Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

Secrets are the stock in trade of any writer. Mystery writers aren’t the only ones that need to keep their audiences guessing, we all want to be surprised, to find that thing that is hidden. Writers, however, have a vested interest in eventually letting their audiences in on whatever secrets they’ve been hiding.

What if you needed your secrets kept?

For centuries, we’ve been creating codes, and ways to break those same codes. Language itself is a code where written shapes stand in for sounds, which in turn stand in for things or ideas. Learning to read is essentially learning to decipher the code. By the time you’re an adult, you probably don’t even consciously realize you’re decoding anything.

Some codes are meant for discretion, especially those developed in Victorian times for courting. Fans, flowers, and even umbrellas were used to convey meanings that wouldn’t be proper to simply proclaim aloud. Expressing interest with a tilt of your fan, rejecting a lover with a bouquet, all could be done while still remaining discreet. Of course, anyone in the same era would have understood the messages if they cared to try, but at least those with secret agendas could maintain the illusion that what passed between them remained between them.

According to one legend, the Bible was encoded into Tarot cards so that its teachings could be spread into places where Christianity wasn’t welcome. Slaves escaping oppression on the underground railroad sometimes got their information encoded in simple songs, the most famous of these is “Follow the Drinking Gourd”. The drinking gourd is another name for the big dipper constellation, or Ursa Major. Using that, they could find the North star at night, and be assured they were travelling North toward freedom.

Fictionally speaking, codes and codebreaking take center stage in The Davinci Code, by Dan Brown. Of course, you’ll also see a lot of references to codes in movies like National Treasure, where the ever-popular lemon juice and heat technique reveals yet another code. That movie actually features several types of encryption, from concealing a message in intricate carvings on the pipe taken from the wreck of the Charlotte, to the code hidden in the letters of Silence Dogood.

My personal favorite litererary way of keeping secrets is the Drasnian secret finger language in David Eddings’ Belgariad series. There, the national pastime, or possibly product, of the swamp-country of Drasnia was espionage. It makes sense in a country where everyone was spying on everyone else to develop ways to surreptitiously speak your mind without anyone else being the wiser. Composed of small, discrete, finger movements, a fluent user could carry on one conversation aloud and a completely different, far more private, conversation with their hands.

If you’d like some fascinating reading on the history of codes and code breaking, I would suggest reading The Code Breakers, by David Kahn.

In the modern world, of course, encryption is king. We live in a digital world, and many conversations we expect to be private simply aren’t. From spy drones to hackers stealing credit card information, to leaked TSA full body scans, we’ve got some challenges to keeping information in the hands we want it in. Perhaps I’d better write Mr. Eddings and see if he can teach a class in that Drasnian language.

Cheers,

Michelle