Wanna Know a Secret?

I’ve Got a Secret was a television show that was on from sometime in the 1950’s until the mid 60’s. It was on mostly in the black and white era of television.  A guest came on, whispered his or her “secret” into the ear of the host and a panel of celebrities no one had ever heard of tried to guess the secret one question at a time.  Get a “yes” to your question and you got to ask another one.  Get a “no” and the guest received a whopping $10.00. The most they could win was $80.00. I give you this as a frame of reference only because I’m certainly not old enough to remember this series. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, but as usual, I digress.

What has an old television series got to do with writing?  Glad you asked.  In my creative writing class or my screenwriting class we discussed how to create a believable character.  All writers have their own system and if they are successful, it would appear that it works. The major thing I like to do is to determine what my character have as a secret and what they fear.

Secrets and fears fuel much of our lives.  The two could very well be the same or related. My youngest daughter was bitten by a black widow spider when she was five years old and we almost lost her. It’s not a secret to the people who know her, but she doesn’t talk about it in normal conversation.  Is she afraid of spiders?  You figure it out. That’s a real fear/secret.  As a writer of fiction, I have to determine what I want my characters to have.

If you have read either of my two series, you may know what they are already, but if not, I’m about to let the Genie out of the bottle because I think I know what they are. You “THINK” you know, you say? Hard to explain unless you’ve been there, but characters tend to take over and let you, the writer, know what they want you to know.  Benjamin Franklin said, “Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead,” and he was right.

In my Max Maxwell series, the protagonist is playing with fire and he knows it. He is having an affair with a married woman. There are a lot of extenuating circumstances, but the bottom line is she is married and he is not. Therein lies a problem. It’s not a secret to either of them, so what is there to fear? Her husband with a gun? Good answer.  You get $10.00.  Does he care? Next question.

Johnny Morocco served in Italy during WWII. He’s now heavily involved with a woman who came to the US with her family from Italy just prior to the war. Did he meet any of her family when he was in Italy?  If he did, it probably was not good for them.

Is any of this spelled out on the pages of my novel? Not really, but the information is there for the reader to determine the secrets and fears of the characters.

Some secrets are easily shared, just ask little Johnny who came home one day and told his mother he knew that his friend Billy could keep a secret. “How do you know she asked.”  His reply, “Because I pissed in his ear before I told it to him.” Horrified, she asked him to explain. “I leaned down and went ‘pssssttt’ and then I told him.”