Writing Rambles: Keeping a Secret
It’s a very human kind of craving to want to know things. When a friend tells you they went on a date, you’ll usually be curious about how it went down. When a headline announces a hot scoop, we may dive into at least the first couple paragraphs. And when a story leads us to ask a question, we’ll generally be hooked so long as all signs point to eventually getting an answer.
Such is the allure of secrets in a story, hidden from sight yet nonetheless beckoning the reader/viewer/player to find it. Sometimes, it’s a character keeping secrets as to their allegiances, motivations, and/or origins. Other times, it’s a character’s mission to unravel the mystery placed before them, its answer serving as a boon for their journey, if not its resolution.
Secrets come in all shapes and sizes, and in some cases, a character’s secret may be made known to the audience early on so that they are aware of its ramifications throughout the story. Either way, their influence on the plot is typically straightforward: enticing the audience through curiosity, building suspense with hints and teases, and then delivering a resolution worthy of all the buildup. As with all things writing, though, writing a well-executed secret is easier outlined than drafted.
If you ask me, the worst mistake to make when writing secrets into a story is putting too much unnecessary focus on them. As per their very nature, secrets are supposed to be a subtle thing; if you overemphasize or overhype it, the secret may end up flanderizing the entire narrative as what should have been an organic component of the narrative now overshadows everything else, misdirecting the audience and perhaps even yourself as to what the story is about.
It reminds me a lot of what I said before about plot twists, in that if they’re done for the sake of themselves or inflated in such a way that they begin to exist for the sake of themselves, they take what would otherwise be an interesting aspect of the story and reduce to a cheap throwaway gag that only works the first time you experience it. However, while a subversion of expectations is more or less a high-level decision made to the overall narrative by the writer, secrets are significantly more rooted in the characters, settings, and events of a story.
Indeed, secrets aren’t just a trope—they’re a device that inform and explain characters’ actions and personalities. They bring all sorts of compelling baggage that must eventually be addressed and dealt with by the characters, as well as consequences both before and after any kind of reveal. When done right, the secret won’t just feel like a natural component of the character(s) and/or setting, but they’ll be fun to explore and experience well after the first reading/viewing/playthrough.
If you ever plan on writing characters with such kinds of secrets, it’s important that you remember to do them not solely because you want to write a character with a secret, but because you want to accomplish something with that secret. When it comes to writing, I will always argue that half the battle when it comes to writing is figuring out what you want to do and how that mission will take form. From there, it’s all just a matter of putting pen to paper.