Wayback Wednesday #6: 2005

For this week’s (and next week’s) Wayback Wednesday post, I’ll be blogging about the sequel to Broken, By My Side. I started this story in March 2004 and finished it in January 2008. In between, I wrote no other solo stories except for Footprints, which is a collection of short stories that accompanies Broken and By My Side (BMS). Besides a couple of collaborations I contributed to in that time frame, my fanfic life pretty much revolved around Nick and Claire for five whole years, and I have no regrets.

I have never gone back and read BMS all the way through since finishing it, but I started to do so last week and am halfway through, so this post will focus mostly on the first half of the story, and I’ll write more about the second half in the next week’s blog.

Title: By My Side

Written: March 2004 – January 2008

Straightforward synopsis: Nick and Claire ride the relationship roller coaster, which takes them on a wild (and incredibly long) ride of extreme highs and lows, eventually bringing them right back where they started from: by each other’s sides.

The story behind the story:
Writing a sequel to Broken was never part of my original plan, but as I neared the end of the story, I found myself wanting to write more of Nick and Claire’s relationship now that they were an actual couple, not just friends. I’d made them wait the whole story to get together, but once they did, I wondered what would happen to them. Would they just sail off into the sunset and live happily ever after, or would they eventually split up?

There’s a quote from the end of the movie Speed where Keanu Reeves says, “I have to warn you, I’ve heard relationships based on intense experiences never work,” which I ended up using in the story. That is what got me thinking about the future of their relationship. Nick and Claire came together because of a shared experience and bonded over having cancer, but besides that, how much did they really have in common? Could their love really last once they got beyond the thing that brought them together?

Of course, I thought it could because Nick and Claire are my fanfic power couple, and in my mind, they’re soulmates. They belong together. That being said, I could see how real life – after cancer – could come between them. Although they did have some other stuff in common besides cancer, they were also two very different people with two very different lifestyles. Nick was this rich popstar who had traveled the world but never graduated high school, while Claire was a middle-class, college-educated dental hygienist. Would they still be compatible once their lives went back to normal?

That’s why I decided not to have either of them relapse in By My Side. It would have been too easy to throw some more cancer at them for the sake of drama, and trust me, it was tempting, but I really wanted to take cancer out of the equation and give them some other kinds of conflict to deal with. Also, I wasn’t sure how much more I could realistically put either of them through without having to kill them. I mean, poor Nick had already relapsed twice and lost his leg and a lobe of his lung, and I had already written one bone marrow transplant, so I didn’t really want either of them to go through that again. So I took cancer off the table and focused more on the long-term side effects of its treatment.

I had discovered during the last part of Broken that I actually really enjoyed writing about Nick’s “disability” and the physical problems and emotional struggles that went along with it, so I did more with that in BMS. (For a long time, the grossest thing I had ever done a Google Image search for was stump ulcers. Google it, if you dare.) Then there was the BOOP storyline, which I wrote 10% to torture Nick and 90% because I thought the acronym was so funny. I don’t remember how I discovered “BOOP” (which stands for Bronchiolitis Obliterans Organizing Pneumonia), but somehow I had come across it online, thought the acronym was funny, and then found this equally strange and hilarious BOOP website called “BOOP Town” that looked like something out of The Busy World of Richard Scarry, and so… yeah! Sorry, Nick.

Claire probably had an even worse time than Nick, between her cataracts, heart condition, and high-risk pregnancy. Chemo drugs are really toxic, and although they’re great for killing cancer cells, they do a lot of damage to healthy cells too and can cause some serious, long-term consequences. That’s what I wanted to explore with her. Sorry, Claire.

With all these other health problems going on, I really didn’t need to rely on cancer for drama in this one, but of course I did kill a random kid, Casey, just to get some sad stuff in there and keep the fear of a relapse alive. I figured since I let both Nick and Claire survive, someone had to die of cancer along the way. Sorry, Casey.

Casey was just one of the many, many subplots I wrote in this story. It seems unbelievable now, but when I first started outlining BMS, I was honestly worried that I wouldn’t have enough material for a novel-length sequel. I had never really written a true “romance” before – while many of my previous stories included romance, the love story always took a back seat to the drama. BMS was the first story where the relationship was the main focus. I knew I would get bored writing fluffy romance, so I brainstormed as many sources of drama as I could without resorting to a relapse. I decided early on that Nick and Claire would break up, then eventually get back together toward the end of the story, but I needed enough content to fill the gaps between those major events. Once it was all said and done, I ended up with a novel that had fifty more chapters than its predecessor and, in terms of word count, was over twice as long. While I do take pride in the fact that I finished writing a novel longer than War and Peace, I guess I didn’t really need all those subplots after all! Sorry, readers.

I also fell into the TV show writer trap of manufacturing drama to break my main couple up, just so I could have the fun of getting them back together later on. I hate when that happens on TV shows, even though, from a writer’s point of view, I understand why it does. Conflict is what creates a compelling story. I got really into The OC as I was writing this story, and that may have subconsciously inspired some of the more infuriating soap opera/love triangle storylines in which Nick and Claire start to resemble Ryan Atwood and Marissa Cooper. I knew I needed to create some conflict between them, but the way I went about it was all wrong. I think the problems between them early on, like him always wanting to pay for her stuff and her insisting that she was an independent woman who could support herself, or him going back to work and her missing him but not wanting to give up her whole life to be a Backstreet wife, were believable and true to who they both were. It was when I forced them to act uncharacteristically that it went wrong.

If I learned one thing from this story, it is to listen to your characters and let them drive the story – don’t force them to do things they would never do. Nick and Claire’s entire relationship was based on the fact that they were always there for each other through hard times. Even when they fought or felt uncomfortable, they would always come together and support each other in times of crisis. So to have Nick run out on Claire when she thought she was rejecting the bone marrow transplant, or Claire move out of Nick’s house while he was gone with “just a note left on the stairs,” was completely out of character and made little sense, no matter how much I tried to justify it in the story. This is now called my “Siberia Rule” because it’s all Siberia’s fault. “Siberia” is one of my two favorite BSB songs of all time, and I was absolutely obsessed with it throughout the summer of 2005 when Never Gone came out. I loved it so much, I wanted to use it in a fanfic. I should have just turned it into a stand-alone short story, but since I was writing BMS at the time, I decided to use it for Nick and Claire’s breakup.

Bad, bad idea.

If there’s one thing I would do differently in this story, it’s that. Claire was no coward; she never had a problem speaking her mind, and there is no way she would break up with Nick by way of a fucking piece of paper.  All her apologies for this behavior throughout the rest of the story were also my attempts to apologize to my readers for making her do that.  And the scene in Chapter 110 where Mary and Veronica let her have it was inspired by real feedback given to me by their real life counterparts, who were both readers.  I now understand why they and other readers turned on Claire after the break-up.  It seemed like she was generally liked by most readers in Broken, but she got a lot of hate in BMS – and deservedly so, considering some of the bad decisions she made.

Like Jamie.

Jamie was first mentioned toward the end of Broken as Claire’s high school sweetheart and first love, whom she rushes to Iowa to comfort after his dad has a heart attack and later dies. I think I was already planning BMS by that point in the story and knew I needed someone to come between Nick and Claire, and Jamie became it. Then I saw The Notebook that first summer I was writing BMS, and that only further cemented the Nick/Claire/Jamie love triangle storyline in my mind. There’s even a scene in the story where Claire and her friends go see The Notebook and she compares herself to Allie – both torn between their high school sweetheart and the nice, rich guy they later get engaged to. This nudges her toward getting back together with her first love, Jamie, even though she ultimately ends up with the other guy, Nick.

Funny story about Jamie: He was based on a guy I had met the summer before my freshman year of college (while I was writing Broken). I actually met him when we were both on campus for a freshman orientation type of event a month or so before move-in, and I thought he was really cute, funny, and friendly. I was looking forward to seeing him again when school started. Lo and behold, he turned out to be my new roommate’s boyfriend. So that was awkward… but I got over it quickly and enjoyed being able to hang out with him as friends. It was fine until he and my roommate broke up about halfway through our freshman year. By then, I had lost interest in him because I’d figured out he was actually kind of an asshole. That’s how I came up with the character of Jamie – the cute, charismatic high school sweetheart who turns out to be a total douchebag. And boy, did the readers sure love to hate him! There was a running joke among the regulars on my forum about killing Jamie in horrific ways, and one of them, Anita, even wrote a fun little spin-off story called “The Many Deaths of the Most Hated BMS Character: Jamie.” 

The character of Tim, the dentist who briefly dates Claire in Broken and Laureen in BMS, was also based on a real person, another guy I met in college. His portrayal was only slightly exaggerated. He really was our mascot, and he really did want to talk about it all the time.

I knew if I was going to have Claire move on with someone else, then Nick needed to, as well, so I gave him some other women to date. I based the characters of Veronica and Laureen on two of my online friends, who I’d met through Broken. Laureen and I have since become friends in real life, but we didn’t meet for the first time until after BMS was finished, so it’s kind of weird to read the scenes with her now. I love both her character and the real life version of her, though.

Veronica was intended to be the anti-Claire – someone totally different from Claire for Nick to date for his rebound relationship after Claire dumped him. While Claire was outgoing and self-assured, Veronica was shy and self-conscious. Claire had a healthy appetite, while Veronica ate like a bird. Claire was low-maintenance and kind of a tomboy, while Veronica was more of a girlie girl. I had discovered the song “Comfortable” by John Mayer around this time, which inspired some of Nick’s scenes during the part of the story where he’s dating Veronica. I wanted to show him trying to move on with this perfectly lovely woman, only to realize he’s still hung up on Claire.

Of course, the real life Nick was with Paris Hilton when I started writing this story, so I couldn’t resist having some fun at her expense, like killing her in a freak carnival accident. That was actually inspired by a nightmare I had in which Nick lost his leg on a carnival ride. It’s a miracle I don’t give myself nightmares more often, but every once in awhile, I have a bad dream that is obviously related to something I’ve written. It was nice to be able to turn that one into something funny for the story.

Well, I have rambled on enough about where I got my ideas for this one. I’ll be back next Wednesday with Part 2 of the By My Side blog, in which I will focus more on the second half of the story, as well as the lessons learned from it. Stay tuned!

Part 2