More Secrets

 

Whenever I'm about to check out of a hotel, I have a burning desire to leave something behind in the towels that remain, folded and unused, on the shelf in the bathroom. It might be a note, or a dollar, or a photograph, or a wind-up set of chattering, plastic teeth. I don't know--just something. Do the housekeepers check unused towels for such things? Or do they just assume they're untouched, still ready for the next guest?

I like the idea of someone shaking open a towel and discovering what I've left. I wouldn't want it to be a bad something. I'd want it to be a good, or at least neutral, something. Back in middle school, I once spent the night with a friend whose mother was, shall we say, a free spirit. She sent us out at midnight with two dozen raw eggs and a few rolls of toilet paper. We were pretty tame girls. I confess that we weren't quite sure what to do with them--fortunately, the eggs only ended up on doors and windows and not cars. Oh, and I think we put some tennis shoes we found on someone's front step in the creek but fished them out again the next morning. I've always felt bad about that night, wondered what dismay our victims must have felt. If I believed in Karma, I'd say that I've spent much of my life trying to make it up to them.

Anonymous action has a dual nature: It's both Santa Claus and the cat-burglar. It's picking up a stranger's bill in a restaurant and writing a poison-pen letter to your boss's wife. In any case, we want to make contact with others without risk to ourselves. And contact takes a certain amount of courage, doesn't it? One doesn't need to be too brave to do things anonymously. It's easy when one is secretly passing out money and you know the recipient needs it. But what's the psychic cost of sharing damaging secrets? Or doing another person harm by secretly causing them pain?

As a fiction writer, I can confess anything I want within my work with relative anonymity. I might reveal something about myself through a character's action or flaw, but the reader will probably never make the connection. (More frequently, people who know me very well will pick up on things I never intended to show on the page.)  The things about myself that I've intentionally put in my work aren't salacious or even particularly noteworthy. But they're there--tiny flesh hooks that attach the story to me forever. I've always had a confessional nature. Too confessional for some people, I'm told. Dark secrets fester. Confession--no matter who one is confessing to--cleanses.

For non-writers, the friendless, or the non-religious, the Internet offers the guilt-ridden a buffet of confession sites: Post Secret (mostly PG-rated, w/ pictures, also a series of books); SecretsAnon.com (apparently unmoderated, kind of gross); Five Secrets  (moderated, still kind of Penthouse Letters-ish). I can spend hours reading the secrets told on these sites. I truly hope the most vile of them are made-up. But I wonder about the person who confessed that he had killed and dismembered a woman at Disney World in 1970. Creepy--even if it's just a fantasy.

What do you do with your secrets? Or do you prefer to remain anonymous?

The Reveal

Today I mentioned to Pinckney that I'm currently working to make a couple of the central characters in CALLING MR. LONELY HEARTS a little more sympathetic when they're first introduced. He said that he was doing the same thing for the screenplay he's working on. We agreed that we need to show that our characters are worth caring about before we totally demolish their worlds. (He writes extensively about the notion of what we do when we're writing stories--Here's a really smart blog on the subject that, if you write, I guarantee will rock your world!)

But what has me thinking tonight is the act of presenting our characters. When I finished the draft of CALLING MR LONELY HEARTS, it was pretty much complete for me. The characters came and told me their stories and I wrote them down. I love each one of my characters, but, as with people I meet in the so-called real world, they don't reveal everything about themselves at first blush. There are so many details, things that distract from the story at hand: minor surgeries, childhood bicycle accidents, petty thievery, what kind of breakfast cereal their mother always served them. Any one of these details could feature in a chapter or scene. The key is to choose carefully.

This is where I get to edit the story a character tells me. People don't always make the very best first impressions. I'm always delighted when I meet someone who looks as though they might be dour and unpleasant suddenly lights up with a cheerful smile, or performs some unexpected act of kindness. Characters in novels, films, stories, etc. can sometimes also make impressions that do them a disservice.

I want you to know the characters in CALLING MR. LONELY HEARTS the way I do. I want them to be multi-dimensional and exciting. I don't want them to tell you everything at once. I want there to be a slow reveal--with some surprises at the end. People can be occasionally unpredictable. Characters we love--and love to hate--should get to be that way, too.

I felt a little reluctant to share this behind-the-scenes look at character creation. Part of me wants to be able to present CALLING MR. LONELY HEARTS as a perfect, finished product next year. But so many of you followed along with CALLING MR. LONELY HEARTS as I wrote the draft--I think I can trust you with a few details about me, and how I work!