forget your secrets
I stumbled upon this article on writing a page-turner and in this article, I stumbled upon “give your characters a secret” advice that just blew my mind.
My Virgin, Bee, has a secret. And that’s not an “I know this and I’m not telling” secret. It’s an “I’m not telling it to myself” secret.
That’s actually one of my greatest fears, and one of the things I do quite often: I forget. I forget big, defining things about myself; mostly because I don’t want to remember them, I don’t want to be that person who did this. It’s mostly things I did because I was sure that was the right thing to do (all my blunders are). It’s things I did with passion and love, and reckless daring.
And then, when I morphed myself into a person who doesn’t do that sort of things, I forgot them because they weren’t convenient any more. I couldn’t accept myself as these things defined myself, so I forgot. I sometimes live whole stretches of time when I forget everything I do, everything I am, almost instantly.
I don’t know how common it is (that’s certainly one of the reasons why I consider myself to be mildly deranged when I come to think of it) but yes, that’s what I do and that’s what I’m afraid of doing. And I know I did it a lot more when I was a child and when I was a teenager.
And now I’m afraid Bee does that a lot too.
Why can’t I ever write about things that *don’t* bother me?
