Claire Seeber
Claire Seeber has been an actress, TV director, documentary maker and journalist, finding success in them all, and has now turned her hand to writing.
With two books under her belt already I caught up with her to talk about the new book Never Tell, juggling her career with motherhood and what lies ahead.
- Never Tell is the latest book so can you tell me a little bit about it?
Never Tell is a story of a mother and journalist called Rose Miller who has given up her career for the sake of her young family; she has had a very adrenaline fuelled career as an investigative journalist.
But she also has this dark past where she belonged to a rather debauched secret society at Oxford University, where she met her husband James.
So there are secrets in her past and they are coming back to haunt her now.
- And where did the inspiration for the central character of Rose come from and how do we see her develop throughout the book?
Rose is not me (laughs) but there is an element, I had a high flying TV career before I had my kids; so I was really interested in the idea of giving up your career for your children but really missing it.
But Rose has had a dangerous career and I was really interested in that because I had read various books about war reporters who are addicted to the buzz, which Rose is; she was also addicted to this naughty society that she belonged to. So she is really a bit of an adrenaline junky and I was interested in how you marry that with having a young family and trying to settle down.
I hope that she’s fully fleshed out as a woman who is struggling and is torn between the two; her family and her career. In the book she goes back to investigate something for a newspaper but she is really torn between whether she should be doing that.
So that’s the way that she develops because you see her struggle with that. I was also interested in having a dark past, having done something that you are not proud of and whether you can redeem yourself in the future.
Her career is about bringing people the truth and that’s partly to do with the fact that she feels she has got to make up for being bad when she was younger, although she wasn’t particularly bad there were other much worse characters in the society, but she did go off the rails a bit.
- You have mentioned that Never tell is about secret societies so what was it that interested you about that?
I think with secret societies what makes them fascinating is they are secret and we don’t know very much about them and we wonder about them. Is it because anything that we are not immediately invited into becomes more exciting, a bit like not being allowed in to the latest club in town?
And with the secret society I was interested in the character that starts it, Dalziel, this aristocrat who is a bit dangerous because he feels like he has got nothing to lose. I was interested in why someone would feel like they had nothing to lose and how they would try and break convention, which is what he’s trying to do; he’s trying to lead these kids into breaking society’s rules and it’s about power.
Rose thinks that she is a member of the elite and she realises that they are all outsiders and that is why he is interested in them because they have got flaws which have made it possible for him to draw them in.
- So what sort of research did you do into these societies for the book? And what did you discover?
Well Oxford University, which the book is set in, has got some quite famous secret societies, some are more secret than others, there are a couple that seem to be quite secret and it really was quite difficult to find out anything about them.
There’s The Piers Gaveston, which Hugh Grant was apparently a member of, and they are quite famous for sexual excess.
Then there’s the Bullingdon Club, which is not particularly secret, David Cameron, George Osbourne and Boris Johnson were all members of and it’s a drinking club. Both of these societies are all male and the Bullingdon Club you have to pay an awful lot of money to join, and then you get to drink fine wine until you are sick.
Then there is another secret society at Oxford call The Assassins and I think they like to try and blow things up like bits of road (laughs).
But then I looked into the more famous secret societies such as the Freemasons. But these ones at Oxford do really exist, or they certainly did, Bullingdon still exists I think.
- And what do you think it’s the reader’s fascination with secret societies books like The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons with groups like Opus Dei have all been hugely successful?
Everything from The Secret Seven by Enid Blyton right through to The Da Vinci Code and Harry Potter there’s a secret society in Fight Club; Tyler Durden is the epitome of the perfect male.
I think the fascination, well probably in The Da Vinci Code, it’s the idea of belonging to something that’s shrouded in mystery and power, and they are status symbols I think.
Opus Dei is a very orthodox and strict branch of Catholicism which is quite fascinating to us because it’s so extreme the self flagellation and things like that I suppose it’s fascinating to a person as to why someone would want to belong to it. But the status behind some of them, particularly the male ones they seemed to be very linked to status and power.
- And how does the writing process work for you is it characters first and then plot or does plot come first?
I think it’s probably a bit of both, all three of my novels have very strong female protagonists at the centre and I guess that female is always in my head when I start thinking about the plot because it’s always going to centre around her.
I like a book that drives you on and makes you, seems obvious, want to keep picking it up and so quite often with the plot I will start with the beginning and the end and it’s the middle bit that you have to figure out (laughs).
- You began your career as an actress so why did you leave all that behind?
I started as an actress and then I just decided, what I liked about acting was the adrenaline and the buzz of being on stage but I ended up doing a lot of TV; little bit of things like The Bill and adverts and actually I wasn’t getting that buzz out of it.
Then I realised, after I did an advert for Pringles crisps and they asked me to be witty with a crimped Pringle crisp, I thought I don’t think I can carry on. I was quite serious and would rather have been at the RSC being Juliet than being witty with a Pringles crisp.
I slid into TV production and I realised that I much preferred being behind the camera and I went on to be a TV director for years and years and made a lot of documentaries and travelled around the world meeting lots of different people, which was good basis for wanting to write stories, I was also a journalist as well so writing was part of that as well.
- That leads me into my next question really you have worked in journalism and documentary TV how important is for you to mix all these different projects?
I think it’s a great luxury for me to do so many different things, it’s amazing to be able to make a living from writing books but it’s a very solitarily career, so I do got back and do bits and pieces of TV, I do it for financial reason because I have a family support, but it’s good to have that interaction and team work and not just always be imagining everything, which is obviously what writing is about. So it’s good to have a mix and I hope it helps.
- You juggle all this and motherhood it’s amazing you have time for anything?
(laughs) Well yeah I squeeze it all in, I quote like being busy.
- You mentioned earlier in the interview about looking at Rose and how she feels about leaving her family to go to work, how much is that based on you?
Well actually when I had my first baby that’s when I started concentrating on the writing because I didn’t want to leave him I went and did a creative, although I was already a journalist and writing features for the broadsheets as a freelancer, I went and did a creative writing course because I had started fiction and screenplays but never finished them, mainly because I was working full time.
So I thought if I could get a book published then I could stay at home with the baby and work and I was really lucky that I managed to do that fairly quickly. So that was very important for me to be at home with my kids definitely.
But I do understand Rose that kind of being torn between the two I think that it’s very difficult for women of our generation who have had a career and then kids to reconcile yourself to being at home all the time when you are used to being out and about working.
- Finally what’s next for you?
I’m meant to be writing book four (laughs) which I really have got down to, I do have a deadline. So yeah book four is next, half written of course…not (laughs). Hopefully someone will make a film of Never Tell that would be my dream.
- Is there nothing like that in the pipeline?
It’s literally just come out so I have just been speaking to my agent actually about selling the TV and film rights, not yet but fingers crossed.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw
Claire Seeber has been an actress, TV director, documentary maker and journalist, finding success in them all, and has now turned her hand to writing.
With two books under her belt already I caught up with her to talk about the new book Never Tell, juggling her career with motherhood and what lies ahead.
- Never Tell is the latest book so can you tell me a little bit about it?
Never Tell is a story of a mother and journalist called Rose Miller who has given up her career for the sake of her young family; she has had a very adrenaline fuelled career as an investigative journalist.
But she also has this dark past where she belonged to a rather debauched secret society at Oxford University, where she met her husband James.
So there are secrets in her past and they are coming back to haunt her now.
- And where did the inspiration for the central character of Rose come from and how do we see her develop throughout the book?
Rose is not me (laughs) but there is an element, I had a high flying TV career before I had my kids; so I was really interested in the idea of giving up your career for your children but really missing it.
But Rose has had a dangerous career and I was really interested in that because I had read various books about war reporters who are addicted to the buzz, which Rose is; she was also addicted to this naughty society that she belonged to. So she is really a bit of an adrenaline junky and I was interested in how you marry that with having a young family and trying to settle down.
I hope that she’s fully fleshed out as a woman who is struggling and is torn between the two; her family and her career. In the book she goes back to investigate something for a newspaper but she is really torn between whether she should be doing that.
So that’s the way that she develops because you see her struggle with that. I was also interested in having a dark past, having done something that you are not proud of and whether you can redeem yourself in the future.
Her career is about bringing people the truth and that’s partly to do with the fact that she feels she has got to make up for being bad when she was younger, although she wasn’t particularly bad there were other much worse characters in the society, but she did go off the rails a bit.
- You have mentioned that Never tell is about secret societies so what was it that interested you about that?
I think with secret societies what makes them fascinating is they are secret and we don’t know very much about them and we wonder about them. Is it because anything that we are not immediately invited into becomes more exciting, a bit like not being allowed in to the latest club in town?
And with the secret society I was interested in the character that starts it, Dalziel, this aristocrat who is a bit dangerous because he feels like he has got nothing to lose. I was interested in why someone would feel like they had nothing to lose and how they would try and break convention, which is what he’s trying to do; he’s trying to lead these kids into breaking society’s rules and it’s about power.
Rose thinks that she is a member of the elite and she realises that they are all outsiders and that is why he is interested in them because they have got flaws which have made it possible for him to draw them in.
- So what sort of research did you do into these societies for the book? And what did you discover?
Well Oxford University, which the book is set in, has got some quite famous secret societies, some are more secret than others, there are a couple that seem to be quite secret and it really was quite difficult to find out anything about them.
There’s The Piers Gaveston, which Hugh Grant was apparently a member of, and they are quite famous for sexual excess.