Want to jump-start your novel?
Hello!
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My name is Hannah Carapellotti. I'm a senior at the University of Michigan, studying English Language & Literature and I'm part of the Minor in Writing through Sweetland. In my free time I also write for the Arts section of The Michigan Daily, one of U-M's student publications and a nationally ranked college newspaper.
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I have always known that I wanted to write stories. My family used to get so frustrated with me when I was little because I would constantly jump from new idea to new idea, abandoning projects mid-sentence all around the house. The issue wasn’t that I didn’t clean up after myself — my parents and grandparents would read what I had written as they cleaned up after me, and wanted me to keep going.
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Unfortunately, this world is not built to support artists financially, so I’ve struggled a lot with this love of mine and whether it’s worth pursuing as a career. This reality led to an even deeper battle with perfectionism — I felt like in order to truly “make it” as an author, I had to get everything right in the first draft. As a result, I hardly got very far with my stories. But whenever I tried out different career paths, nothing ever excited me like writing did. The day that I finally admitted out loud that I wanted to do this for real, I felt a weight leave my shoulders.
Let's do this together!
This capstone project has served as my way of motivating myself to stick to one story idea and to finally get something down on the page. But it's also meant to serve as a way for you, the reader, to get started on your own writing, if you find yourself in the same mindset as I was. I've collected several of the exercises and websites that I've used throughout the process in order to share what has worked for me in reaching this goal, for any aspiring writers who also don't know where to start. While the content of the story itself will be password protected, I will say that it's a romantic comedy, with themes like the acceptance of uncertainty and a touch of magic ;)
Working on this capstone has taught me that writing a novel will not be a perfect journey…and that’s okay. In the past, most of my stories have never left the prewriting stage out of a fear to take writing seriously, but I am now more appreciative of this stage because of how it keeps me on track when I’m actually writing. And I am actually writing — that’s what’s most important. “First Time for Everything” is a story I’m really excited about. I hope that my process is interesting to explore, and I hope that you find some useful tips and encouragement, but I’m most proud of how far I’ve come in my creative writing journey. Enjoy!
<3,
Hannah