Exchange of Realities

Have you ever seen a person, whether real or fictional, who is 100% transparent? One whose feelings, agenda, and just about everything is right out there, who isn’t even hiding the smallest thing?

I didn’t think so. I certainly haven’t.

Photo by Dr_ernst

People hide things. It’s a defense mechanism a lot of time, wanting to suppress knowledge that might result in being hurt, shamed or embarrassed. Sometimes they’re things that aren’t or really shouldn’t be a big deal, like the guy who will never admit that Princess Tutu is his favorite anime. Other times the knowledge is a bit more dangerous. Every now and then it’s even a plot-important secret, though it doesn’t have to be. (If anything, the minor secrets are more common, as people whose moral codes are all about transparency would feel bad hiding something big, but can rationalize the little things as “you never asked” sorts of details.)

As a result, an interesting thing to do with a character is to figure out what sorts of secrets she’s hiding—and more interestingly, how this is going to show through. And I don’t mean ’show through’ in the ‘you’d have to be blind not to notice it’ sense, but in the hundreds of little details that, when the secret is revealed later, cause everyone around to go “Now that makes sense!” It’s important to have those sorts of details for two reasons: one, very few people are capable of suppressing everything they’re hiding, and two, plot twists or character revelations seem a lot less like deus ex machina and derailments when you can prove they’ve been vaguely hinted at before.

First step: figure out how big the secret being hidden is. On the minor end, it might be something that really isn’t that big a deal, but that the character just doesn’t want to share. On the major end, it could be something potentially deadly like “My mother is the goddess of death, and she’s going to use me as the channel for a world-destroying ritual next week.” Most of these are going to fall in the middle; something that the character should hide, that probably affects the character’s outlook, but that isn’t going to be break-the-party dangerous.

Next, come up with ways that it’s going to show through. For some people, it’s reactions to a given conversational topic: some clam up when it comes up, some hurriedly change the subject, some just do a really good job of keeping the conversation on that subject within specific (and safe) parameters. People whose secret connects to a person, place, thing or a behavior will probably do the physical equivalent of the above reactions to conversations. Some people might have reactions that don’t obviously hearken back to the secret, but could logically follow from it, like defending other people who have similar secrets exposed. And then there are the ones who occasionally pop out with something it just didn’t make sense for them to know at the time, but is perfectly logical in context.

If someone else already knows, the interplay between the two characters could be foreshadowing in and of itself. This goes double if the someone else has a tendency to subtly pick at the character who’s hiding, dancing around the topic in such a way that it’s clear to the character what’s going on, but everyone else is just hearing a normal-sounding conversation.

The most difficult part is keeping it subtle, or at least making it not obvious what the secret being hinted at is. Clues that scream out “Obviously hiding something” can give the game away in moments. On the other hand, if you can’t hide that the character’s hiding something per se, you can still keep it from damaging the reveal too much by having several more plausible explanations of what they’re hiding, and in fact it being clear that a reveal of some sort is on its way can hook an audience’s curiosity in and of itself.

So think carefully about it—what is this character hiding, and how might it be hinted? Inquiring minds want to know.

Feel free to look for more tips on interesting characters.