One of the books I'm working on has a very mysterious tone. The big reveal is, the MC is a witch and she had no idea. She becomes close friends with a girl who is also a witch and knows the MC is a witch and, knowing nothing about the MC's history, thinks she also knows they are both witches. (All witches have a grey lock of hair, so someone who knows this - unlike the MC - can spot one immediately.) The issue is, the MC realises her new friend knows something (there are many intertwined mysteries here and the witches is only one of them) so she asks her about the history of the school she's found herself at, which was designed to allow witches and human girls to mix without prejudice and that's its main selling point, and this is where I encountered my problem: I can't figure out how to have the MC's friend mention witches without actually mentioning witches. I'll need to have her do this at several points throughout the book, so this is a really big problem. Can anyone help me? Did this post make any sense?
The hair. How about referring to fellow witches as "greylocks" (or just 'locks) as a secret identifier?
Maybe she sees something at the school that sparks the wonder of if she is a witch, like an artifact of some kind, and then decides to sleuth her way to the truth that she is indeed a witch.
I would assume that being in a school where many teenage girls are sporting a lock of grey hair would spark some sort of wonderment/investigation on the part of your MC? That could lead to a conversation....
Given the basis of Wicca as a religion, you could infer different references in comments. "She is so Sambain" (late, as in last part of the year). That is just a quick (crude) off the cuff reference idea. That said, keep in mind that people are quick to pick up on memes and in a school setting, they would be adopted widely. Some of the adopters would be clueless as to the original meaning though and that could create humor or conflict. Another thought would be the ability to see things not visible to the less talented. Special organic dyes could be used in inks or paint to send messages, graffiti on buildings, etc. As in Harry Potter, not everyone could use the entrance to track 9 1/2. Horny could have a totally different nonsexual meaning! Disclosure notice: I do not practice the Wicca religion and have never played a warlock on TV.
I'd think the bigger problem would be keeping your secret-witch character from figuring things out way too early. As @jannert says, the hair alone would seem to prompt some questions... Other than that... is being a witch a big, dark secret, or is a sort of wonderful gift? If it's a dark secret, I could see it being easier to hide, with lots of "but obviously we don't talk about that" type lines, and your secret-witch being confused but not rude enough to press. Trickier if it's a wonderful gift. I think Buffy did a thing with witchcraft being confused with lesbianism, maybe? Was there something like that? So the kids would make references to "one of them" or "spending time doing... whatever they do" or things like that, and it was possible to think they were talking about sex rather than magic? But it's been a long time since I watched that show, so I could be confused.
Holy crap! That opened on my big screen and I almost spewed coffee out my nose!! You coulda made it a tad smaller....
Hm, honestly if there's no one trying to stop her from finding out and it's just a series of random happenstances that keep her from discovering the truth? That'd drive me nuts and I wouldn't read any more books in the series.
Beat me to it. I never watched Buffy (well, I did. There Can Be Only One, and Her Name is Kristy Swanson!) but the first thing that came to my head was her friend saying something like "Oh, I can tell, you're one of us. We can always recognize each other" and the MC assuming that the friend was lesbian and assumed she was too. Alternatively, the grey lock of hair thing is going to look weird if a lot of the students are running around with it, maybe most of them hide it but the MC's friend doesn't, "OMG, are we related?" "In ways you don't yet understand."
Yes, one thing I forgot to mention is that the bulk of the book is set in the 1930s. Kids - or at least upper-class kids like the characters - didn't talk about sex and homosexuality was a huge taboo. She has been wondering about the kids with the grey locks of hair and she does make the connection between what they have in common and the grey locks of hair pretty quickly. My issue is, as @BayView said, how to keep her from finding out right away. The other witches don't hide their identity, but they don't really talk about it either. It's not really a big issue, it'd be like discussing your hair colour, especially since they aren't allowed to learn magic at that age. The backstory is, she's the daughter of a very famous wizard and when she was a baby, she was targeted by a terrorist organisation who wanted to brainwash her. For her safety, she was sent to the 21st century with her mother (because that was where her mother would be had she not gone to marry the father) and they were on the run for fourteen years. Now, she's been pulled back to the 1930s, so she's now in a lot of danger. I had the idea that one of the teachers who knows she's a witch and has already been looking out for her might try and prevent her from discovering she's a witch so she doesn't do anything that might endanger her in her quest to discover why she wasn't told before. I'm still so confused, I need to write all this down somewhere.
Yeah, right. Proper novelists didn't record those conversations, but I'm sure they took place. Some parts of Anne Frank's unabridged diaries that her father tried to suppress deal with the effects of puberty and the beginnings of sexuality. Wow...um, for someone who's spent much of her life living 80 years in the future and suddenly been yanked back to a time before television, the idea of LGBT folks isn't going to be novel or taboo, and there's a whole lot more weird shit going on in her life than just a few odd-colored hairs.
In all honesty? It sounds like you might be over-complicating your plot. Time travel, witches, school story, there's a lot to explore right there, and I think keeping the witch-thing a 'mystery' is likely going to fall flat. It's a good concept for a story! It just might benefit from a little smoothing out. I still don't understand why the witch thing needs to be kept secret?
Yowza. This started as a mere tale of "the tell-tale lock," but clearly there's much more at stake here! I like the concept, but if you weren't already planning to serialize this one... you might want to consider the option.
I recently read a novel about a young woman who discovers she's a witch, and yeah, watching a nescient character find that out can make some good reading. (The reader already knows what she is from the cover blurb.) You've got that going for you, though as others have said, you have to decide if the MC will be delighted or appalled. (Or, in the case of the MC in the book I read, if she'll bypass the personal reaction altogether and simply use her newly-discovered powers to save her lover.) However . . . if she's going to a boarding school (it is a boarding school, right?) where regular humans (witches are humans, too, remember) and witches mix without prejudice, you're going to have to explain why she isn't wondering why her parents picked that school for her. Especially in the 1930s. Does she know it's that kind of school, founded for that purpose? You'd think it would have a reputation . . . or has her sojourn in the 21st century kept her ignorant about it? But I have to ask, if she's already participated in time travel, wouldn't she already know that her family, and she herself, were unusual? I take it she never knew her famous wizard father . . . And remember, the 1930s weren't that long after the 1920s. Things got pretty wild then, and even if nice British girls didn't make a practice of sleeping around, they wouldn't have been shy about talking about sex. And crushes on other girls or female teachers were common in such environments (it was referred to as having a grand passion, or a GP, for someone-- see Dorothy L. Sayers in Gaudy Night), and there had to be speculation about how far any such relationship was going. If her parents are hiding her witch identity from terrorists (Bolsheviks? Terrorists generally were at the time. Or members of a Camorra?) and from the girl herself, her mother had always dyed her skunk stripe to match the rest of her hair, without telling her that's what she was doing, maybe? ("It's a rinse, sweetie. It keeps your hair nice and soft.") And at the school she can't get the dye for some reason and the stripe begins to reappear? Why do the terrorists want to brainwash her? (That technique wasn't really used until the 1950s, BTW). To get at her father? How would it change the plot if they wanted to hold her for ransom or kill her or force her to use her latent powers to help their cause? None of this is unsolvable. But you'll want to think about it, as you put your story together. Some ideas I'm throwing out for you in the middle of the night.
