: Re: Writing a short story with a secret code I want to write a fictional short story where part 2 is embedded in part 1. Has anyone heard of this or tried this? Any ideas of resources would

@Samaraweera193

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You are describing a not entirely unheard of method of hiding a coded message in a plaintext. I don't know if it's in common usage by real world spies, but it certainly has appeared before in fiction. I fondly remember once reading a time-travel romance (whose name I've unfortunately forgotten) where the young lovers communicated using overlapping codes.

Can this actually be used for a longer work? It would certainly be difficult since it necessitates a certain level of artificiality and constraint. The technique is described but not (as far as I know) actually used in Daniel Manus Pinkwater's young adult classic "Alan Mendelson, Boy From Mars" in which a dictionary hides not one, but two separate coded messages describing how to develop psychic powers AND transition to alternate realities. The use of a dictionary is probably realistic, in that it doesn't require a coherent plot, and is already divided into smaller sections.

Try as I might, I can only think of one author who has actually used this technique (but with surprising success): Steven Hall. His "Raw Shark Texts" contains 36 ordinary chapters, which contain the entire story, and can be read as given. It also, however, has 36 "negative" chapters which have been hidden in various ways, including being coded into the text of the original chapters (with different negative chapters in different translations of the book, as described here). I believe some of them are coded visually and digitally (rather than in the plaintext), which gives an avenue into making one text do double duty without sacrificing meaning.

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