In a post on Writer Unboxed, David Corbett says the secrets your characters keep says a lot about their values, fears, and desires. “Secrets provide writers with an intrinsically valuable way of conjuring depth in a character—there is automatically an inside and an outside, what is concealed and what is revealed,” he says. “And the tension created by the character’s decision to conceal something about themselves provides an immediate dramatic payoff—we can’t help wondering what they’re hiding, why they’re hiding it, and what will happen if the secret is revealed.”
Secrets also make your protagonist vulnerable. If they weren’t afraid the information would be revealed, it wouldn’t be a secret. The fear of being exposed often derives from a fear of being abandoned or ostracized, Corbett notes. We believe that if we can only maintain our silence, we’ll never be alone. To protect ourselves, we create masks: confidence, competence, self-effacement, bravado, or arrogance. A common theme in modern drama is based on taking away this mask and learning to live authentically.
Corbett differentiates between secrets and repression. “Repression, from a writer’s point of view, is simply what happens when the concealment of a secret has been rendered habitual by years of effort,” he explains. “Both repressed traits and secrets can be uncovered straightforwardly by exploring the character’s backstory—whether they’ve been buried for a moment or a lifetime.”
Corbett shares a number of famous characters who kept devastating secrets. In Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman doesn’t tell his family about the loss of his job or his plan for suicide. His mask is his constant insistence that he’s well-liked, which hides his crushing sense of failure. Corbett also discusses characters from House of Sand and Fog, A Streetcar Named Desire, Citizen Vince, Breaking Bad, Regarding Henry, and Tumbleweeds. In the latter, it’s the shameful secret kept by a supporting character that provides a painful jolt.
“If you’re going to use a secret, don’t think small, unless you’re trying for comic or ironic effect,” Corbett says. “Imagine something deep and fiercely protected—the thing that, if known by others, would change forever your character’s life as she knows it. Even people she loves and who love her would recoil in disgust or fear or condemnation if they knew.”
