The Bird That Almost Broke a Book

#fantasyworldbuilding #plothole #writingprocess #southernechoseries

While I was working on A Whisper from the Edge of the World (Southern Echo 2), I ended up stumbling into a research vortex with a bird in the very center of it. This led me to learning all about a species of bird that I had never heard of before, and that nearly made me break down over a potential plot hole. A fairly minor one, but a plot hole all the same. Read on to see how I oh-so-professionally dealt with that.

But first, allow me to introduce:

The bar tailed godwit, aka nature's ultimate "screw you" to both distance and gravity.

This is a godwit. It is a small, relatively unimpressive bird, and it almost destroyed the second Southern Echo book.

"How is that possible?" you wonder.

I'm so glad you asked.

Allow me to elaborate. You see, when you're writing a book, sometimes you come up with a plot point that you're pretty sure is solid, but just in case, you make a note to yourself to do some research later, and make sure that hedging this particular climatic bit of action on the stamina and endurance of a bird actually tracks. And for the most part, it does. Turns out, lots of birds like to take a pause during a long flight to do reasonable things like eat and sleep.

"Great," you think. "This is going to work out totally fine."

But then you discover that some birds actually switch off half of their brain and just coast for days on end.

"Okay," you think, a little unsettled, "that screws with the character's logic a bit, but I can make that work."

And THEN you learn about the godwit.

A small, relatively unimpressive bird, except for the fact that every year, this bird flies 7,000 miles from Alaska to New Zealand for the sake of mating and raising their young in summer weather before making the same journey in reverse once Alaska becomes the warmer spot of the two.

And it does this WITHOUT STOPPING. This bird does not eat, it does not sleep, it does not do anything except flap its wings for an entire 7,000 mile journey for upwards of 10 days.

And that's just a little too much to hedge this plot point on.

So what do you do?

You play Supreme Overlord of the Universe, and decree that the godwit does not exist in the world of the Southern Echo. Ironically, it definitely would, given the geography of that world, but maybe the gryphons picked them all off somewhere further back in the magical evolutionary lineage that led to this world's current fauna.

So that's how you close a plot hole in a fantasy book. You simply obliterate the problem, and pretend it never existed.

But in all seriousness, this bird is FASCINATING, and I highly encourage you to go learn more about it from this online article.