Typescript posts a new challenge each Wednesday to encourage creativity and inspire conversation. Feel free to talk about the challenge or share your writing results in the comments section below by leaving an excerpt and/or a link to your own site or blog.

The spark of inspiration can be found anywhere you choose to look. From a title of a song to a sketch found on a napkin, from an overheard conversation to a simple photograph, these stories are waiting to be discovered and told.

“Shhh…I have a secret.”

What is so compelling about secrets and why the longing to share them? What sparks that curiosity in us, that need to know? Is it the desire to discover something previously unspoken? Is it the unknown, the allure of something forbidden, that heightens intrigue before the words are said? Or perhaps it’s merely an attempt at communicating and relating to another human being through shared confession.

Writers seem to have an insatiable curiosity — a desire to know and understand the world and those in it — that tends to transfer to the page. We want our readers to connect with and relate to our characters and their situations, and yet we still need to maintain that intrigue, to hook them, draw them in, and keep them reading until the very last word. We want our readers to discover our characters and this world we’ve created throughout the story, uncovering pieces bit by bit so that the readers become more involved and characters’ motives become better understood. Whether it be through hopes and dreams or unveiling a bit of their life experience, readers develop a relationship with our characters because of the ability to relate to them. And if there’s one thing we can all relate to, it’s secrets.

Because everyone has a secret.

And every secret tells a story.

PostSecret
PostSecret is billed as a “community mail art project” wherein individuals submit their secrets (or confessions, thoughts, or dreams) on a homemade postcard. A selection is then chosen for display on their website each week. Thousands of postcards have been submitted, with the anonymity of the project most likely playing a factor in the appeal.

However, what is personally most intriguing are the thousands of individuals behind these postcards. If every person has a secret and every secret tells a story, then there are thousands of stories just waiting to be told.

What story will you tell?

Challenge: Use one or more of the images below, selected from previous PostSecret posts, as a prompt for a new short story or poem.