Somewhere to write
I've been thinking for years of having somewhere to dump everything, so this is that. Also, it's taken some time for the continuation of my creative writing to become clear after I finished a masters last summer. Having written two novels in French for the course, I found myself at a dead end. My masters was in "recherche en création," in which a creative work is fuelled by research and vice versa. The creation, in this case a novel per year, is linked to study, in my case anarchism, climate change and story in the first year, and ethical non-monogamy and interior literary modes in the second.
As is one of the key topics of discussion around research-creation as an area of study, the criteria of success of the creative work in this type of academia differs from commercial art. The books I'd written were uncommercial, test projects, a conduit for understanding how the novel works. I focused on interiority in the second year to better grasp modernism, which is the crux of it, really. Reading so much postmodernism had redherringed me into believing it was the final form, when in fact it was Proust, Woolf and Joyce. Postmodernism just plays with the truths they wrote. Understanding modern narratology can be used as a base skill in writing contemporary novels. Almost all fiction is now written within this framework, or some variation of it. As part of the course, I read the latest book of a successful feelgood author with whom we did a master class in the second year, and it's effectively written in exactly the same form as Mrs Dalloway. Modernist theory was probably the most valuable concept I learned over the two years.
For the first year I focused on narrative and story. I started all of my university studies through a lifelong desire to write fiction (I completed a three-year undergraduate degree in literature before the masters, and eighteen months of French tuition before that). But I didn't understand how to do it, how to engineer narrative. I just read and read and wrote and wrote. As I learned, passion does not replace education. In Rousseau's Les Confessions, the young Jean-Jacques is bested by a priest who has more advanced learning in latin than his student. Even though the child has knowledge of classic literature, of Plutarque and Ovide, from the bookcase in the office of his father, a watchmaker in Gevena in the early 18th century, he's unable to fully understand its meaning due to his lack of education. Rousseau learned this lesson as a child, myself unfortunately not. I'd read a lot, but I didn't really understand the books.
But I do now, I'm sure you'll be pleased to know, and I'm in my best position yet to write something saleable. It's been quite an odd year, all told. I had no idea what to do after the masters. I started applying for apprenticeships to be a graphic designer (?) and was preparing to do another masters to better professionalise myself as I couldn't find a job. I also started preparing for a doctorate in literature. After meeting my potential directrice for the third time, I admitted to myself that I was incable of completing the reading required to even form the "projet de thèse" before embarking on the first year in time to apply for funding. I was honestly tired.
So I was glad when the Future job arrived. I'd been applying for work as a game writer and getting nowhere. One of the courses in the second year was given by a senior developer who mentioned the possibility of doing some freelance writing. I'd been so focused on the novels that I'd kind of ignored the possibility of writing for games. I put together a portfolio and had some decent feedback from old lecturers, but, as I'm sure you're aware if you're reading this, the videogame industry has suffered terribly in recent years for various reasons, and even the most experienced developers are finding it difficult to find work. Future offered me a consultancy role in January on a B2B Edge newsletter and I took it gladly. I now co-edit it.
Now the dust is clearing a little, I'm turning back to creative writing. I actually enjoyed writing game narratives and I'm going to continue constructing a portfolio. I did a complete Twine game (with stats!) and wrote scripts, game design documents and so on. I did get a little traction despite me saying I was "getting nowhere," and it's a format I definitely enjoy, so it makes sense. My focus, though, will be the writing of a new novel. I don't want to say I've struggled to find a subject, because I've been working on base ideas for a romance for some time, at least a year. But the book's fabric has been too thin, and I only recently settled on a story I think could work as a novel-length project. It's early, so we'll see.
I do have another thing, actually. I outlined a horror story for a potential collaboration with a friend a little way back, and I did mentally sketch it all out. I think I'm just going to write it anyway, just for fun, and see what happens.