Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today’s guest for the WHAT is Nicole Lesperance, a YA/MG writer and a tech research editor. Her debut MG novel, THE NIGHTMARE THIEF, will be published by Sourcebooks in January 2021. Her debut YA novel, THE WIDE STARLIGHT, will be published by Razorbill in February 2021.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

I read somewhere a long time ago that there were legends about the Northern Lights, saying if you whistled at them, they’d swoop down and carry you away. That concept rattled around in my head for a while, and when I finally started researching the stories, I discovered a ton of different ones from all over the world, from Greek to Norse to Estonian to Indigenous people all over the Arctic. There are all kinds of ideas for what they might be, from horse-drawn carriages to fire foxes to Valkyrie to spirits playing a game with the skull of a walrus.

My head was whirling with all the different possibilities, and when I first started to draft this idea, it was just a short story about a girl whose best friend whistled at the lights, and they came down and touched his hand and changed him in this mystical and unsettling way. I wrote a few pages of that and realized I wanted it to be a deeper family story, and I decided it would be about that girl and her mother.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

This book has been through a few different iterations. I first wrote a version that was set partly in Canada, then ended up scrapping that and changing that part to Svalbard, which is an Arctic archipelago way up north of Norway. As I started researching, I stumbled upon a bunch of Norwegian fairy tales. The only one I was familiar with was “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” but there were all these other stories like “The Tale of Prince Lindworm” and “The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body.” They were so much more gruesome and captivating than the fairy tales we tend to read here in the US. I decided to frame my main character’s memories as fairy tales, and I incorporated a lot of the elements from those traditional stories into them.

So half of the story is those memories, and then the present-day narrative is set on Cape Cod, where I grew up, and Svalbard, which I was lucky to be able to travel to in 2019 — back when we could still go places. At the heart, this is a story about a girl named Eli who lost her mother, and about how her mother struggled to do the right thing but ultimately made a terrible mistake. I poured a lot of my own anxieties and worries as a parent into Eli’s mom. It can often feel like you’re messing everything up all the time as a parent, and her mom’s choices in the book are sort of an evolved version of that. 

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

Yes, I often say that my characters don’t always behave, and in a lot of my writing, I’ve struggled with expecting them to do one thing, but then they end up behaving completely differently once I’ve had time to build out their personalities through writing them. With this book, by the time I settled on the final setting and story, it actually went very smoothly, and that’s probably because I knew Eli so well by then. The fairy tales sort of wrote themselves, which was pretty unusual for me but pretty amazing to experience, and they didn’t change much from first to final draft.

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

I’m pretty slow to come up with ideas and plots, and I’m super jealous of people who can manifest a bunch of different, wildly creative ideas quickly. It’s actually one of the reasons why I didn’t start writing books until well into adulthood. I honestly didn’t think I was creative enough to write an entire book. But it turned out I just needed to give my ideas a lot of time to develop. Often it takes a few months or even years of setting them on the back burner of my brain and letting them cook until they’re ready. 

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

These days I’m writing MG and YA books at the same time, so I feel like I’ve always got a few ideas going, in various stages of development. My agent and critique partners are incredibly helpful for bouncing ideas off, like I might have two or three options and see which one resonates with them. Sometimes just the process of writing a quick description of each idea helps me figure out which one is coming together the best and which one I’m the most excited about. 

I have 5 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

Wow, five cats!!! That’s my dream! I have two cats, and one of them is definitely my co-author. He likes to snuggle up next to me while I’m writing and sometimes helps by adding paragraphs of nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn or ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, to my manuscripts.