Keeping Secrets

My editor makes a good point about what my main character is hiding

We all need a good editor. At least I do. I learned the lesson long ago, when I was earning my keep as a writer at CNN. During my years there, I had all sorts of terrific editors—Walt, Kim, Randy, John, among many others—who regularly reminded me that I wasn’t quite as terrific a wordsmith as I sometimes considered myself to be. When I made the switch to writing histories, I had a whole new slew of editors—Pam, Ted, Mike, Ryan—to reinforce the lesson. Now, as I get ready to publish my first novel, Helium, another editor is keeping me honest. His name is Jonathan.

Jonathan says I have things to learn about keeping secrets.

Jonathan is right.

Writing fiction is in many ways a lot trickier than writing words to come out of anchorpeople’s mouths or crafting nonfiction chronicles of the past. Among other things, you have to know when to reveal and when to withhold.

During his first deep read of Helium, Jonathan quickly figured out that I had plenty of work to do on the revelation and withholding front. Among his main directives: stop being quite so coy about Joan, the book’s main character.

I have to be careful here. I don’t want to give too much away as I try to explain what the problem is and how I intend to fix it. But here’s what I can tell you: Joan is running away from her past—something traumatic—and what that something is does not become clear until very late in the story. I made sure while writing the previous draft to sprinkle Helium with lots of clues as to what Joan’s traumatic episode might be, but I was careful not to be too obvious about it. I wanted readers to be properly surprised when the big reveal came.

In Jonathan’s opinion, I was being too careful. After reading through the entire manuscript, he realized that I had missed numerous opportunities to connect Joan’s actions to her past and, in the process, invest the reader more fully in the outcome of her story. He shared my desire to be judicious with my hints, but he urged me to revisit certain scenes to see if I could strengthen the reader’s anticipation.

I’m still working on the revisions, but let me share an example of one addition I’ve made as a result of Jonathan’s suggestions. At one point fairly early in the book, Joan is shopping at a grocery store in Escondido, California. The year is 1947. In the previous draft of this scene, Joan waits to be served as a butcher hands over a package to another customer, a woman accompanied by her young daughter. There isn’t much more to it than that. In the new draft, I’ve expanded the scene to suggest (subtly, I hope) the kind of connections Jonathan is urging me to make. This is how the scene reads now:

The meat market was in an adjacent storefront, connected by a wide passageway. A refrigerated display case ran the length of the shop, from front window to rear exit. It smelled of blood and sawdust. The man behind the case was handing a package wrapped in white paper to a customer in a pretty red overcoat. As the woman stuffed the bundle into her already bulging bag, she froze in place.

“Gloria?”

The man peered over the case. “Where’d she go?”

“Gloria?” The woman’s voice had raised a half octave, sounding more annoyed than concerned.

Joan hustled back through the passageway to survey the grocery store. No sign of a missing child. She stepped past a display of Jewel shortening tins to check the baking aisle. Again, no luck.

“Gloria!” The woman in the butcher shop did not sound amused. “Get back here this instant!”

Reaching the next section, Joan spotted a little thing in a flared swing coat, holding her ground at the far end of the aisle. The girl appeared to be sucking on a lollipop. Joan raised her hand and waved. The child, seeing she was under surveillance, pulled the sucker from her mouth and flashed a smile dripping with wicked resolve.

“Gloria?”

The youngster spun and scurried off in the opposite direction, vanishing from view. Joan caught her breath, fought off a sudden twinge of panic.

“Gloria?”

“Hey!” The disembodied voice of the butcher shop woman carried over from the next aisle. “You get back here, missy!” A few moments later, the sound of a hard whack against a padded bottom, followed by inevitable howls of toddler indignation. “Don’t you ever do that again, you hear?”

As the cries continued, Joan realized she was staring at a shelf lined with boxes of apple blossom-scented Lady Eva bubble bath. Puffs of weightless, iridescent spheres invaded her imagination. She shook away the image, headed back to the meat market. The butcher watched her return.

“Amazing how they disappear like that.”

“What?”

“The little girl. I gave her a lollipop and suddenly she was gone.”

Chances are, you don’t have enough information to make a good guess about the secret I’m hinting at with this scene, but trust me, it’s there. I can’t tell you any more without ruining the book for you.

And I think that’s exactly the point Jonathan is prodding me to reach.

More to come…