Layery Layers and I Contradict Myself About Secrets…Kind Of

I got revisions back on the Geek Billionaire today from my fabulous editorial duo. They are, again, my most favoritest kind of revisions. It’s…this is all really screwed up…can you make it darker and more screwed up? Yes. Ma’am. I CAN DO THAT.

So, I’m super excited to get going on these, but before I do, I thought I would give you a little rundown on the agenda for these revisions because…well, I feel like I already learned something from them.

I robbed myself of layers and turning points by having everything out in the open from page one. Now, I’ve done this before to great effect. It’s one way I make sure I have enough conflict. If the secrets of their pasts are upfront from the beginning, and you still have crap to work through, then you have good conflict.

Or, as my first editor said during a phone convo: Me: Can’t I just put them in a room and let them deal with it? Her: If you have enough conflict, you could.

So I generally make it a policy to keep secrets thin on the ground in my books, but of course, even if a character’s past is known up front, how they feel about it isn’t necessarily.

So I had done this with Geek billionaire. I exposed his secrets up front with a tell all book, with the idea that the true reveal would be his feelings about his past.

But here’s the problem I ran into. My editor pointed out that once you got to the middle of the book, things stagnated a bit. Because there were no new revelations. The heroine was light on conflict, the hero, while heavy on conflict wasn’t going to open up and share his feelings re the conflict and that meant that there were no new layers being uncovered. I robbed myself of layers and it left things feeling flat.

This is the tricky thing. You have to find the line between BIG SECRET and layers to character. I think, for the purposes of this post a BIG SECRET is a secret kept from either the readers or character(s) or both, until the end, for the sole purpose of triggering the black moment or resolving the conflict.

OHMAHGAH you SLEPT WITH MY SISTER? You MANHOOR!! (heroine storms off in tears and gets hit by a car and loses their baby) (this could also be a big misunderstanding, but that’s a whole other topic, and I digress)

or OHMAHGAH you aren’t really the heir to the throne so WE CAN BE TOGETHER!! Thank you big secret! (that’s also a little deus ex machina but I also digress yet again!!)

The difference between THAT KIND OF BIG SECRET and having some secrets, are huge. The Big Secret often seems random or too convenient, it also has a tendency to undermine conflict. I did this HORRIBLY in the first iteration of my debut book His Virgin Acquisition (you remember, we’ve talked about this. THERE WERE DOLPHINS YOU GUYS)

I triggered the black moment by introducing an ex-mistress of the Marco’s who claimed, to a newly pregnant Elaine, that she’d gotten pregnant with Marco’s baby and he’d coerced her into an abortion. This was many things, none of them good. Contrived, random and undermining to the relationship that I’d built between the hero and heroine. To have Elaine go off weeping and angry, leaving a man she supposedly loved without even talking to him because she believed a stranger’s word over anything she knew of him undermined the romance HORRIBLY.

But in the case of Geek Billionaire, his background is a closely guarded part of who he is. Having it revealed slowly enriches the conflict and character rather than undermining it, or hiding the character from the reader.

In the 1st version of Highest Price to Pay, the reader and Ella didn’t know what Blaise had done to his brother, so when he confessed it, my editor said he felt like a stranger. She thought he was one thing, but he was another entirely, and that was made known way too late for the reader to connect with him.

So in the rewrite of that book, he still had his mask, his public persona vs who he was, but the reader knew, and so did Ella, right away what he had done. But not the guilt, or how deeply his own actions had wounded him.

With GB, I plan on turning his background into a sordid rumor, rather than a known fact. A rumor that plagues him but that he can’t deny. So as we dig deeper we’ll see the truth of him, and as we go further we’ll see how he really feels about it and how this past has informed the public mask he wears, and how much of a mask it truly is. This will hopefully make him more interesting, someone you get drawn into slowly before the full horror of him comes to light. 🙂 (*evil laughter*)

The real thing with layers and secrets like this is that there isn’t a one size fits all approach to a MS. It’s heavily dependent on each set of characters you and you have to think through what will work best for each situation.

So I would ask:

1. Does the secret help reinforce the conflict or is it there for the sole purpose of keeping readers in the dark and creating interest that way? (ie, is it propping up weak conflict)

2. Will is undermine the conflict to save the secret?

3. Will it help you explore layers to reveal it early? Or will revealing it steal your layers and make it feel one note?

4.  Is the secret necessary or is it only there because you don’t know of another way to break them up or get them back together? In which case you may be thin on internal conflict, and I would suggest removing said secret and figuring out how to have them break up/get together based on their issues.

So, those are just my initial, rambling thoughts based on my phone call this morning. I am now for the revision cave and looking forward to it!! 🙂