Guest post by Victoria Helen Stone

Inspiration for stories is all around us. It’s in our families, in our neighbors, in history and in everyday life. Victoria Helen Stone, the author of Jane Doe and The Hook, recently released her latest novel, Follow Her Down, about a family still reeling from a murder. Stone joined She Writes to share the sort of stories that capture her imagination and find their way into her novels. From an exploration into her own genealogy to her own experiences, she discusses the threads writers can pull on to bring intrigue into any story.

The Past Lives We Carry by Victoria Helen Stone

I’m fascinated by secrets. I don’t mean in the gossipy sense. You can trust me with your gossip, because my memory is so awful I can’t reliably pass on any stories. I’ll forget the names and the details within a few minutes, so I’m a vault. Or a sieve. But the tales drift down, settling on the floor of my mind until I dredge up mismatched pieces for my books.

The truly deep secrets I ponder are the pasts of people I meet. Everyone has a story and nearly everyone has family trauma. My immediate family is proof of this, but diving into genealogy made it even more clear. The abandonments, the divorces, the deaths and scandalous remarriages… all these stories are quickly covered over and hidden away in the hopes that no one will dig them up later.

One story I excavated from old documents came to me as a skeleton of a tale, bare of all its flesh. A teenager left the woods of rural New England to fight in the American Revolution. When he returned a year later, he married a neighbor girl… who now had a three-month-old child. I’ll never know the details, which is where my writer’s imagination flares to life.

Was she his sweetheart before he left? Or was it a wild farewell send-off gone awry? Had any word reached him, or did he walk into his village to the explosive, life-altering shock of a young mother and an infant? Was she shamed and scorned until he returned to marry her? Or were their families thrilled at this promise of new life during war? I’d give anything to know.

Searching for Secrets

Those kinds of secrets still play out all around us today, whether we notice or not. My mom suffered a teen pregnancy and all the trauma and chaos that comes with it. You’d be surprised at how many people share the same story when I tell them. A teenage relative forced to marry, or perhaps sent off in secret to a girls’ home. A daughter passed off as a sister. So many young women were left to live with the hidden trauma of forced childbirth and adoption with no one to talk to about it. You might be close to one of them and never know.

My mom later married my father and had me, the daughter of a couple from a tiny farming town in the Midwest where everyone knew everyone. I spent my summers in that town every year. Yet somehow, even I became a secret after their divorce, cut out of the fabric of that place, my threads adrift in the wind.

I have no idea when it happened or how. What I do know is that in my 20s, I flew to Minnesota for my grandfather’s funeral and… nobody knew who I was. “How did you know him?” they asked. Then, with increasing confusion when I sat in the family pew, “How are you related?” I’d been his only grandchild for ten years, I’d gone with him to the town museum, the shooting range, the pizza place, the grocery store. Yet I was lost to time, no longer a child of my birthplace.

Digging Into the Mystery of Your Own Experiences

But of course, I wasn’t simply lost. I was a belated cover-up, a forced secret. A quick marriage, a quick pregnancy, a quick child, and then a quick escape when my dad walked away just as I was born.

My father married again. My mother moved on. I was an only child and yet I had seven half-siblings. My father had three more daughters with his next wife. I heard about them but did not know them, and they weren’t told about me. My grandparents must have hidden my pictures when the younger children came over, erased me from their walls, but I’ll never know. Another layer of dirt flung over the secret. Another cover-up.

During the school year I lived in a crowded house in the city with half-sisters I loved, but during the summer they went to live with their father, and I stayed with my grandparents. We were sent to the same small town to live out the hot and humid days, but we did not see each other there, not even on my birthday. I had a half-brother too, and I did not know him. For months at a time, I was an only child exploring acres of rural woodland until the summer ended.

It only recently occurred to me how odd this all was. It felt perfectly normal at the time, but it must have imprinted on me, leaving deep scars just below the surface. I was the only sister with no father and no brother, the only sister with a different last name, the only sister somehow born a secret bastard even though her parents were married. My siblings had uncles and aunts and cousins I’d never met. They visited them at Christmas without me.

Against all odds, people forgot I existed. In the Midwest especially, trauma and shame are swept under the rug. Small towns seem quaint and calm because the truth is often collectively ignored. Move along, we say. Everything is fine, so don’t make a fuss. No use dwelling on the past. It’s over.

The Wellspring of My Storytelling

But it’s never over. It’s never gone, and perhaps that’s the wellspring of my storytelling, this long and impossible secret I somehow grew into and then out of. I know it’s why I’m interested in others’ lives. I see secrets everywhere. I want to know the complexity beneath the surface, the sharp-edged boulders long ago buried beneath the dirt.

For me, an unassuming stranger is just someone whose secret story I haven’t heard yet. If I never get the chance to hear that tale, I can definitely make one up. But I’ve learned that whatever story I tell probably won’t be as interesting—or impossible—as the truth that exists all around us.

Follow Her Down by Victoria Helen Stone

In Victoria Helen Stone’s latest suspense, Follow Her Down, Elise Rockwood returns to the town where her teenage sister was murdered. She’s determined to face her demons and reconnect with her broken family, but she soon finds that the past can’t be trusted… and the truth about what really happened is still unspeakable.

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