A Lucky Break: What My Last Book Taught Me

By Susan Patron

Writing a sequel to The Higher Power of Lucky launched me on a path I had wanted, in the worst way, to avoid. That was the path to puberty, Lucky’s puberty, a subject I had no wish to explore. Characters of many fine writers have navigated this crossroads of their fictional lives, and memorably, but it was not material for me. No, I wanted my protagonist to remain ten, a less ambiguous age where hope may still be in the mix. Because if I know Lucky, and I do, her adolescence will be no picnic for either one of us. So the plan was for Lucky Breaks to begin just a short time after the previous book ended and to cover a span of only a few weeks.

After four rewrites and a year of peeling off my characters’ outerwear, layer after layer—you know, the bulky stuff that envelops them because they have not yet been closely enough envisioned, and makes them sound muffled and walk funny, like Teletubbies wearing twenty-five snowsuits—I finally had a draft I thought ready to send to my editor Ginee Seo at Atheneum. She was enthusiastic and asked some helpful questions that I took to heart once I had gotten over the shock of the manuscript still needing any changes at all (What? After all my work?).  Someday I’ll get used to the notion that I must do five or six complete revisions before I can sign off; I was only on number four.

So I had given my characters a little air, and Ginee commented mildly that Lucky has grown older. “Not possible,” I said in a churlish tone, discernable even in email, in order to let her know this was a position from which I refused to budge. She cheerfully referenced passages by page number, claiming not only that Lucky had grown, so too had the other child-characters, Lincoln and Miles.

To humor her, I checked it out. At first (because to my dismay it turned out she was right) I re-read those passages as if they had been written by some devious, hostile invader trying to sabotage my work. The characters were, indeed, all older by about six months, enough to affect their thoughts, relationships, reactions, desires, behavior, and interests. But then I saw that, although there is evidence of a little hormonal activity in the background, puberty itself is not yet front and center.
I could live with eleven, I decided.

In fact, eleven gives Lucky (and the story) a bit of crunch, like a bread crumb topping on a casserole. Once I’d walked myself though this and submitted to the truth of it, a wild rumpus began. The characters crashed the gates and whooped, as if they’d been constrained in cages. They were eager to get on with it, to fulfill their destiny. “Okay, okay,” I muttered, sharpening a bunch of #2 pencils. I re-wrote the up-until-then elusive first chapter in a blistering heat, slapping down the words as fast as I could.

Lesson learned: I need to get out of my own way. The invader whose passages seemed so subversive knew what she was doing; she was trying to unlock a detail that allowed the story—the action and motivation of the characters—to make sense, even though it flirted with material I was consciously trying to avoid. My wise editor helped me to pay attention, to listen to my own words, to trust that those words would reveal what it was that I was trying to say.

 

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