Weekly Prompts are BACK!
This week, our prompts are about secrets.
Friends, I’m back and feeling better for the most part. Apologies for abandoning my weekly prompt the last few weeks. WE’RE BACK. This week our prompt is about secrets.
Secrets Make Excellent Inciting Incidents
Secrets are powerful. The keeping of them and the revealing of them can sometimes change the course of a life, can create change like nobody’s business. And storytelling, friends, is all about change.
Generate Something New:
Begin a piece in the genre of your choice that involves one of the following scenarios:
A person is told a secret by a stranger that, if revealed to others, would have an impact on a larger group of people. However, the personal stakes of telling that secret are high.
A person discovers a secret about someone they have a relationship with which changes the terms of that relationship somehow.
A person does something privately that they then feel that they have to keep a secret, but the keeping of the secret changes the course of their life
A person who has been carrying a secret around for years considers telling it
A person who has been carrying a secret around for years tells it to the wrong person
A person who has been living a secret life for years and years is discovered by someone in the community
A person has two families that they keep secret from each other
A person tells all their secrets to their dog who eventually responds in an unexpected way
Two people do something together then vow to keep it a secret. Ten years go by, and one person discovers that the other person told and there are consequences
A person has been planning something for years secretly, and now it’s time to go for it
Revise
Understanding what your characters hide from others and from themselves can be key to generating tension on the page. Secrets we have in our own lives can be really cathartic and profound to write about in essays or poems; and so if you’re in the middle of a scene in any genre but feeling stuck, see what happens when you give your character a secret or bring to the foreground something that have been hiding from another character. Write a scene about this reveal. In nonfiction or poetry, think about secrets you’ve perhaps been holding that are relevant to the topic you’re investigating, then see if thinking about the secret on the page can take you in a new direction.
Have fun with this one this week. Let me know how it goes!
Your bestie -
Kate