The Magic of Secrets

A really wise person – I unfortunately can’t remember who – once told me that secrets are at the heart of good fiction. At first, I had no idea what this was supposed to mean. But then I took a look at some of my favourite books and began to realise that the way tension was essentially developed was through the creation of a mystery – a secret – and the eventual revelation of that secret.

What’s absolutely crucial to whether or not the book works? How the author handles the timing of the pay-off, and plants clues so that the discerning reader can piece the secret together. There are a lot of different ways to do this, so I’m just going to use examples from a couple of novels I enjoyed that I think use secrets, or just simply hide information from the reader, really effectively (without spoiling the books too much!), to illustrate this.

So, take for instance Paper Towns by John Green, which is one of my all-time favourite YA novels. In this book the secret revolves around a character, Margo, who’s disappeared. The information that’s kept secret from us as an audience – where’s Waldo? I mean, Margo – is what actually generates the tension in the story. The characters attempt to discover this secret/mystery at the same time as the audience, and that’s a large part of what drives the plot. Green drops clues throughout the novel, and these clues are a perfectly placed reveal or pay off of those secrets, or mysteries, established earlier on.

Granted, Paper Towns is a mystery so it’s obviously going to revolve around some kind of secret or quest. But, I can point to another wonderful contemporary YA novel that does this (not a mystery) Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler, one of the books at the centre of the recently Wesley Scroggins book-banning debacle. The tension in Ockler’s story is driven by a secret as well. The main character, Anna had a relationship with her best friend’s brother, Matt. Except, Matt died before they could tell her best friend about this relationship. So now Anna’s stuck hanging out with her best friend, thinking about her brother, having this huge secret hanging over her.

Ockler’s reveal? Pitch perfect. The secret comes out in the climax. There’s is so much pay off here, because throughout the novel this secret has been eating away at Anna, forcing her into herself, and then bam! it’s out in the open, is having drastic consequences on the dynamic between the girls, but on the up side Anna is finally allowed to grieve.

But it’s not just YA novels that use the magic of secrets and mysteries to generate tension. Jane Austen uses them in a super-effective way in Pride and Prejudice. I think this is best illustrated (and yeah, I’m spoiling this one totally, because I’m just making the assumption that you’ve all read Pride and Prejudice or at least seen the BBC series or movie) by the situation with Wickham and Elizabeth. Wickham seems to reveal a secret – that Darcy was a horrible man, willing to completely disregard the wishes of his father – which fuels the tension for a large part of the story and results in a climactic scene where Darcy proposes, and Elizabeth reveals that she knows his ‘secret’. Then Darcy in epistolary form reveals another secret – that Wickham was a predecessor to politicians ie a really good liar – and that generates a ton of inner conflict and tension for Elizabeth. So really, Austen is brilliant as always and has layered her secrets to maximise tension.

Obviously secrets aren’t all there is to fiction, and you have to add more layers to your story, but next time you’re trying to discover what the heart of your story is (for instance, when you’re trying to come up with a good pitch or query), or  even trying to inject tension into a scene, you may want to ask yourself: What’s the secret?

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Vahini Naidoo is a recent high school graduate from Sydney, Australia. She’s the author of several YA novels, including THE GNOME IS WATCHING, which is currently on submission to publishers. Her work is represented by Ammi-Joan Paquette at the Erin Murphy Literary Agency. You can find out more about her over at her blog