In this week’s episode, JP and Crys continue their Author’s Tarot Journey, this time using The High Priestess to guide their discussion. They talk about how they use the layering of secrets to write a better story.
Question of the week: What books use secrets really well to create depth in the story? What tips and tricks do you use? Share your answer here.
Show Notes
Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty
Chime by Franny Billingsley
Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone
Transcript
JP: Hello friends. This is episode number 86 of the Write Away Podcast, and it is the 12th of March as we are recording. I’m JP Rindfleisch with my cohost…
Crys: Crys Cain.
JP: Hi Crys, how has your week been?
Crys: I finished a book, I think. No, that was last week. We finished the book up last week. What are my days? Yeah, early this week. My co-writer and I finished the book we were working on and I uploaded it for pre-order Thursday. It goes out in three days. So woohoo, I’m going to make some money.
And I finally got off my metaphorical butt and started auditioning translators for German translations.
JP: Very nice. Yes, you told me about that. That’s pretty cool. You’ll have to update us on how that process is because I know many people are very curious.
Crys: Yeah. So right now I budgeted about $500 for auditioning translators, which is I give each of them a 2,500-word sample from the book. And I picked, because there’s explicit sex scenes and other strange genre specific things, I made sure to include at least part of that, as well as some of the other scenes that just are quintessential for my co-authors voice and my voice.
And so I hired five or six people to do quotes. I got quotes for that 2,500-word sample anywhere from $25 to $150. So it really is running the gamut. And then we will have a native, German speaking friend evaluate them and tell us which ones they think did the best job.
JP: It sounds like a wonderful plan. I’m very excited for you.
Crys: I think for most folks, the hardest part when they’re considering pursuing the translation on their own, other than just the organizational bit if organizations a difficult issue for you, is that evaluation. Trusting someone else to say, this is decent, this is good. Because if you don’t have a German speaking friend, which most North Americans do not have a ton of native German speaking friends, then you have to hire someone and hope that their evaluations are correct.
JP: Very true. Or you create an author directory for friends that speak native languages. And then that way you’re not just shooting in the dark.
Crys: Yeah. And one of the funny things about translation that’s a little bit different than hiring narrators for audio, is that everyone keeps their translators really close to the vest because the translation takes so much longer than a narration does. And so they don’t want somebody else making their translator too busy to translate their own books. And so it’s not like you can easily get recommendations the way you can for narrators.
JP: Interesting. It makes somewhat sense. Interesting though. That’s my opinion. Interesting.
Crys: How about your week?
JP: My week has been a lot of things.
I’m finally back home. Hooray. I probably sound less subdued because I’m not awkwardly talking, knowing that all of my hotel neighbors can hear me.
And let’s see, it’s been just a busy work, like day job week because the shift I was on was flipping around. And even though I was quote unquote scheduled for eight hours, I was definitely working 12 because that’s what happens when we release software. But now I get to not have to do that for the next few weeks, which is nice.
So then writing wise, I was actually helping a friend who was doing a project who needed something that could update automatically. So this was actually a like tech related thing, but it took a little bit of troubleshooting because I wanted to make it look like whatever they were doing. I’m making this very vague for no reason.
Crys: I was like, we could just tell people and push them towards the project.
JP: Okay. So I think at this point it will be done, but it was the Writers for Ukraine project that Daniel Willcocks was doing. And ultimately he was updating those numbers manually. And I was like, no, don’t do that. I can hand you things that will do it automatically. So just took a little bit of troubleshooting, but then we figured it out. And then I was able to provide that, which I hope gave him some more time to not have to worry about that. So it took a little bit of effort to figure that part out, but then yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing.
Crys: And just for a little bit further clarification Writers for Ukraine is a charity campaign to help support Ukraine. If you want more information, the link will be in the show notes, but Dan Willcocks has put this together for writers to band together, get words done, and send some support to Ukraine.
JP: Yeah. And I think it’s been four days now, and I think tomorrow is going to be the fifth day, which there was just a five day like writing challenge. And the goal was 1 million words and 10,000 pounds. I think that’s what it was in. Yeah. And they beat both of those goals within the three days. So it was pretty exciting.
Editing wise, I’ve been just kind of trying to get through those. That’s been a treat. I’ve read a ton because when I’m traveling, it’s easier to listen to audio books when I’m in transit than writing while walking. So, I just finished, I’m going to tell everyone because it was such an adorable book, the audio book I listened to it was All That’s Left in the World by Eric J. Brown, and it was adorable.
It is LGBT, post-apocalyptic which I have yet to have seen a lot of post apoc with LGBT representation. I think the Baron series that Jane Zack does has a lesbian main character, but this is a romance set in a post-apocalyptic genre. That’s what Left in the World is. It was very adorable to listen to, so that’s going to be my airspace for what I did this week because it was adorable.
Crys: Excellent.
Okay. This week, our card that is guiding our question was the High Priestess. Would you mind giving us a description of this card?
JP: Absolutely. So some keywords for the High priestess upright is the inner voice, the subconscious, and intuition. Reversed, it’s repression, silence, and secrets.
So a High Priestess usually is sitting in front of some type of a thin veil. And that veil is representing the conscious from the subconscious realm, from seen from unseen. So in terms of writing, this is very much that like internal knowledge, the intuition. It’s that kind of barrier between the external and then your internal needs. And it’s focusing in on, what do you know about yourself? What is true? All those sorts of divine intuition, subconscious things.
Crys: Yes. And the question that we came up with for craft, because we had a lot of really good options for this. But one thing we haven’t really talked about is the layering of secrets. So our question is: how do you layer secrets to create depth in your story?
And I know that you and Abe actually have in your series, you have quite a lot of secrets going on on a lot of levels there. So let’s start with kind of how you guys did that specifically. And then we’ll back away to the grand ideas.
JP: I think we were doing this well before I read You’re Going to Need a Bigger Story, but that definitely impacted it. And that was knowing that this story world you’re writing is only a snapshot of a bigger world, if you want it to be. And we want this one to be. So a big part of that was leading up to these like frayed secrets, or these frayed foreshadowing, or these frayed moments, where we can mention our main characters mother clearly has a history, and then just leave it right there. Just enough of a secret to be like, hm, what’s here, so that if someone has that question, then we can develop it and build more into it.
But at the same point, it’s not an anchor point that takes away from the main story so much that it frustrates people when they read it because I’ve yet to hear that as well. So it’s finding that balance of sprinkling in pieces that could be expanded on but aren’t going to be detrimental to the story if you don’t tell them to the reader.
Crys: Yes. With this question, two of my favorite stories that just had so many secretive layers, they’re both sci-fi, and they made really good use of amnesia. So amnesia can be like a really cheap tool, particularly in like romances or whatever to create secrets, but these two books did amazingly. And they had to do with like memory wipes, A Doll’s House if you’ve watched that.
But the first one was a TV show called Dark Matter. And the second one was Mur Lafferty’s book Six Wakes. I just want to reference these because they are masterclasses in redefining everything you know regularly. And I don’t want to go too deep into them because they wouldn’t necessarily be possible without the amnesia tool. So amnesia is a tool, but it’s a minor one. Most of us aren’t going to use it, but definitely check those out.
Secrets. So I think there’s two kinds of secrets and layering secrets. One is the lies that we tell others, to protect our secrets. Like the things that we are consciously knowing that we are trying to keep from everybody. And then the second one is the lies we tell ourselves to keep ourselves from knowledge that we’re not ready to deal with yet.
The example that comes to mind of that second one is in a toxic relationship, the lies will often be like, you know, they’re only like that when they’re drunk, they’re only like that when things are hard. You know, it’s just been a couple of tough years, like things will get back to normal.
So there’s those kinds of lies, those are super useful. And the really complicated ones that will put you in major conflict with other characters are the external lies, when you are blatantly lying about things or obscuring things. Which obscuring might be more common than straight up lies.
JP: Yeah. So this makes me think about role-playing games because I can’t not think about them. And I will not shut up, and I have mentioned it several times on this show, that Invisible Sun is a wonderful piece. It is like my opinion of a masterwork in a role-playing game. And it lies heavily on secrets, to the point where there are coded messages throughout all of the books that you can depict, and they’ll tell you secrets about the world that you otherwise won’t know. There are two sets of coded secrets that are like completely separate from each other.
There are things hidden in the pictures that are in the artwork in the books. There are physical fortune cookie secrets that are like inner layered within the box, that if you peel back paper, you’re like I’m destroying this box, but I literally just found a secret. And I found one of them and it changed all of the rules about the game. Like things that I, as the gay master, I’ve been telling everyone this history about what happened and then I find out that’s not true at all. It’s not real.
And it’s just really fun to learn all of those pieces, because if you think about it in that aspect, there are layers upon layers of secrets that either characters are holding back and that they’re choosing not to tell. And when we’re talking about this game, that would be like their quote, unquote, true name or their true sign. If they tell anyone, then they hold power over them.
If you think that back towards story, there are some secrets in our lives that if we tell others they will use against us. So we conceal that, and we look for ways to skirt around that, to tell half-truths or to not necessarily lie, but not necessarily tell the truth, which I think is very interesting. And that’s what they do in Wheel of Time, and that’s a really good master work in figuring out how a character who is incapable of lying, can still not tell the truth. Which, you know, we always think of these things as black and white, but there is a hundred percent gray middle ground, and I think that is a really good thing to look at.
So we have characters who are capable of holding onto these secrets, but then you have the story world who it’s just knowledge really. It’s just, who is telling the story and what knowledge do they have about the world around them? And what do they come to learn? What do they come to unfold? And what have they been lying about because they just didn’t know? And then there’s, you know, as the writer, what secrets don’t you want your reader to know yet? What things can you hint at by not lying to them, but by not telling the truth? And I think that’s a really fun place to play in.
Crys: I think one of the ways that I like to look at it to deepen my story is not necessarily even what is the secret that my character is holding, which is really important, it has to be true to your character, but what secret would most devastate the other character that they are coming into interaction with. And could somebody in the story be holding that secret in a way that could cause chaos?
JP: Definitely. Secrets. They are dangerous.
So you’ve mentioned Mur Lafferty and Dark Matter. Do you have any others?
Crys: Yeah. This example is not necessarily the main character holding secrets, but there are secrets in the story. And it is Chime by Franny Billingsley, and you don’t realize that going in that the main characters and unreliable narrator, because they’re very earnest. And they’re telling things exactly as they understand them, but they are a child. And so they have a child’s understanding.
And as you go through the book, you realize how much gaslighting is happening, how much abuse is happening, and the secrets are story level secrets, not like character level secrets, of what doesn’t the reader understand yet because the narrator doesn’t understand it. And the narrator honestly doesn’t even fully understand it when he gets to the end of the book. It is very much a mass work on revealing things to the reader that the characters don’t necessarily understand. And what I really like about this is that there’s a deep understanding of the experience that readers bring to the book.
Most of the time when I try and write a story, I simply try to recreate the experience of the character for the reader. This book goes a step beyond that. And it works so much in that middle space between the experience of the book and the experience of the reader, and manipulates it masterfully, slowly revealing to you.
And it’s been a while since I read it, so I can’t tell you any specific tactics it uses. But describing things in such a way that you, as an adult reading this book, who possibly has experience of trauma in your life, look at something going, oh, no, that’s terrible. But the child is explained that this is the way things are, or, you know, you’re a terrible cursed person so like this just happens to you, and that’s just life.
And they’re like, I’m a kid and you’re an adult and I believe you kind of stuff. And just operating on the dissonance between what a child understands and what an adult reader understands. It’s really cool, like how those secrets are unveiled as you move through the story without the narrator actually ever fully understanding any of it.
JP: That sounds wonderful. It sounds like a terrible book, but…
Crys: It’s a beautiful book. I love Franny Billingsley. The way I describe Garth Nix is that his stories make me feel like the world is slightly off kilter. She’s the same way. Her stories are very kind of folklore rooted, but they make you feel as if everything is off kilter, like just everything’s slightly sideways. And you’re not really sure entirely what it’s going on, but you’re okay with that because it’s interesting.
JP: Yeah, definitely. And that makes me think of like the times writing urban fantasy and having to have this magic system and how, you know, having to explain that in a scene is not always the best method.
There’s always that good use of secrets of kind of holding back what information do they need to know versus what information do you want your reader to know. And I like that there are books out there like this one that I can look at, I can study, and I can see how we are utilizing the narrator voice as a form of holding secrets, or like keeping some truth still behind.
Crys: Yeah, as a very direct and blunt person, I’ve realized that I tend to write all of my characters with some element of full truthfulness and directness. And that’s fine for the romance fluff that I’ve been writing, we want them to get together. The dark night of the soul is never in the relationship, it’s always in the circumstances.
But as I level up in my writing, I’m like that’s not gonna cut it as I want to write more complex relationships. I have to look at what are the opposing lies, what are the opposing needs? What are the opposing wants of the characters and which characters are okay with lying to get what they need because of their lie that they believe, or whatever? Which ones are painfully truthful? How can those truths cause lies because of how other people will understand them other than what they were meant to be understood as? Because not doing that definitely limits the stories I can tell.
JP: Definitely.
Crys: I feel like this is a much more of a chaotic, like us working through how to layer in more secrets than giving directions. So, come on this journey with us. We’re trying to be dirty liars.
JP: One, no. Two, I’m trying to be, not liars, but I really love the how to not tell the truth, but not lie. That’s like my favorite thing. So that’s why, like when I mentioned the ice dye, like that’s my favorite thing about storytelling is when you can do that piece. So that’s where I am, a little slippery little snake.
Crys: One of the ways that I will do this, I do this in more in world-building than on a character level, but it will be how characters express their understanding of the world. And so this secret truth of what the world is or what the history was or who this person is or that, I will often have one person espouse a story or a belief simply because of their understanding.
For instance, if you have magic in your world and this person is like, well, you know the magic comes from the source, and the source was there in the beginning and early magicians accidentally happened upon it and that’s how it happens. And another person’s like, no, the gods brought it. And they taught us like, that’s like legit, like my priest talked to the gods all day and they’re like, you know, you’re kooky.
So somewhere in there is the truth. And the truth is a secret because it’s so far in the past, you can’t know it. I do that. So I do the world building secrets far more easily than I do the personal secrets.
JP: It’s been a very long time since I’ve read it, but like Three Parts Dead.
Crys: Max Gladstone is wild with his levels and layers.
JP: Yeah. And I’m thinking of like how they incorporated the magic with Three Parts Deadand trying to figure out like how magic was functioning with technically a dead God. And it was just very interesting and because it’s basically like the judicial system with magic. And I loved that piece, it was a very interesting take on that sort of fantasy.
Crys: I just had an insight that I think one of the troubles I’ve had in my attempts to write cozy mystery have been that one of my weakness is layering in the secrets on the character level and having people lie convincing or unconvincingly.
But I think something else that I remember is a lot of people lie really unconvincingly, but we have a social contract to just accept and not push a lot of time. So that can also be very interesting because then you’re like, okay, what exactly are they lying because that’s absolutely not true, but why?
JP: Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about. And like your lies don’t have to be high stake lies. You could honestly be lying about where you grew up. You could be lying about having a good relationship with your parents. All of these things could, you know, be the quote unquote defining lie that you have that is guiding who you are right now. And they aren’t really that high of stakes. But at the same time, they’re something that your character holds dear. There is something that your character is willing to lie about.
Crys: Or something that you just don’t tell people. Even if you don’t lie, you just don’t tell.
Like you were saying that not telling the truth. “Oh, where did you grow up?”
“Oh, I grew up in the Southern parts.”
“Oh, where?”
“A really far away tiny town. You wouldn’t know it.”
JP: Yeah, basically Chicago, even though it’s like south of Illinois, not even close.
Crys: Yeah, exactly. Anyone who’s from two hours of big city, oh, I lived near Buffalo.
JP: Fun fact, I live in Rockford and someone was like, oh, you mean a suburb of Chicago. And I’m like, if two-hour drive is, like, it’s not, but you know, for some people on the sides and coasts of the world, they only understand cities. They’re like, oh, a suburb. And I’m like, sure, the same way that like Kansas City is a suburb of Chicago, I guess.
Crys: I would like to throw the question to our listeners of either examples of stories that they felt really did secrets well to create depth in the story or examples of tips and tricks that they use.
JP: Yeah. I would love to hear that.
Crys: Thank you so much for listening. We’re about to go record our business podcast for this card, which we will be discussing the question: how do you trust yourself in making decisions for your author business? If you’d like to hear that and many more episodes, you can check out our Patreon and the link will be in the show notes.
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