The family you were born into says a lot about who you are. You can meet someone, then meet their family and say, “Oh, it all makes sense now.”

Unlike David Copperfield, I’ll spare you the “Chapter 1 – I am born” version. But here are some interesting tidbits that I believe shaped me as a person and as a writer:

My dad is a retired professor of European history, specializing in World War II. Growing up with such a person could make the simplest things complicated. For example, you could never avoid an argument by saying, “I’m Switzerland” because Dad would say, “Now wait. Which PART of Switzerland? Some parts weren’t neutral. . .” So you had to know your stuff before you opened your mouth.

You also couldn’t join in when other kids talked about games they played with their dads—horseshoes, throwing a ball outside. . . At our house, we played Bombs over Schweinfurt. You know, Bombs over Schweinfurt, the family game that’s sweeping the nation! It was basically just Dad dropping pillows on our heads. My sister and I would scream, as if the pillows were made of steel. I think it was the anticipation of getting hit that caused the screams—or we were just wusses. Anyway, I don’t know anyone else who grew up playing Bombs over Schweinfurt.

Sometimes our father would traumatize us without knowing it. My sister, for example, still remembers a school report she had to do in fifth grade about the guy who invented the reaper, Cyrus McCormick. This was back in the days before the Internet, when Dad took her downstairs into his study where he had not one, but two, sets of encyclopedias. It was there where he admonished her never to plagiarize because it was a crime and she’d be sent to prison. She was ten years old. (I don’t know if he really said the “prison” part, but as the story keeps being told, it gets more dramatic.) So my sister dutifully learned about Cyrus McCormick, making sure everything she wrote was in her own words for fear of being sent to prison for plagiarism.

My mom, on the other hand, is an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a big onion. To the outside world, she seems the perfect homemaker, the kind of woman who would offer you pie, the kind of woman who might have starred in a Jimmy Stewart movie. But when we were growing up, Mom would say the most surprising things like, “When I worked at NASA. . .” None of us had any idea. Apparently, she and Dad went to a party where Neil Armstrong was, and Mom was like, “Oh yes, that’s Neil” like it was no big deal. Mom was so full of surprises and able to keep secrets for years—we all decided it was highly likely that she also worked for the CIA. When we told her our theory, she laughed it off but didn’t deny it. It became a running joke. Now after fifty years of marriage, Dad still isn’t sure who she is.

The biggest contradiction about my mother is that on the one hand, she loves baking and kittens. On the other, she loves movies like The Amityville Horror and Rosemary’s Baby. Perhaps Dad should sleep with one eye open. . .

These two wonderful—and wonderfully weird—people raised me. That’s why I’m so inspired to write complex characters. Characters with contradictions. Characters that aren’t as they seem. After all, I’ve never met anyone in real life who checks all the boxes for one personality type. And doesn’t that make the world more interesting?

Stay tuned to my next blog when I’ll talk about how vivid characters can make a big difference in your scripts.