Born Under a Bad Sign…Every Last One of Us
Author Lo Patrick discusses the troubled nature of most (and maybe all) people and how that’s fertile ground for character creation.
I can’t write about superlative people. I can’t do it. If I’m entirely honest, I don’t even know any—maybe a few who get close to a Snow White designation, but then I assume I probably don’t know them all that well. Every person has corners, pockets, folds into which things fall.
I am most interested in those places, where the trouble settles, and sometimes it settles in deep like a stain that no amount of scrubbing is going to get out. You can thank your DNA, your parents, their parents, your genetic code—whatever you want, but we are all ultimately one long story. Or said less elegantly, we’re vacuum cleaners that never get emptied.
Because we are indelibly made of our experiences, and we can only pass along to others what we have to give, what gets moved along from generation to generation is not always the good stuff. It’s not necessarily the wisdom, the important life lessons, the seeing-great-distances-by-standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants sort of thing. A lot of the time it’s our trouble.
That’s one of the places I went in The Sins of Summer Daughters. If a person doesn’t have a proper wrestling match with their history…never mind, they’re going to have to have a proper wrestling match with it, or the hidden wound is going to bleed on everyone they come into contact with, most especially their families.
Meg Gregory is in her 60s when the novel starts, and has willingly settled herself into a life that is coming down the mountain. She has overcome much and with her unrelenting determination, has left every last bit of it behind—mostly by keeping the people in her life all at an arm’s length. The one exception being her granddaughter, Lucy, over whom she has been willing to thaw, if not melt. Meg’s offspring appeared to have counteracted her own volatile history, Lucy especially.
Because Meg had come to rely on the generations after her to be steady, consistent, boring even, when Lucy starts to unravel, it’s profoundly derailing for not only Lucy, but Meg. Crimes were committed when Meg was Lucy’s age, and they are trailing behind Meg like a long shadow. Distinguishing between then and now becomes more and more difficult as a familiar lack of control buckles the earth. There’s a fault line. And fault. Meg is searching for the source of both.
In order to connect generations of victims and criminals one has to look not only at the similarities but also differences both in character and circumstance. Vulnerability takes many forms. Meg and Lucy are nothing alike, and their upbringings are entirely distinguishable, but they were both exposed to lurking menace. There have been studies as to why certain people are selected as victims; criminals explain their process in identifying the most defenseless among us.
On the converse, some families seem to breed lawbreakers—other than the hard-knock-life defense, I’m not sure as much has been done to try and understand a proclivity for deviance, at least run of the mill deviance. People have long tried to understand Hitler and Charles Manson. They haven’t given as much time to the pervert who keeps exposing himself behind the dry cleaners. But either way, something is wrong, and we should wonder where it came from? Why is this person acting this way? What was passed down, learned, collected that created this problem?
And of course, the time period when a story takes place has a lot to do with how crimes are handled by the family, the public, and law enforcement. Some decades were unkind to certain victims and harder on certain criminals. Interpersonal dynamics also determine how trauma is processed and also how punishment is dealt…or foregone. Weaving all of this cause and effect together is the stuff authors’ (at least this author's) dreams are made of.
I’m uncomfortable inside of my characters’ heads because of the shit they’ve seen, the flaws they carry, the way they were raised, the mistakes they’ve made, and the lessons they’ve been forced to learn. I don’t mind being in the corners, pockets, and folds of their imperfection. I only want to think about them and to try to understand them, even if the understanding means that I think they had it coming. Or maybe that someone should have seen them coming.
There’s always a reason to go at least a couple of generations back if you really want to know someone or to truly explore a character. The same goes for explaining why a crime took place. The lead up to every single misdeed started when Eve ate the apple. Speaking of apples, when writing and when trying to know people—start with the apple, then find the tree it didn’t fall far from, and keep going from there. You’ll be back at Eve in a blink. In the end, it’s all her fault.
Check out Lo Patrick's The Sins of Summer Daughters here:
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