Lessons Learned from Contest Judging, #2

It’s sooo tempting, you know? Dangle a little bait. Tease some great big reveal, some dark horrible secret, something major. Make the reader curious, worried. Make them want to know WHAT happened. Make them desperate, frantic. Draw them along, pulling them ever deeper into your story.

But you know what, as effective as this can be, you also run the risk of frustrating the reader. Do you know someone like that on Facebook, someone who always pops these vague, but oh-so-important, status updates? Someone who says, “OMG, y’all. Something huge is happening. But I can’t tell you. But keep me in your thoughts, okay?”

Yeah.

Maybe the first time or two you jump in with them, but after awhile, the guise wears thin and you start ignoring them. Same thing happens with writing.

Secrets are good. Personally, I love them. But you have to handle them with care, especially if you’re dealing with the point of view of the character with the secret. Doesn’t really matter if it’s first or third. Most of us don’t continuously think vague, such as “my past haunted me” or “her past haunted her.” We tend to think specific, more like “catching my boyfriend in bed with my best friend changed me, taught me not to trust” or “seeing my best friend take her last breath wasn’t something you got over” or “I could still feel his rough hands all over my body, pulling and tugging…”  or “the day my brother came out of the closet changed our family”…and on and on. You get the drift.

Recently, I’ve read several stories where the same secret has been teased chapter after chapter…and it just flat lost its punch. So unless there’s a really good reason to keep the secret the whole book, I’m going to continuously remind myself to let the cat out of the bag, then deal with how the characters react to whatever the “big reveal” is. THAT is usually the real meat of the story.