Do You Want to Know a Secret? Do You Promise Not to Tell?

by Riley Redgate


Back when I took acting classes, one character-building activity in particular stuck with me: the Secret. The goal of the Secret was simple and self-explanatory: Come up with a secret for your character, something the character never says onstage or even references subtly. Tell no one what the secret is. Harbor the secret. Supposedly, this helps breathe inner life into your performance.

But I always felt like the point of the Secret wasn't to give the character inner life, but to create a semantic attachment between actor and character. Similarly, what I love about creating characters' backgrounds in writing is that it makes me feel like the character and I are getting to know each other. Yeah, a significant portion of what I craft for my characters never makes it "onscreen"—but since such a vital portion of writing consists of nailing a character's voice, every little bit I can do to connect to them seems to help. It's not that I'm furthering the character so much as furthering my ability to communicate who he/she is.

Which brings me to the larger issue: What happens when your character's Secret is actually your Secret? And how much of an author's life seeps into the creation of a novel? I know some writers who base entire characters off people they know in real life. (I have been known to borrow a characteristic here and there, but I've never had a specific friend/family-member/enemy/what-have-you from my personal life in mind when I've come up with characters.) Of course, there are "easter eggs" lying around here and there—something in a line of dialogue will be a reference to a thought I had while driving to school, or there'll be some loosely adapted translation from a foreign language for a character's name. Nothing too major, though.

Interestingly enough, a fellow writer once told me about one of her easter eggs before I read her novel—and that knowledge ended up ruining the character for me, because every time I read one of his lines, I was like, "THIS DUDE IS BASED ON SOMEONE I KNOW." It was sort of uncomfortable. And invasive-feeling.

However, when another friend told me one of his character's secrets—a secret relevant only to the character, nothing drawn from my friend's real life—it didn't bother me at all. I felt like it maintained the illusion, and actually assisted it, instead of destroying it. It seemed like he'd applied the acting activity, and it'd worked.

I started to wonder, though—if my first friend hadn't told me a thing, would I even have noticed? Would I have enjoyed reading that character just as much as the character in Novel #2? Many writers look down on blatant authorial self-insertion, but as long as there's that barrier between author and reader, does it really matter? Technically, doesn't all writing (and acting, for that matter) involve a degree of self-insertion, assuming we're writing (or acting) from a place of sympathy? Dark and scary questions indeed.

Of course, the question would eventually become this: if the author relies on self-insertion, will he/she ever be able to write an entirely different main character, a character who isn't him/herself? And heck, I've got to admit, when an author has an obscenely long series of books, I sort of start to wonder if they've forgotten how to write in any other character's voice.


Do you think that self-insertion, if unknown to the reader, is acceptable? Do you draw directly from real-life experiences (or people) when you write? Are your characters' secrets their own, or yours?

Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.

Dumping Those Info Dumps

by Jemi Fraser

Sometimes it's really bad...

Jemi clawed at the earth above her, desperate to escape before the air ran out. She'd never liked getting her nails dirty, even though her dad was an incredible gardener and she'd grown up digging in the dirt. His tomatoes always won top prize at the county fairs. And his petunias? Priceless.

Sometimes it's even worse and doesn't even have that first sentence to draw you in...

Jemi had never liked getting her nails dirty, even though her dad was an incredible gardener and she'd grown up digging in the dirt. His tomatoes always won top prize at the county fairs. And his petunias? Priceless.

Blech! Can't write any more! :)

I love RC's definition of an Info Dump: Halting the momentum of a story to lay out a large chunk of information. If the information is critical to the story, it should be woven in as skillfully as possible.

Skillfully weaving in backstory isn't as easy as it sounds. We have to give the reader enough information so they feel connected to the main character. If the reader doesn't connect, he or she isn't going to stick around to see what happens.

On the flip side, if we give too much information all at once, it grinds the story to a halt (see the hideous example above). Hopefully in the first example, the reader wants to know why Jemi is buried and how she's going to get out. No one cares about tomatoes, or her nails, or her dad. Even if that information is vital to the story (maybe the neighbour, crazy from all those 2nd place ribbons, has planted her to get back at her dad), all of this can wait.

Sprinkle the needed backstory throughout the first few chapters. Only reveal what you really must reveal, and only when you really need to reveal it.

There's nothing wrong with writing out all of your backstory so you know it. As writers, we have to know every aspect of our characters. We have to know how they're going to act & react. And we have to know why. So, go ahead, write them out, put the info in a file. Just don't put it all in the story! Pick and choose those details. Which ones does the reader really need to know?

So, how DO you include the pieces of information you need?

Weave. Sprinkle. Tease. Hint. Show. Entice.

Use dialogue, as long as the character isn't relaying information the other character(s) would obviously know. Include a few hints in the setting and descriptions. Use internal dialogue—sparingly—to let us see the character's motivation.

And remember—we don't need to know everything all at once. Just enough to tease us into wanting more!

So, do you have trouble with info dumps? What's your biggest challenge with them?