has a chance meeting with the lost love of her life, sixteen years down the road. Those years have seen her stagnate through domesticity in a stuffy marriage to jobbing actor Marcus, while her ex-lover has gone from being a spear-carrier at the Royal Shakespeare Company when they had their affair, to starring in Hollywood action movies. He tells her she is the biggest ‘what if’ of his life. What she doesn’t realise quite is how the years have changed him…
You might guess that I don’t yet have a title for novel #2…
Book three is called Bad Jean, and it’s about a child who murdered her little brother. It’s in gestation now, just playing on in the back recesses of my mind.
Do you tend to plot your writing in advance or do you prefer to fly by the seat of your pants?
Pantser, definitely. I see the first draft as a voyage of discovery. I used to be a devising theatre director (before the website design, but that’s another story), developing plays with actors improvising in rehearsal. Writing for me is more or less the same process. The only difference is that the performers in my novels are my own creations, rather than gobby actors, and they only have limited powers to argue with me. Although I do find that they sometimes take over in the writing. I start a scene saying to them ‘right, we’re going to end up here,’ and they end up taking it way, way, over there. I say to them, ‘ you can’t say/do THAT, surely? And they say, ‘just watch us’.
It’s very exciting when that happens. Even a bit spooky.
When I get stuck, I give up and go for a run. I live by the sea, so it’s very refreshing. Mostly the answer to my problem comes if I have the right music on and put my brain into neutral.
What, if any, revision regimens do you swear by?
I’m quite new at this. But I do think that printing out your first draft, however crappy it is, and giving yourself a couple of weeks to really read it through with a pencil in hand is a good thing. You mustn’t be afraid to scribble all over everything.
Then I like a mixture of real index cards and the Scrivener corkboard (I always work in Scrivener) to get a solid structure. This will mean there are completely new scenes that need to be written, and whole scenes that you can just junk.
Then I rewrite the whole thing, working from my hard copy, and the Scrivener split screen. I retype everything, rather than cutting and pasting, because then you have to think about every word again.
After another print out and read through, it is ready to be seen by others.
I have had a great experience working with my editor at Headline. Her suggestions have almost unanimously been brilliant, and have moved the novel into quite another plane. I really enjoyed this process, and love that stage of writing, where you are threading in the final strands that make it utterly coherent.
It has been very different writing this second novel though, because I have a deadline, and because I know there are people who have invested a lot of time, work and money into me, who are waiting for it. Add that lot to my inner editors and some mornings I have to do a lot of what I call deprogamming before I can write. Deprogramming is facebook, twitter, emails, buying a nice thing on ebay, anything other than the novel. I used to feel guilty about this, but now I recognise it as part of my process.
What has NaNoWriMo 2010 been like for you?
I have tried to keep up my word count equivalent or more than 1700/day, 7 days/week while moving novel #2 on, but I have been very jealous of everyone who has the month to do the full arc of a story in 50,000 words. And, because I have all day to write now, I don’t very often do late night sessions. I remember, when I was Nano-ing CUCKOO, my best friend and his boyfriend got married and they had a weekend of partying at their farm in Cornwall. This was the first weekend in November! I’d go back to the cottage we were staying in after a day of champagne and get my words in—sometimes at 2am. Made for some surprising reading the following January—but some of it stayed in and is there in the final draft.
How did you come to find out about NaNoWriMo, and what convinced you to participate?
In 2006-7 I did an Open University Creative Writing Course. My tutor, John O’Donoghue was really supportive and encouraging about my work. He suggested NaNoWriMo to me, and I went on to do it (and win) in 2007. (That novel, AD BESTIAS, is halfway turned into a screenplay. I have some hopes for it). The first thing I did when I signed up was to order Chris Baty’s book NO PLOT? NO PROBLEM!
Reading the book through, I recognised that this was the perfect way to steam on through a story. Previously, all novel attempts had floundered at chapter three, when I read back through what I wrote and got depressed. I really liked the way that, with NaNoWriMo you are part of a community, with the local meet ups and online message boards. It makes the lone, slightly mad activity of writing seem just a little bit sane. The site was pretty flaky back then, though!
I’m pretty evangelical about NaNoWriMo—I’m a pain in the arse for my friends who take part, constantly emailing and facebooking them to keep them on track.
Do you have any advice on writing or revision for NaNoWriMo participants?
The usual stuff—be open and free for the first draft, be ruthless with the structure for the second, and fanatical about the words for the third—examine every sentence. Remain true to your characters and story, but also be flexible and listen to and value feedback, see things from the reader’s point of view. Oh, and read the whole lot out loud, every draft. Get lots of pens, stickers and index cards to make structuring fun.
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