Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook

by Donald Maass

  I cried. Sitting there in Little Lloyd's room, not a light on in the house, an old, slightly blue-haired woman who'd thought of nothing but herself all her life. Yes, I cried.

  Miss Julia's motivation changes from protecting herself to protecting little Lloyd Jr. Ross gives her a maternal side, after all.

  How many sides of your current protagonist do you reveal? I know what you are thinking: My hero is multidimensional. My hero is complex! But let me ask you: Is he complex and multidimensional only in your mind, or actually on the page?

  Take a careful look at your manuscript. On which pages, exactly, do you specifically unlock extra sides of your protagonist's personality? Can you highlight the passages? How many of them are there? List the pages numbers. No, really, don't just read this paragraph and congratulate yourself. Do it for real. Scroll through your manuscript, highlight, and count.

  Come on now, did you really count? Okay. Now, how many extra dimensions of your protagonist do you actively show? If you cheated and avoided counting, I promise you, there are not as many as you think. If you really counted, now is the time to increase the number of dimensions that your hero has. The more extra work you do, the more involving your novel will be.

  ____________EXERCISE

  Opening Extra Character Dimensions

  Step 1: What is your protagonist's defining quality, that is, how would anyone describe your protagonist? What trait is most prominent in his personality? What kind of person is she? Write that down.

  Step 2: Objectively speaking, what is the opposite of that quality? Write that down.

  Step 3: Write a paragraph in which your protagonist actively demonstrates the opposite quality that you wrote down in step two. Start writing now.

  Follow-up work: Define a secondary character quality; write down its opposite; write a paragraph in which this character demonstrates the opposite secondary quality. In the same way, open third and fourth additional dimensions to your protagonist.

  Conclusion: As I mentioned in the introduction, the second most common reason agents reject manuscripts (after low tension) is poorly developed protagonists. Now that you have opened extra dimensions to your hero, you will have an easier time building into this character a fundamental and full-blown inner conflict.

  Inner Conflict

  A step beyond the technique of adding character dimensions is investing your protagonist with two goals, needs, wants, longings, yearnings, or desires that are in direct opposition to each other. Wanting two things that are mutually exclusive means having inner conflict, being torn in two directions, and that is what makes a character truly memorable.

  Inner conflict does not need to be limited to your protagonist. Any character can be conflicted. The prologue of Richard Russo's Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls tells the story of C.B. Whiting, scion of the industrial dynasty that rules over the central Maine town of Empire Falls. As a young man, Charles longs to escape and indeed manages to linger in Mexico for almost a decade, but in the end a more powerful destiny tugs him back to Maine:

  For his part, Charles Beaumont Whiting, sent away from home as a boy when he would have preferred to stay, now had no more desire to return from Mexico than his mother had to return from Europe, but when summoned he sighed and did as he was told, much as he had always done. It wasn't as if he hadn't known that the end of his youth would arrive, taking with it his travels, his painting, and his poetry. There was never any question that Whiting and Sons Enterprises would one day devolve to him, and while it occurred to him that returning to Empire Falls and taking over the family business might be a violation of his personal destiny as an artist, there didn't seem to be any help for it.

  In other words, C.B. is torn between bohemian freedom in Mexico and financial security at home in Maine, and he chooses the latter. But that is not the end of his inner conflict. Although he appears to accept this destiny, C.B. begins to build himself a hacienda (in Maine?) across the river from Empire Falls. Later, the arrival of a decomposed moose among the river trash that regularly washes ashore by his hacienda-in-progress provokes in C.B. a personal crisis:

  Now, down by the river, his thoughts disturbed, perhaps, by the proximity of rotting moose, he began to doubt that building this new house was a good idea. The hacienda, with its adjacent artist's studio, was surely an invitation to his former self, the Charles Beaumont Whiting—Beau, his friends called him there— he'd abandoned in Mexico. Worse, it was for this younger, betrayed self that he was building the hacienda.

  His inner conflict isn't over. C.B.'s conflicted spirit eventually seeks relief in an affair with a pretty young worker at his family's shirt factory—fragile Grace, the mother of the novel's protagonist, Miles Roby. This affair shadows Miles's childhood and leads C.B.'s iron-willed wife, Francine, the novel's antagonist, eventually to reel in and dominate not only Grace but Miles himself throughout his adult years.

  Thus, the powerful inner conflict that Russo builds for C.B. Whiting spreads to affect generations beyond C.B's. Indeed, it nearly causes the destruction of Empire Falls itself.

  Is there any character in contemporary fiction more conflicted than Laurell K. Hamilton's wildly successful series heroine Anita Blake? Anita is a St. Louis "animator," or raiser of the dead. (Why raise the dead, you ask? Among other reasons, to question them about the details of their wills.) She also works as a court-sanctioned vampire killer; vampires being, in Hamilton's alternate world, real and endowed with certain limited rights.

  Anita Blake is tough, but in contrast has a soft spot for vampires and other were-creatures. Indeed, her series-long love interest is the French master vampire Jean-Claude. As the series progresses she becomes engaged, then unengaged, to a junior high school teacher and alpha werewolf of the local pack, Richard Zeeman. Indeed, it is Richard who draws Anita to Tennessee in Blue Moon, the novel that finally brought Hamilton to The New York Times paperback best-seller list. Richard has been arrested in the small town of Myerton, accused of rape. It is up to Anita to exonerate him before a rare "blue moon," only five days away, sends Richard on an uncontrollable feeding binge.

  Anita's inner conflict—enforcing the law vs. sympathy (indeed, lust) for the creatures she is meant to hunt—would alone be enough, you would think, to energize this steamy and complex novel. But Hamilton does not stop there. Richard is her ex-fiance at this point, but she still has strong feelings for him even though she has firmly chosen Jean-Claude for reasons we learn at the beginning of the novel:

  Richard was an alpha werewolf. He was head of the local pack. It was his only serious flaw. We'd broken up after I'd seen him eat somebody. What I'd seen had sent me running to Jean-Claude's arms. I'd run from the werewolf to the vampire. Jean-Claude was Master of the City of Saint Louis. He was definitely not the more human of the two. I know there isn't a lot to choose from between a bloodsucker and a flesh-eater, but at least after Jean-Claude finished feeding, there weren't chunks between his fangs. A small distinction but a real one.

  There you go: another example of how flossing might have saved a relationship. As I said, Anita is torn between two lovers, so much so that she thinks of them all as a triumvirate: master vampire, Ulfric (wolf king), and necromancer. For Anita, being torn in two directions is not just a romantic dilemma but a condition of life in her (well, Hamilton's) universe:

  But I wasn't riding to the rescue because Richard was our third. I could admit to myself, if to no one else, that I still loved Richard. Not the same way I loved Jean-Claude, but it was just as real. He was in trouble, and I would help him if I could. Simple. Complicated. Hurtful.

  I wondered what Jean-Claude would think of me dropping everything to go rescue Richard. It didn't really matter. I was going, and that was that. But I did spare a thought for how that might make my vampire lover feel. His heart didn't always beat, but it would still break.

  Love sucks. Sometimes it feels good. Sometimes it's just another way to bleed.

  In addition to all that, Anita is conflicted
about the very justice system that she serves, as Hamilton reminds us as Anita considers the news that idealistic Richard is relying on the truth alone to save him from the rape charge:

  It sounded like something Richard would say. There was more than one reason why we'd broken up. He clung to ideals that hadn't even worked when they were in vogue. Truth, justice and the American way certainly didn't work within the legal system. Money, power, and luck were what worked. Or having someone on your side that was part of the system.

  Do you think that Anita has enough inner conflict? Hamilton does not. On top of everything else, Anita is a committed Christian. Each new adventure deepens her conflict between her beliefs and her actions, and Blue Moon is no exception. Anita's many inner conflicts are a primary reason that she is so memorable. That Hamilton continually deepens those conflicts almost guarantees that her readers will come back book after book. And so they do.

  The narrator of Alice Sebold's literary best seller, The Lovely Bones, Susie Salmon, has a conflict that can never be reconciled. As the novel opens, fourteen-year-old Susie takes a shortcut through a cornfield on her way home from school. She is lured by a neighbor into an underground room, raped, and murdered. From heaven she looks down upon her family, her friends, and her murderer, observing their lives in the aftermath of her death.

  Susie's conflict? Sebold expresses it succinctly early in her novel as Susie describes her heaven (everyone has their own version), which is somewhat like her junior high school, but without teachers. Her textbooks are Seventeen, Glamour, and Vogue. She lives in a duplex with a roommate, but after a time the pleasures of paradise pall, as she explains to her intake counselor, Franny:

  Eventually I began to desire more. What I found strange was how much I desired to know what I had not known on Earth. I wanted to be allowed to grow up.

  "People grow up by living," I said to Franny. "I want to live."

  Franny states, "That's out." Susie's desire to live despite being dead is a powerful inner conflict that infuses and informs the remainder of Sebold's luminous novel. Susie's hopeless yearning is felt again and again as she watches her father come apart with grief, her mother escape into an affair, her sister grow and eventually marry, and her baby brother struggle with the legacy of a sister whose absence is in itself an impossible-to-ignore presence. Susie misses her dog. She envies her younger sister's first kiss, her first sex, her first experiment with makeup.

  Tasting the adolescence that for her was cut short only makes Susie restless in heaven:

  I did begin to wonder what the word heaven meant. I thought, if this were heaven, truly heaven, it would be where my grandparents lived. Where my father's father, my favorite of them all, would lift me up and dance with me. I would feel only joy and have no memory, no cornfield and no grave.

  "You can have that," Franny said to me. "Plenty of people do."

  "How do you make the switch?" I asked.

  "It's not as easy as you might think," she said. "You have to stop desiring certain answers."

  "I don't get it."

  "If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling," she said, "you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth."

  This seemed impossible to me.

  It would be easy for Sebold's novel to lose tension. Objectively speaking, little happens back on Earth. Her murderer is never caught. Her family comes apart, then back together, no more remarkably than any other family. Her father and the boy who loved her experience grief (see Turning Points in chapter eighteen), but how is that any different than most lives? Yet Sebold keeps Susie's longing powerful and ever-present. Susie's inner conflict is the central conflict of the novel: sweet, sad, and full of love of life and those lucky enough to live it out.

  Sebold builds an entire story on nothing more than this simple yearning: to grow up and be alive. The Lovely Bones demonstrates the power of inner conflict not just to carry a novel, but to carry us deep into the sorrow and joy of human existence.

  Is the protagonist of your current manuscript beset by an inner conflict? How clearly is that expressed? What actions does it result in? What about other characters in the novel? Use this exercise to help you develop this inner conflict, make it stronger, and give it expression—and to make your protagonist, and other characters, as memorable as they can be.

  _EXERCISE

  Creating Inner Conflict

  Step 1: Thinking about your protagonist in the novel as a whole, what it is that your protagonist most wants? Write that down.

  Step 2: Write down whatever is the opposite of that.

  Step 3: How can your protagonist want both of those things simultaneously? What would cause your protagonist to want them both? What steps would he actively take to pursue those conflicting desires? Make notes, starting now.

  Follow-up work: Work on sharpening the contrast between these opposing desires. Make them mutually exclusive. How can you ensure that if your protagonist gets one, he cannot get the other? Make notes.

  Conclusion: In creating genuine inner conflict, it is not enough simply to create inner turmoil. True inner conflict involves wanting two things that are mutually exclusive. It is most effective when it tears your protagonist, or any character, in two opposite directions.

  Larger-Than-Life Character Qualities

  Zingers: Oh, how I wish I could snap them off as needed! Unfortunately, they tend to pop into my mind about an hour after I need them. Happily, one of the pleasures of novel writing is that an hour later is not too late. Until the manuscript is turned in, there's plenty of time to slot those zingers in.

  In Jodi Picoult's morality tale Salem Falls, Addie Peabody owns a diner in the small New Hampshire town that gives the novel its name. Addie is unwillingly wooed by the town sheriff, Wes Courtemanche. One evening Wes is pressing his attentions on her. He asks why she stays at the diner and if she could be anything in the world, what would she be? Addie answers: (1) She stays at the diner because she likes it; and (2) if she could be anything, she would be a mother. The last answer pleases Wes, and so he moves in for the kill:

  Wes slid his free arm around her waist and grinned, his teeth as white as the claw of moon above them. "You must be reading my mind, honey, since that brings me right to my third question." He pressed his lips over her ear, his words vibrating against her skin. "How do you like your eggs in the morning?"

  He's too close. Addie's breath knotted at the back of her throat and every inch of her skin broke out in a cold sweat. "Unfertilized!" she answered. . . .

  Zing! Addie's barb does not entirely discourage Wes, but it does endow Addie with quick-wittedness and pluck. Addie says on short notice the kinds of things we wish we could say. Whether her author invents these darts with equal dispatch or after long mulling I cannot say. Whatever her method, Pi-coult uses the power of the out-of-bounds speech to build larger-than-life characters whom we cannot help but admire.

  Another example—actually many examples—of verbal zingers revealing the pain and conflict in relationships can be found in Susan Wiggs's multi-layered contemporary romance The You I Never Knew. The novel's backstory reveals that Seattle graphic artist Michelle Turner left Crystal City, Montana, as well as her movie star father, Gavin Slade, under strained circumstances, as we see when she returns to Montana sixteen years later with her sixteen-year-old son:

  Her stomach constricted nervously as they walked along the front of the bleacher in search of Gavin Slade. She'd see him soon. Good grief, what would they say to each other?

  Their last face-to-face conversation had not been pleasant.

  "I'm pregnant, Daddy."

  Gavin had gone all stony-eyed. Then he'd said, "I'm not surprised. Your mother was careless, too."

  "My father was careless," she'd shot back.

  Did you ever hold a grudge against a member of the opposite sex? You know, the creep who spent the night and never
called again? The girl in high school who went all the way with some handsome bad boy but wouldn't let you, Mr. Nice Guy, lay a hand on her? (Nothing like that ever happened to me, nooooo.)

  Did you ever wish that you could get back at the object of your grudge in some unforgettable way? Janet Evanovich's series protagonist, bounty hunter Stephanie Plum, does just that in the opening pages of her debut novel, One for the Money. The bad boy in this case is Joe Morelli, who took advantage of young Stephanie (who willingly accepted his advances, it must be said) on several occasions in their hometown of Trenton, New Jersey. As a sixteen-year-old, Stephanie, a virgin, is warned to stay away from Joe by her best friend, Mary Lou Molnar:

  "He specializes in virgins! The brush of his fingertips turns virgins into slobbering mush."

  Two weeks later, Joe Morelli came into the bakery where I worked every day after school, Tasty Pastry, on Hamilton. He bought a chocolate-chip cannoli, told me he'd joined the navy, and charmed the pants off me four minutes after closing, on the floor of Tasty Pastry, behind the case filled with chocolate eclairs.

  The next time I saw him, I was three years older. I was on my way to the mall, driving my father's Buick, when I spotted Morelli standing in front of Giovichinni's Meat Market. I gunned the big V-8 engine, jumped the curb, and clipped Morelli from behind, bouncing him off the front right fender. I stopped the car and got out to assess the damage. "Anything broken?"

  He was sprawled on the pavement, looking up my skirt. "My leg."

  "Good," I said. Then I turned on my heel, got into the Buick, and drove to the mall.

  How many times have you run over an ex-lover with your car? None? I thought so. How many times have you wanted to? Plenty? Yeah, I knew that too. What makes Stephanie Plum a larger-than-life character is that she does what the rest of us would never do.