Writing secrets

“Unguardedly honest and painful confessions between people who have just met are forced and false” -Robert McKee, “Story”

This is why so much of what I read is memoirs by women and gay men.

Because this relationship both to secrets and to what you can assume the reader will know does not in any way reflect my experience as a human or my experience in writers’ groups.

The vast majority of stuff that I would consider common knowledge (or at least would expect of someone who reads the newspaper) about sex, drugs, and various subcultures is totally baffling to a group of Boston area women age 50-70.

Also think of the amazing meet ugly between Wade and Vanessa in Deadpool, where it becomes a competition of trauma and gallows humor. Though I would agree that these are not the kind of secrets that drive plots. In Deadpool, the secret that drives the plot is Wade’s inability to face the vulnerability of someone caring for him while he is dying.

Or the boyfriend I met when I was 23 who when I told him I used to shoot heroin was like, yeah, I pretty much assumed that. But he was shocked when he saw how nice my father’s apartment was, because I was trying so hard to survive without my parents that I didn’t act like a rich girl.

I love characters who are trying to pretend that everything’s fine while it is really clear to the reader and most of the other characters that they’re a fucking mess. And those characters often have secrets that they wield in various ways and secrets that they try desperately to keep but that are obvious or mundane to people around them.

So, yeah, experiment with telling as little as you can get away with. But also you need to have a piece workshopped or betaed to actually figure out what is confusing people. And then write a really long version and keep rewriting it until it’s one or two amazing sentences. Show don’t tell doesn’t work for othered groups the way it works for straight white men.

I also love the idea (which I haven’t tried) of squeezing exposition in in the form of mansplaining.