PART 2: Writing a novel about a breeding program in a fascist regime

A little while ago I told you about how I got the idea for my novel set inside Lebensborn, the secretive Nazi breeding program. Here’s what happened after that…

Research research research

*One of the many street fights Hitler’s SA (aka Brownshirts or Stormtroopers) initiated… because that’s what they did.*

You may recall that I was unemployed, and I took advantage of that to spend the first six months researching and planning the novel as my full-time job.

I learned plenty about the bizarre microcosm of Lebensborn. And I learned about the Third Reich, and what it meant to be an everyday German at the time. I found chilling similarities between Germany in the 1930s and the United States today.

Enough about the heroes, the victims, and the villains

I didn’t want to write about war. I didn’t want to tell stories I’d read a million times before about Resistance fighters and Holocaust survivors.

Those stories have great value — but there are so many others that remain untold.

To many people, Nazi Germany is synonymous with World War II, with Holocaust. But it’s not as if Hitler came to power one day and started invading countries and setting up extermination camps the next. It happened over the course of years.

I wanted to write about people who didn’t want to be a part of atrocities, but also don’t want to die. People who didn’t realize what was going on until it was too late. I wanted to explore how people awakened to awful realities and then had to reckon with their complicity in them — all while staying alive.

Because, of course, those people became victims, too.

The story

The novel I decided to write follows an eighteen-year-old, working class, aspiring herbalist named Ilse. She’s pregnant, her baby’s father is Jewish, and she has nowhere to turn.

*A good haul. It’s always a thrill to check out / buy a big stack of books at once. Yes, one of those books is in German and no, I do not know German.*

When she learns about the secretive maternity home for “racially valuable” mothers called Lebensborn, she believes it’s her only way out. She lies about her baby’s heritage and enters the program — only to find it’s the most dangerous place for herself and her child.

It’s a story of what happens when bodies are controlled by the people (men) in power. It’s the story of how one woman reckons with her own indoctrination and fights to reclaim her body and her identity.

The first draft

With November coming up, I decided to try out NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November.

It went okay to start. I tried to write all day, even though I was only productive after 4pm. I consumed a steady supply of gluten-free sandwich cookies, Kettle salt-and-pepper chips, and (after 5pm), Omission beer.

Whenever I see any of those things, I’m back there, wringing a first draft out of myself, again.

Then, halfway through the month and 20,000 words in, I simply couldn’t make the words come. I was disgusted by how much my sentences sucked (even though that’s normal for a first draft).

I stopped writing for a whole week and a half. That’s a long time when you only have a month.

I spent that week and a half adding an additional 4,000 words to my novella set during the Salvadoran Civil War in the 80s. I spent a lot of time listening to “Los peces en el río,” a Salvadoran Christimas song. I find it hauntingly sad, but I think I’m the only one.

Then I wrote a short story that was supposed to be an allegory for long COVID.

Then I decided to allow myself to bring Jane Eyre into the Lebensborn novel and somehow that allowed me to work on that project again, with gusto.

On the last day of NaNoWriMo, I wrote 6,000 words, doubling my previous record for most words written in a day.

I wrote a total of 61,000 words that November. I spent months trying to heal the gnarly carpal tunnel / tennis elbow combo I developed. (Check with me for tips.)

I continued to work on the first draft for a couple more months, until I didn’t know how to make it any better. That’s how I know a draft is done.

The main reason I couldn’t make the first draft any better was because I couldn’t dig deeper and get more honest.

I couldn’t be more honest because I needed to go to Germany. To soak up the sights and smells and sounds. To be in the same rooms the characters had inhabited. The sift through archives and meet people who had lived the experience I was writing about.

Too bad it was still the height of the pandemic and Germany’s borders were closed, with no sign of opening up.

So I researched what I could. With carpal tunnel keeping me from taking notes, I took poorly lit photos of relevant passages and plopped them right into my Google docs.

And I prepared for the trip I knew I would take. More about that next time…