Secrets!

The types of secrets that characters in novels have can be grouped into a few general categories.  These are the categories:

1.  “I committed a crime!”
2.  “I’m having an affair!”
3.  “Your mom/dad/mentor/hero is fallible/mortal!”
4.  “I’m actually a great person!  And I’m in love with you!”

The last category of secret is usually only found in what the kind call “light fiction.”  But how cool would it be if this was everyone’s secret?

Scenario 1: You’re riding to work on the bus.  Your teeth hurt, and you’re creeped out by that one woman’s basket.  Suddenly, a good-looking person appears and says, “you may think that I am a rake and a scoundrel, but actually, I built a garden for orphans yesterday.  Also, I’m in love with you.”

Scenario 2:  You go to the grocery store, and the check-out person is being weird, and your spinach looks wilty.  You sigh and look off into the distance.  Suddenly, a random bag boy looks you flush in the eye and says, “I’m actually a millionaire.  And I’m in love with you.  Here’s five bucks.”

Scenario 3:  You’re a single mom with a floundering career.  One day, you go to your dumb job, and discover your co-worker is kind of hot.  He says, “I may be married, but I’m actually in love with you.  Futhermore, I’d love to travel the world with you saving people and adopting kids and having a bio-kid and making us both really famous.  I’ll send Jennifer the divorce papers tomorrow.”

My secret is that I’m actually quite a well-coordinated individual.  And I’m attracted to you, but not in a “let’s have sex/food together way,” more of a “I wish you were an alien but looked the same but had sex with a human tarted up to look like a Star Trek TNG alien but I got to watch from a dark room with crystals and dorks in it while omninous Tin Pan Alley jazz played” kind of a way.  But only if I had a time machine.

Bookmark/share