………………………….Run a little slower
And I will run, I promise, a little slower.”– Apollo to Daphne, Ovid’s Metamorphoses

I love retold myths.

John William Waterhouse’s Apollo & Daphne

If I find a novel that retells, say, the Daphne and Apollo myth, I’ll read it.

Oh, wait.  That’s the one I’m writing.

Yes, I’m writing a novel for National Novel Writing Month (NANOWRIMO), an annual project that brings people together to write their own 50,000-word novels between November 1 and November 30.

You can read about this enjoyable project here. A group started it in San Francisco in 1999 for the same reason people start bands, they say at their website:

Because we wanted to make noise. Because we didn’t have anything better to do. And because we thought that, as novelists, we would have an easier time getting dates than we did as non-novelists.

One reason it’s fun and sweet is that members in your area meet twice or thrice a week at coffeehouses or Panera. (You don’t have to go, of course.)   It’s kind of like AA or Weight Watchers, only you are trying to do something, rather than not do it.  A bunch of people get together with their laptops…and write.

I am not a novelist, but I once won a scholarship to a writers’ conference on the basis of the first chapter of a novel I was writing.  Did I go home and write Chapter Two?  No, I did not.   When it came to writing Chapter 2, I discovered that I’d rather be reading a book.  Any book.

NANOWRIMO means all kinds of things.  It can mean participating in online forums.  It can mean shopping.  I intend to buy a new black sweater and black jeans (I wonder if it’s tax-deductible to buy writing clothes?) which I will don one minute before I leave the house, because otherwise they will be covered in cat hair.

NANOWRIMO is such a charming idea, and Erin Morgenstern did start her best-selling book, The Night Circus, there.  Now I have signed up twice, and never finished.  I enjoy the first couple of days, but then I fall behind on my word count.  Everything I write needs revision, and NANOWRIMO is not about revision.  It’s about getting something down on paper.

I hardly think my retelling of Apollo and Daphne will take up the space of a whole novel, but that’s my idea of the moment.

In Ovid’s comical version in his brilliant poem, Metamorphoses, Cupid wickedly fires an arrow at Apollo to make him fall in love with Daphne, and fires one at Daphne that drives all love away.  When Apollo chases the nymph, he begs her not to run so fast; she prays to her father, the river god, “to change and destroy the body/which has given too much delight” (Rolfe Humphries’ translation).  Her father turns her into a laurel tree, and Apollo  will not let her go.  He claims the laurel for himself.  It is an aetiological myth:   it’s why he wears a laurel wreath, and why Roman victors wear laurel wreaths.

The description of Daphne’s changing into a tree is simultaneously dazzling and nightmarish.

…her limbs grew numb and heavy, her soft breasts
Were closed with delicate bark, her hair was leaves,
Her arms were branches, and her speedy feet
Rooted and held, and her head became a tree top,
Everything gone except her grace, her shining.
Apollo loved her still.  He placed his hand
Where he had hoped and felt the heart still beating
Under the bark; and he embraced the branches
As if they still were limbs, and kissed the wood,
And the wood shrank from his kisses…

—Metamorphoses, Rolfe Humphries translation

Read on!  It’s a very great poem.