Storytellersunplugged

Gerard Houarner

Secrets

A recent Poets and Writers magazine had an interesting article in which a teacher talked about giving feedback to a student about holding back information characters gave each other to add greater tension to their interaction, and to the story as a whole. Kelly Link, in her Locus interview, talked briefly about her short story writing, mentioning her fear of losing her skills at compression and withholding as she moved to writing longer fiction.

Another article in the NY Times Science Section about the function of denial (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/health/research/20deni.html) in everyday social life resonated deeply for me – we keep secrets from ourselves and agree to keep them in shared social and political worlds. In a kind of psychological/sociological dance of ying and yang, personal, political, religious, sexual and cultural identities can all be viewed as much in terms of the values presented (truthful, honest, hard-working, God-fearing, etc) as for secrets that are hidden (greedy, hateful toward this group or the other, exploitative, predatory, etc).

In plain English, we are as much what we present as what we hold back (adjust your mix according to taste for cynicism or trust).

To be obvious, a preacher can offer comfort, help the poor, speak beautifully about the joys of forgiveness and maintaining a relationship with a higher being of eternal love while at the same time victimize children or spread hateful attitudes about other religious or ethnic groups.

A civilization can produce magnificent, awe-inspiring art and architecture, make profound leaps of insight into the nature of the surrounding world and universe, produce technology to adapt and exploit entire habitats, and still torture and carve the hearts from living human beings for apparently perfectly acceptable and rational reasons.

(Hmmm – I see where my mix tends to go….)

Life and survival certainly depends at some level on being secretive, from hunter/prey relationships to plants and bacteria. Perhaps consciousness, at our level, does indeed depend on the capacity to deny, to edit reality, to make the everyday story of our lives flow a little bit more smoothly and certainly comfortably. After all, we’re the prime audience for the story of our lives, so I guess we’re also pretty tough editors. We also want to stay sane.

Anyway, the mash-up of ideas came together in my little head in terms of “secrets,” and how important they are in terms of storytelling. (I bet you were getting a little scared there about how deep off the philosophical end I was going to go – have no fear, my tiny brain can’t hold too much, and often manages to muddy what gets into it.)

As usual, folks who’ve been around might be getting a bit restless with the obvious. Don’t mind me, I just need to belabor the obvious so eventually I might get it, myself.

I’m thinking of secrets as a hook or a way to look at an idea/premise or to solve a storytelling problem – as story-starters, as a means of building tension in a scene, a lens through which to observe and develop a story – a perspective, just like “consequences” from a few months ago.

In the little editorial reading I’ve done, none on a “professional” level, I’ve certainly had a chance to run into the notion, and how secrets are handled by writers at many different levels. Probably a number of my own personal rejections have been signals about how I may have failed to satisfy a market’s expectations for how they should be handled.

Just shooting off the top of my head, I’m seeing the idea of secrets in a few different ways. Certainly the concept serves as the initial plot driver in a lot of genres – romance, mystery and noir, thriller; certainly the “literary” genre, with its close attention to the details of common daily life and interactions cunningly positioned to arrive at the epiphany the reader expects to experience for that type of story, thrives on the secrets characters hide from themselves and each other.

Secrets are, of course, at the heart of who-dunnits – with the hero resolving the crime’s transgression through through solving the puzzle of people, their actions and consequences. Thrillers manipulate who knows what among the various characters and between the cast and the audience, driving readers to turn the pages with the anticipation of discovery. Romance seems driven by triangles and unrequited love, secrets all.

Horror treasures the secrets of past sins, hidden desires, ancient powers, traps, unspoken insanity, with the horror residing in the secret’s revelation.

Fantasy seems to use a lot of secret identity, revolving around the discovery of hidden “good” as opposed to “evil.”

SF is frequently driven by finding out the secret of the “other” in alien-contact stories, or the permutation of known or theoretical science at the heart of the puzzle of odd-phenomena disrupting the characters’ lives.

What drives characters, from this point of view, are the loves and hatreds, the fears and desires, they keep hidden. What drives the story is a secret or mystery (House of Secrets/Mystery, for you old school DC fans out there) the reader, if not the characters, wants to uncover or resolve.

So one way to start a story (or to identify what kind of story you really like to tell) might be to find a secret that fascinates you. It could be the same kind you like to keep, or the kind you find fascinating in others (hate to tell you, but they’re the same – but go ahead, denial is a beautiful thing). Characters and situations, and most importantly conflict, flows from that hidden knowledge.

The tropes are all around – cheating spouses, thieving workers, the seven deadly sins (only seven? you sure?). The spy, detective, investigator. The lone individual cast out of his/her comfortable life by a vast conspiracy, or a secret about themselves known only to a benevolent/diabolical few.

Hamlet? Adultery and murder. Ibsen? Family. Yes, of course, there are other things involved in the art, but the engine that propels the narratives containing fantastic speeches and insights and observations and language is, at least from this humble point of view, lowly little secrets.

If a scene is sitting there flat with folks lecturing each other (because you’ve got a lot of backfill to shove in, or a rant simmering in your psyche, or whatever), try (as the Poets and Writers article suggested) letting the characters hold back some of the information or feeling, and see what misunderstandings, conflicts and tension arises from that.

Let’s face it, watching people lie to each other is great fun. Even when the observer doesn’t know the actual truth. In fact, trying to figure out what’s being hidden is half the fun.

If you’ve got a premise or an idea that fascinates, but it isn’t going anywhere, what happens when one character hides that idea from someone else? The story shifts from being about the idea or premise to being about the characters and why one would do this to the other (and then you can release the secret from its box and let the consequences fly).

If the characters are just not going anywhere, no arc or emotional throughline seems to be taking shape, perhaps too much has been spilled on the pages and everyone “knows” each other too well (which I think is a common problem when trying to get at characters in the process of writing the story – in exploring the character’s head, too much can be revealed to the reader/other characters).

Secrets say a lot about the characters keeping them, as well – there are cultural preferences for certain kinds of denial, from the US military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” to someone denying they have a particular ethnic ancestry. Friendships are built on one person protecting another from the truth or protecting a shared but hidden attitude about status or a piece of knowledge or an act no one else knows about.

Most importantly, secrets add depth and complexity to characters. In some types of fiction, and particularly in longer fiction, where conflicts are expected to turn and twist and snap at the reader like a wrestling ‘gator, all kinds of buried emotions, past incidents, desires, need to pop out to keep the story engine going.

Oh yeah, and keeping secrets is not always a bad thing. Like the Times article points out, denial can be a good thing. No harm, no foul, no need to know.

Nor are all secrets necessarily “bad,” as the one true king in a thief’s disguise frequently reminds us. Upon further meditation, good secrets can have terrible consequences, if you want them to, just as bad secrets can unwind into good endings.

Ultimately, a story is also a secret you’re telling, in a round about kind of way. After all, you know the ending before the rest of us ever will.

One brief final spasm – secrets are, of course, only one aspect of character, and for some, I’m sure, minor or irrelevant. I was reminded of this after watching the movie adaptation of The Mist, which got me to thinking about myths and folktales. When the archetypes haul themselves out and become all that they can be – religious faith, scientific rationality, and practical realist in the King story adaptation – you pretty much know what you’re getting in terms of character and even plot. Once again, it’s the storyteller’s secret (in this case, the possibility that you need a little of faith, rationality and reality to survive) that provides the real pay-off.