In a post on Writers Helping Writers, Christina Delay says that a character’s secrets provide a strong way to build suspense. She suggests three questions you should ask when planning to keep a secret from your reader:
- Does this secret enhance the plotline, or distract from it?
- Does this secret align with the character’s moral code?
- Does this secret send a message about the character’s personality that meshes with how I want readers to think about him or her?
Of course, the answer you seek is ‘yes’. In addition, your character should have a strong reason for keeping the secret. If revealing the secret to the reader at the beginning would increase tension, that’s a good reason to let the cat out of the bag earlier.
Delay also identifies two kinds of secrets:
- Author secrets – story twists and surprises that you intentionally conceal from the reader. These occur naturally in your plot; otherwise, you’d have a very short novel. Tricks to keeping secrets include doling out information in small bites, foreshadowing, and misdirection.
- Character secrets – information that characters withhold from each other, and which may or may not be known to the reader. Your characters may provide partial answers or half-truths. In extreme cases, your character may have repressed or missing memories that prevent them from revealing a secret.
