The last few nights, I have been rereading The Boaz Secrets, one of my earlier Boaz novels.
I did not pick it up as a critic. I did not pick it up as a story coach. I did not even pick it up with the intention of studying it.
I picked it up as a reader.
What surprised me, quite honestly, is that I have been enjoying it.
That may sound strange for an author to say about his own work, but it feels true. Enough time has passed that I am not reading every sentence with the same memory I had when I wrote it. I know the broad shape of the story, of course. I know the world. I know the concerns that kept pulling me back to Boaz. But there are moments, turns, details, and tensions I had not thought about in a long time.
Rereading an earlier novel is a curious experience. You meet both the book and the earlier version of yourself who wrote it.
You see what you were trying to do. You see what mattered to you then. You see the kinds of pressure you kept returning to before you had fully named them.
In The Boaz Secrets, the title tells part of the truth. The novel is concerned with secrets, but not merely secrets as hidden information. In fiction, a secret matters only when it creates pressure.
A secret held by one person may shape a marriage.
A secret held by a family may shape a child.
A secret held by a church may shape what an entire community is allowed to say.
A secret held by a town may become part of the air people breathe without noticing it.
That is one reason Boaz has remained such powerful fictional territory for me. In a small town, the past is never entirely past. People remember what they pretend to forget. They carry old loyalties, old wounds, old accusations, old silences. The grocery store, the church hallway, the courthouse, the school, the funeral home, the family table — each place can hold memory.
That gives fiction a kind of natural pressure.
A character does not have to live in a mansion, inherit a kingdom, or face an international conspiracy for the stakes to matter. Sometimes the deepest stakes are local and intimate.
Who knows?
Who suspects?
Who is protected?
Who is blamed?
Who has been carrying the cost of someone else’s silence?
Those questions have always interested me more than spectacle.
As I reread The Boaz Secrets, I am noticing how much of my fiction depends on the tension between what is publicly known and privately understood. Characters live inside communities where appearances matter. Reputation matters. Church membership matters. Family names matter. The official story matters.
But fiction begins to move when the official story weakens.
That is where secrets become story pressure.
A secret is not just something hidden from the reader. It is something acting on the characters before it is fully revealed. It shapes behavior. It creates avoidance. It explains fear. It distorts memory. It makes certain conversations impossible until the story forces them to happen.
That is one of the things I would tell a beginning novelist.
Do not think of a secret only as a twist.
Think of it as pressure.
If a secret does not change how people act, it probably is not yet doing enough story work. If it does not create risk, silence, conflict, guilt, fear, longing, denial, or consequence, it may be information rather than story.
But if the secret bends the lives around it, then the story has something to work with.
That is what I am noticing now as I reread.
I am also noticing how often my novels return to the same deeper question:
What happens when someone finally tells the truth?
Not abstract truth. Not truth as a slogan. Not truth as something easy to admire from a distance.
Truth inside a family.
Truth inside a church.
Truth inside a marriage.
Truth inside a town.
Truth spoken by someone who knows there will be a cost.
That question runs through much of my fiction, and I can see it clearly again in The Boaz Secrets.
The pleasure of rereading the novel is not merely that I wrote it. The pleasure is that the world still feels alive to me. The people still seem caught in real pressure. The secrets still have weight. Boaz still works as a moral landscape where ordinary lives carry more than they can easily say.
That is why I keep returning to these books.
Not because Boaz is simple.
Because it is not.
Not because small towns are quaint.
Because they remember.
Not because secrets are dramatic.
Because they cost something.
And fiction, at its best, lets us feel that cost without reducing it to an explanation.
Readers interested in the Boaz novels can begin with the Novels page. And those interested in the wider fictional world may also want to visit The Tanner Files, where Micaden Tanner continues remembering what others have tried to forget.
Richard L. Fricks 