PostSecret for Fictional Characters

Do you remember PostSecret? I was delighted to find out that it’s still going strong. Now powered by WordPress, the original PostSecret was a Blogspot blog run by Frank Warren, started in 2005. Visitors were invited to send an anonymous postcard to a post office box. On the postcard, they wrote a secret. Every Sunday, Frank posted (scanned images of) a selection of postcards. As far as I can tell, that is still the basic setup. I don’t remember exactly when I started reading PostSecret, nor do I know when I stopped, but I will never forget one postcard that haunted me when I read it and haunts me still: on it, the anonymous writer confessed to escaping the twin towers on 9/11 and starting over, letting their loved ones believe they had died. Was it real? I don’t know! Maybe. The beauty of PostSecret is that every secret could be real, and there’s no proof it isn’t.

(In 2013, one of the secrets was a murder confession that has been proven to most likely be a hoax. So I guess sometimes the secrets aren’t real, but I feel strongly that it’s better to believe the majority of them, regardless of the likelihood that they’re 100% true.)

One of the best and most frustrating things in literature is when conflict is caused by characters keeping secrets. Sometimes those secrets are big, life-altering, plot-driving secrets; other times they are small, only affecting the secret-keeper and perhaps one other person. Sometimes they are good secrets, sometimes bad. Sometimes the secrets are revealed and sometimes they are not. I have created eight PostSecret postcards, each of them written by a fictional character. You can guess who, if you like — some are more obvious than others! All of the anonymous secret writers are identified at the bottom of the post.