Although I enjoyed the normal plays, my preference was for stories read aloud or for the monologue. The definitive monologues in my view were by Alan Bennett’s “Talking Heads” where a single voice would paint a life while seeming simply to talk to you in an unstructured way.

I don’t normally write monologues – it’s not a form that lends itself to erotica but the other day I was staring at the screen of my laptop, waiting for my fingers to produce some words, when a voice in my head said “We all have secrets. You have one don’t you” and I knew I was listening to an echo from Radio 4 bouncing off my on-going obsession with secrecy and disclosure and what they do to us.

I listened to the woman speaking in my head, my fingers moved and “Secrets” appeared on the screen. It’s not particularly erotic but it does have a noir-ish tension that to me smells of sex the way that pubs always smell of smoke and spilled beer.

When I read it over I realized that somehow this short piece had pulled a lot of my emotions around secrets onto the page in a way that feels dynamic and yet has no real dialogue and almost no action. I think that this is because monologues speak to us directly, with no distractions of detail and context and make us engage with them in a way that is almost hypnotic.

The text of “Secrets” is below. If hope you enjoy it. I’d love to hear whether this speaks to your experience of secrets and what you think about this kind of monlogue.