NaNoWriMo 2021 and Hope Is The Thing With Feathers
Last summer, while I was editing a different novel, a new idea popped into my head. So shiny, so tempting… but I resisted and finished the work I’d already planned. When October came around and I started thinking about NaNoWriMo, I dusted off my shiny idea and started fleshing it out.
I’ve done NaNoWriMo before (2020 and 2018). For those who need a reminder, November is national novel writing month—where one writes 50,000 words over the month. I find setting this goal is a great way for me to get a first draft down. By the way, I hold no expectations on my first drafts—other than getting the story down. Later I edit and polish to the point I’m willing to share the work.
Over the last two weeks of October I developed my outline (some people can write a coherent novel without and outline, but I’m not one of those people). My shiny idea morphed into a story full of airships, fantastic beasts and a quirky robot.
Weirdly, while working on pulling my ideas together, I stumbled upon a poem by Emily Dickinson that describes my plot better than I could’ve imagined (here's the book of her poems I'm slowly working through). I know this poem has deeper interpretations, different interpretations, but my story is about hope, a bird and storms. Here it is:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches on the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
I forced my idea into a story arc complete with turning points and characters who develop. Also the more I worked on the story, the less shiny it became (which is what always happens).
On November first, I started writing. Five days in, writing in a third person point of view, it dawned on me the story I’d plotted would work best in first person point of view, so I switched. I also realized that the story is a coming of age one, and thus might classify as YA—so I’ve added some scifi YA books to my to-be-read pile just to get an idea of what tropes are expected (starting with this one).
I’m just about at the half-way point of my draft. Writing is always hard, and this one is not exception, but I think it’s going well. Of course a new shiny idea for a different story has popped into my head, which I’ll resist until its time comes.
*Image above is from here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple-crowned_fairywren