Writing prompt #7: THE POWER OF SECRETS

Hi Everyone,

Tell the secrets. Yours and other people’s. The secrets that have been buried by shame or remorse, intimidation, effrontery, revenge. Dig them up. Bring them to the surface, into the light.

Whisper them, shout them, but tell them in all their grisly glory.

Keep going until you know these secrets by their touch and stink, their intimate contours and slimy underbellies, their kinky unpredictabilities. Don’t feel beholden either to the so-called facts as much as to the deeper truth of what concerns you, of what the secrets convey.

Secrets are rarely what they seem. Nothing of enduring interest happens on the surface of anything for very long. Topography is there to suggest what lies beneath it. Like the tip of an iceberg. 

Toward the end of Anton Chekhov’s brilliant short story, “The Lady with the Dog,” we come across this startling passage from the perspective of Gurov, a married man who’s been having a passionate affair with the lady of the title:

"And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself . . . was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth . . . all that was open. And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night."

YOUR PROMPT: Tell a secret, a big one. Then chronicle the fireworks that ensue.

You’re welcome!

Abrazos,

Cristina