EMILY ARSENAULT

Characters and Their Secrets

EMILY ARSENAULT’s The Broken Teaglass, a mystery that takes place at a dictionary company, was a 2009 New York Times Notable Crime Novel. Her second novel, In Search of the Rose Notes, is about two eleven-year-old girls who try to find their missing babysitter using a set of Time-Life books about the paranormal as their guide.

 

 

I ’m a reader, in part, because I’m a nosy person.

And I was a nosy kid, too. That’s how it started. When I was around ten, I loved secrets. But I didn’t have all that many, and neither did my friends. Fortunately, there were plenty of juicy secrets promised in the blurbs on the backs of the books I’d buy at the mall:

The old house is haunted by a ghost who has kept a terrible secret for two centuries . . . As their friendship develops, Karen starts to suspect that Amy is hiding something from her . . . In the attic, Dana finds a clue to a family secret.

Paperbacks promised more secrets than real life.

Sometimes I was disappointed with the revelations. What? This whole time Amy was hiding that she was afraid of dogs?! Because a dog bit her last year? Who cares? But I almost always loved the experience of tearing through the book to get to them.

I suppose I write suspense because it offers me a similar experience. As a suspense writer, I get to control the secrets. It’s like a nosy ten-year-old’s dream, knowing everybody’s business and getting to withhold and dole out bits of it at my discretion. In adult life, we sometimes encounter people who are curious, but whose stories (and secrets) we’ll never know. So one method I use for creating characters is to take someone I’ve encountered—someone whose idiosyncrasies interest me, but whom I know only superficially—and create a fictional backstory for them. This includes assigning them a few secrets.

Whether or not you choose to form your characters this way, it’s always useful to ask yourself what baggage they carry—whether it’s something to be revealed explicitly or not, whether it is the crux of your mystery or not.

But with the license to be nosy comes responsibility. You must always ask yourself—is it realistic for this person to withhold this information here? If so, why? Is he shy, devious, frightened, or perhaps protective of someone else? Is this behavior consistent with previous behavior? Is it fair to the reader? Would someone with a secret like that really say this? Is this piece of information going to be satisfying in this particular spot in the story? Should it be earlier or later? Is it worthy of the reader’s time? Is the nosy ten-year-old in your reader going to feel betrayed, bored, or condescended to?

A suspense writer must balance the revelation of information as an element of plot with realism and consistency of character, i.e., This is the perfect spot in the story for the reader to learn this—but wait, does it really make sense for the character to have withheld this till now? I’d love for this character to blurt this out here, but does he realistically have sufficient motivation to do so? And it’s quite easy to write yourself into a corner that forces you to have to choose between pacing and character realism.

It’s a tricky dilemma—one that I struggle with more often than I’d like. But one way to minimize it is to know your characters well before you put them in a difficult situation. Know their baggage. Know how they carry their baggage. Always keep in mind that it’s not just the secret driving the plot, but the person who carries it.

EXERCISE

Create a character with a secret—or less sensationally, a piece of information he or she has good reason to withhold from other characters.

Then, write two dialogues:

In one dialogue, your character is speaking to someone who knows the same information. In the other, your character speaks with someone who does not. The dialogues should not be about this information—but peripherally related to it. You may not use either dialogue in your story, but it’s worth exploring how the character carries this information.

After you’ve written both dialogues, study the differences between them. How has the character changed between the first and the second ? Did his or her speech change? Did the behavior change? Is the speech and behavior here consistent with the character’s personality—or does it seem forced for your convenience? Did your character have to lie (either overtly or subtly) in order to keep the secret hidden? If so, how well does he or she do it?