The Fire in Fiction

by Donald Maass

  Another principle of effective sidekicks is making them human. That means giving them conflicts. But what kinds of conflicts? Ah. Authors' answers to that question are telling indicators that divide run-of-the-mill writers from true storytellers.

  Tess Gerritsen's tense thrillers are noted for their gruesome killers. On that score, The Mephisto Club (2006) doesn't disappoint. At Christmastime, Boston is hit with a series of dismemberments—body parts cunningly switched between crime scenes and mystery messages (such as PECCAVI, Latin for "I have sinned") written on the walls in blood. Assigned to this case, their sixth, are medical examiner Maura Isles and homicide detective Jane Rizzoli, who are in a sense each other's sidekicks. Like any good M.E., Maura is detached. Like any good homicide detective, Jane is fiery in her dedication and wounded (literally) by her past.

  Gerritsen could easily have left Maura and Jane that way: central casting thriller leads, nicely contrasted and all-too-predictable. But she knows better. Both need other, human, sides. Maura's is shown on this Christmas Eve when she attends a Roman Catholic mass. Afterward, it is clear that she and the priest, Father Daniel Brophy, have a history:

  "Hello, Maura."

  She looked up and met Daniel's gaze. The church was not yet empty. The organist was still packing up her sheet music, and several choir members were still pulling on their coats, yet at that moment Daniel's attention was so centered on Maura, she might have been the only other person in the room.

  "It's been a long time since you visited," he said.

  "I suppose it has been."

  "Not since August, wasn't it?"

  So you've been keeping track, too.

  Need a road map, here? Maura's cool and scientific side is softened up in this excruciating flirtation with a priest, which continues over a number of books. Meanwhile, on Christmas day, Jane goes home for dinner with her tension-fraught family. Present this year is someone new: Jane's four-month-old daughter, Regina:

  "Let me hold her." Jane opened her arms and hugged a squirming Regina against her chest. Only four months old, she thought, and already my baby is trying to wriggle away from me. Ferocious little Regina had come into the world with fists swinging, her face purple from screaming. Are you so impatient to grow up? Jane wondered as she rocked her daughter. Won't you stay a baby for a while and let me hold you, enjoy you, before the passing years send you walking out our door?

  Jane's maternal tenderness is not quite what we expect from a woman who, at the crime scene, says to Maura coolly, "I see you found the left hand." Maura's search for a connection and Jane's struggle with her family not only provide extra plot layers, they make human two professionals who could be too easily stereotyped.

  Sidekicks can be regular folk (although different than expected and three-dimensional, we hope) or they can be eccentrics. It's a matter of choice and what serves the story, but if you're using misfits or originals, there are issues for you to consider.

  David Baldacci regularly climbs to the top of best-seller lists with his political thrillers, many involving the Secret Service. The Camel Club (2005) introduces a group of oddball Washington, D.C., conspiracy theorists, the club of the title, who meet once a month to share information and keep tabs on threats to American freedom. A less high-powered group of individuals would be hard to imagine.

  Their leader and the series protagonist is a mystery man who has taken the name of his favorite film director, Oliver Stone. He lives in a cemetery caretaker's cottage and in a tent across from the White House in a designated protest area. On the tent is a sign that reads simply, "I want the truth."

  Oliver clearly has manifold skills, keen smarts, and some sort of intelligence background. We learn little except that his past is a forgotten life, which is now replaced by his unusual lifestyle and the Camel Club. The club members, on the other hand, have detailed histories and distinct personalities.

  The first is Caleb Shaw, a fussy academic type with twin doctorates in political science and eighteenth-century literature. A lifelong protester, his antiestablishment views have exiled him from academia. He works instead in the Rare Books and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress. What one notices about him first is his manner of dress: suits straight from the nineteenth century, complete with bowler hats, vest pocket watches, and long sideburns and mustache.

  The second member of the Camel Club is Reuben Rhodes, a six-foot-four West Point graduate, multi-medal-winning veteran, and former Defense Intelligence Agency operative. Lacking purpose after Vietnam, his life slid into drug use until he ran into Oliver Stone, who helped him turn his life around. When not helping the Camel Club, he works on a loading dock.

  The third member is Milton Farb who is able to add long strings of numbers, is possessed of a photographic memory, and once had a promising career at the National Institutes of Health that was unfortunately destroyed by his worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder, a condition born in his childhood in the sideshow of a traveling carnival. His paranoid personality had him close to destitution until he was persuaded by Oliver to become a contestant on the TV show Jeopardy! on which he earned a small fortune. Now he runs a successful business designing corporate websites, even though he is prone to ritualistic foot shuffling and adding aloud long strings of numbers meaningful only to him.

  A ragtag bunch to be sure; not a collection of people one would expect to be battlers against conspiracy and effective early warning watchdogs for America. But that's the point. Who are the most eccentric people of your acquaintance? Anyone who dresses in antique suits? Any dockworkers who are multiply decorated war heroes? Maybe an obsessive-compulsive math genius sideshow freak or two?

  No? Then you see my point. For oddballs and misfits to come across in a sea of secondary characters, they must be genuinely eccentric. But that comes with a problem: Such characters are hard to swallow. We won't buy them unless they are carefully and convincingly constructed, and remain true to their weirdo selves. That's not easy to do. David Baldacci does it.

  What about you? How much development have you done of your sidekicks and other secondary characters? Do they provide contrast, yet also counter our expectations? Are they real and human, beset by conflicts with which we can identify? If eccentric, are they genuinely and deeply strange? In what ways? And are those ways justified and detailed?

  Whether using sidekicks or secondary characters of other sorts, time spent developing them will considerably raise the interest quotient of your story.

  ANTAGONISTS

  Villains are some of the worst characters I meet in manuscripts, and not in a good way. What I mean is that they frequently are cardboard. Most are presented as purely evil: Mwoo-ha-ha villains, as we call them around the office.

  Cardboard villains never work. Far from frightening us, they generally have us rolling our eyes. It's not that I don't enjoy a good baddie, understand; it's just that too many writers get lazy when it comes to these antagonists. Unchallenged by doubt, free of obstacles, never set back, blessed with infinite time and resources, able to work their nefarious schemes on a part-time basis (or, at least, that's how it seems since they crop up only occasionally), these villains strike us as unrealistic and therefore silly.

  Even worse can be stories in which there is no villain as such. Literary fiction, women's fiction, romances, and coming-of-age tales are just a few types of story that do not necessarily call for a classic wrongdoer. In such manuscripts, even so, those who oppose the protagonist are often poorly developed and inactive. Lacking strong resistance, one wonders why the protagonist is having a hard time. It is possible to build conflict out of internal obstacles, of course, but over the long haul it's wearisome and hard to maintain readers' interest that way.

  People are the most fascinating source of obstacles: that means antagonists, those who work against your protagonist. They can be active opponents or even friendly allies who cast doubt upon your protagonist's actions or undermine his resolve.

  Do you go through you
r days without experiencing friction from others? I doubt it. Do you have ongoing problem people in your daily routine, possibly even active enemies? If you do, then you know that those who oppose you are not easily deterred, and they may even have the best of intentions. Have you ever noticed how your critics are eager to help you? They willingly share what they see as wrong with you and have valuable suggestions for your improvement. Our enemies do not hide.

  Keith Ablow's series of thrillers featuring FBI forensic psychologist Frank Clevenger has been noted for its original and chilling villains. The fifth in the series, The Architect (2005), revolves around a killer who leaves his victims with one part of their anatomy (their spine, say) exquisitely and meticulously dissected, as if laid open for a medical school class. It's a different piece of anatomy each time, too. All the victims come from money, so Clevenger's task is to make connections and find who is responsible.

  Ablow, meanwhile, clues us in. The sick pervert who dissects people is an architect; not only that, a brilliant architect named West Crosse. Crosse is smart. Crosse is successful. Crosse is handsome. Bored yet? We would be except for the creepy and unusual touches that Ablow adds. For instance, when Crosse was twenty years old, he deliberately ruined his perfect face by cutting a jagged facial scar on himself. Professionally, he is blunt to the point of alienating potential clients. Toward the novel's beginning, Crosse brings preliminary plans for a new home in Montana to a rich Miami couple who are choosing an architect. Crosse is openly contemptuous of their ultra-modern digs:

  Crosse sat down. The chair felt stiff and cold. He placed his rolled drawing on the table, laid a hand on the glass. Then he looked Ken Rawlings directly in the eyes. "You're living—or trying to live—in someone else's house. Because it feels safe. But it isn't."

  "I'm not following you," Rawlings said.

  "This is Walter Gropius's house," Crosse said. He glanced at Heather Rawlings. "It has nothing to do with you, nothing to do with your wife." He felt his own passion beginning to stir, the passion to liberate people from the tombs of fear that kept them from expressing the truest parts of themselves, kept them from feeling completely, exquisitely alive. ...

  This from a guy who dissects different body parts on living victims? It is exactly that contradiction that makes Crosse so fascinating: He gives life through design; he takes life by design. What is up with this sicko? Of course we read ahead to find out. More to the point, Ablow has created a villain who helps his victims. If he finds them lacking in some respect, he fixes them. Just being helpful, you see? That's far from your usual Mwoo-ha-ha villain, and it works.

  National Book Award nominee Charles Baxter devised in The Soul Thief (2008) a villain who doesn't kill but rather steals lives.

  Baxter's protagonist is Nathaniel Mason, a graduate student in Buffalo, New York, in the 1970s. Nathaniel is infatuated with an artistic beauty, Theresa, who unfortunately is the lover of a romantic poseur named Jerome Coolberg.

  Coolberg plays head games with Nathaniel, stealing his shirts and notebooks, claiming that episodes of Nathaniel's life happened to him instead. Events occur that are both tragic and that set Nathaniel's life on a disappointingly conventional track. Years later Nathaniel begins to feel that Coolberg had manipulated his fate in even more sinister ways. He tracks down his nemesis, now a famous interviewer on national radio in California, only to find that Coolberg expects him. They walk on to a pier, where Coolberg explains himself:

  "... Are you looking down? Nathaniel? Good. Do you suffer from vertigo? I do. But you see what's down there? I don't mean the ocean. I don't mean the salt water. Nothing but idiotic marine life in there. Nothing but the whales and the Portuguese and the penguins. No, I mean the mainland. Everywhere down there, someone, believe me, is clothing himself in the robes of another. Someone is adopting someone else's personality, to his own advantage. Right? Absolutely right. Of this one truth I am absolutely certain. Somebody's working out a copycat strategy even now. Identity theft? Please. We're all copycats. Aren't we? Of course we are. How do you learn to do any little task? You copy. You model. So I didn't do anything all that unusual, if I did it. But suppose I did, let's suppose I managed a little con. So what? So I could be you for a while? And was that so bad? Aside from the collateral damage? ..."

  That Nathaniel's life was messed up by Coolberg is bad; that Coolberg can rationalize what he did is even worse. (Worse still is Nathaniel's passive acquiescence, which is made sickeningly clear in the novel's last line.) To put it another way, there's no villain so scary as one who is right.

  Not all antagonists are creepy or bad. Some are as human as a novel's protagonist. An example can be found in John Burnham Schwartz's Reservation Road (1998), a novel about the aftermath of a hit-and-run. The victim is a ten-year-old boy standing by a roadside near a gas station in a northern Connecticut town. His father, Ethan, sees him killed.

  The driver of the car is Dwight, whose point of view is one of the three through which Schwartz tells his story. Dwight is at fault but is intended to be sympathetic. For the author, that is a challenge. How can a hit-and-run driver be sympathetic?

  In the opening pages, Schwartz deftly sketches in Dwight's circumstances. He is driving his son Sam home from a Red Sox game. The game went to extra innings, so they are late. That's a problem because Dwight's ex, Sam's mother, is a bitch on wheels. Worse, Dwight screwed up a few years earlier after she told him she was leaving him for another man. Dwight struck both her and Sam; he landed on probation, lost his law practice, and was left with tenuous visitation rights to his son.

  Thus, Dwight finds himself driving too fast down a nighttime road, one headlight out, distracted and worried. He hits Ethan's son, killing him. This is a crucial moment for Schwartz. Why doesn't Dwight stop? Schwartz has Dwight's son Sam dozing in the car, his face pressed against the passenger door handle. There is the impact. Schwartz executes the moment this way:

  The impact made the car shudder. My foot came off the gas. And we were coasting, still there, but moving, fleeing. Unless I braked now: Do it. My foot started for the brake. But then Sam started to wail in pain and I froze. I looked over and he was holding his face in both hands and screaming in pain. I went cold. "Sam!" I shouted, his name coming from deep down in my gut and sounding louder and more desperate to my ears than any sound I'd ever made. He didn't respond. "Sam!"

  In the rearview mirror I saw the dark-haired man sprinting up the road after us. His fury and his fear were in his half-shadowed face, the frenzied pumping of his arms. He was coming to punish me, and for a moment I wanted him to. My foot was inching toward the brake. But suddenly I felt Sam warm against my side, curling up and holding on and bawling like a baby. I put my foot on the gas.

  Dwight makes a tragic mistake, but as Reservation Road progresses, it is Ethan who does something wrong, allowing himself to become consumed with a desire for revenge. His reasons are carefully developed—so carefully than when he discovers Dwight's name and goes to his house with a gun, it is unclear what will happen. Motives, in other words, abound on both sides. The two antagonists are perfectly understandable. We feel equally for them both.

  That is the power of a three-dimensional antagonist: the power to sway our hearts in directions we would not expect them to be swayed. To get us to see, even accept, the antagonist's point of view. You may not want your story to be neutral. You may embrace right and wrong and write an outcome that makes your values obvious. That is your choice.

  At the same time, a wholly black-and-white story cannot engage us very deeply. The deck is too stacked, the players too shallow to stir or scare us in memorable ways. Whatever your intension, it's worth investing time in your antagonist, opening up her unexpected sides, justifying her actions and even making her right. That only adds to the drama.

  The term "secondary" for characters is misleading. As you can see, secondary characters have a major role to play in making your novel strong. Special, ordinary, or opposition, they are as important as your pr
otagonist and worth some extra time.

  Have you ever skimmed through some scenes in the middle of a novel? Worse, have you ever looked at middle scenes in your own manuscript and wondered if they work?

  Middles are tough. Too many middles in manuscripts and published novels are routine, lackluster, just there, nothing special. What goes wrong? Is it poor focus? Is it a blank spot in an outline? Were these ho-hum scenes written on rainy afternoons following disturbing parent-teacher conferences when inspiration was lacking?

  I suspect many sagging middle scenes slump the way they do not because of bad planning or bad luck but because their purpose hasn't yet emerged. Authors, as they plow through the middle portion of their manuscripts, tend to write what they think ought to come next; furthermore, they write it in the first way it occurs to them to do so. In successive drafts such scenes tend to stay in place, little altered. Unsure what to do, an author may leave a scene in place because ... well, just because.

  The push to rack up pages, to meet self-imposed or actual deadlines, makes it easy to avoid tearing apart a scene to find its weakly beating heart and surgically open it. Taking a fresh approach means throwing away time and redoing a lot of work. Who wants to do that? It's understandable that authors leave the troubled middles alone, but the result is too often scenes that are ineffective.

  What can you do to fire up your middles? To answer that question, it's first helpful to realize that every scene set down by an author usually has a reason to be. The author may not grasp the reason yet, but the impulse to portray this particular moment, this particular meeting, this particular action, springs from the deep well of dreams from which stories are drawn.

  This scene has a point. The task is to draw that purpose out. How? Changing the words on the page won't work. We authors are wedded to our words. Our instinct is to preserve them. So, it's the whole scene that needs to be explored again. Scene revision is, to me, less a matter of expression and more a way of seeing.