what's stopping authors from adding hidden messages and codes into their novel?
we're talking ergodic literature babey. house of leaves. S. pale fire.
i like to call this device ghosts in the narrative.
and the way i write these ghosts is by sneaking acrostics into dialogue between characters. it's like... literary possession.
you hide a message using an acrostic- which is basically just a null cipher. if you take the first letter of every word in a specified sequence, you get a hidden message.
Here's an example from "The Vane Sisters" by Vladimir Nabokov (1951):
I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.
- "The Vane Sisters" Vladimir Nabokov (1951)
which, by taking the first letter of each word, reads:
Icicles by Cynthia. Meter from me Sybil.
The prose on its own reads nicely, but is innocuous to the unknowing reader. Upon noticing the hidden message, the narrative takes a twist- the ghosts of the sisters have been speaking to the narrator this whole time!
The cipher can be worked on many levels- the first letter of each page, paragraph, sentence, word. the complexity is up to you, whether you start at the word, sentence, or line level.
for my works, i usually like to string out my acrostics at the paragraph level. For example, within each line of dialogue between characters, separated by breaks. as a rule of thumb, the less fine it is, the easier to work your hidden message in.
first you lay out your core plot, the de facto happenings of your story that can't be denied- concrete stuff.
out of nowhere, or maybe even gradually as a tease, your mc starts making remarks or comments that could have double meanings. like they might be talking to someone else. listening, speaking, to a ghost- A GHOST- this whole damn time.
of course, placing some clues for an acute reader might clue them in and give them extreme catharsis during the reveal, if that's what you want- or you can punch them in the face with it.
with a bit of literary grit and wordsmithing, you can add a nice layer to your narrative. might even be something you employ to change the reality of your story entirely- all in the hands of the sneaky author devil.
ergodic literature babey.
Favorite tool in my writer toolbox: Ghosts in the Narrative
make your writing ergodic with ciphers!
just like i did with this post.