by Donald Maass
Ultimate Stakes
Why do we do what we do? Get up in the morning? Scan the paper?
Struggle through rush hour? Placate the boss? Mow the lawn? Save for vacation? Help the kids with their homework? Send birthday cards? Bring a tuna casserole to the reception after the funeral? "We have our reasons. We may not think about them all the time, but if pressed we could explain what they are.
We care. We feel that what we do matters, however small it may be. We must. No one can live for long feeling that life is futile, without purpose. If we did, at the very least we would stay in bed in the morning. At worst, after living too long without any reason we probably would check out.
When life tests us to the utmost, our motives grow exponentially greater. Our deepest convictions rise close to the surface. We care still more. We become more determined than ever to make a difference, to persist, to overcome all problems and obstacles. At the moment of ultimate testing we summon our deepest beliefs and swear that nothing, nothing, will stop us.
The hero of your novel also will be tested to the limit of his convictions— at least, I hope so! (If not, are there enough obstacles in the way of your protagonist?) How does she respond at this supreme moment? The way that you or I would, let's hope, but even more strongly.
The hero of Dennis Lehane's mystery novel Mystic River is homicide detective Sean Devine. At the outset of the novel, his convictions are at low ebb. He has returned from a suspension following an on-the-job "incident" that put his partner on medical leave. At the scene of the murder of Katie Marcus, nineteen-year-old daughter of Sean's one-time friend Jimmy, Sean's boss, Detective Lieutenant Martin Friel, is wary of Sean. Is he up to the investigation that lies ahead? He searches Sean for motivation:
"Trooper," Friel said, "you know what I like even less than ten-year-old black boys getting shot by bullshit gang-war crossfire?"
Sean knew the answer, but he didn't say anything.
"Nineteen-year-old white girls getting murdered in my parks. People don't say 'Oh, the vagaries of economics' then. They don't feel a wistful sense of the tragic. The feel pissed and they want somebody to be led onto the six o'clock in shackles." Friel nudged Sean. "I mean, right?"
"Right."
"That's what they want, because they're us and that's what we want." Friel grasped Sean's shoulder so he'd look at him.
"Yes, sir," Sean said, because Friel had that weird light in his eyes like he believed what he was saying the way some people believed in God or NASDAQ or the Internet-as-global-village. Friel was Born Again all the way, although what the Again had been Sean couldn't say, just that Fried had found something through his work that Sean could barely recognize, something that gave him solace, maybe even belief, a certainty underfoot. Times, to be truthful, Sean thought his boss was an idiot, spouting bullshit platitudes about life and death and the ways to make it all right, cure the cancers and become one collective heart, if only everyone would listen.
Other times, though, Friel reminded Sean of his father, building his birdhouses in the basement where no birds ever flew, and Sean loved the idea of him.
Sean's dedication to the case is, as yet, weak. But he gropes for belief and conviction, and borrows it, albeit abstractly, from Fried.
Later, the murdered girl's father searches Sean, too, for his commitment to the case. In the morgue to identify Katie's body, Jimmy Marcus recalls the crucial childhood event that he and Sean have in common: While planning to steal a car one day on the street with a third tag-along friend, Dave Boyle, two men in a car took Dave, who was missing for four mysterious, presumably horrible, days. Survivor guilt plagues both men, and Sean feels it now:
He met Jimmy's plaintive glare. He wanted to say something. He wanted to tell him that he had also thought about what would have happened if they'd climbed in that car. That the thought of what could have been his life sometimes haunted him, hovered around approaching corners, rode the breeze like the echo of a name called from a window. He wanted to tell Jimmy that he occasionally sweated through his old dream, the one in which the street gripped his feet and slid him toward that open door. He wanted to tell him he hadn't truly known what to make of his life since that day, that he was a man who often felt light with his own weightlessness, the insubstantial nature of his character.
But they were in a morgue with Jimmy's daughter lying on a steel table in between them and Whitey's pen poised over paper,
so all Sean said to the plea in Jimmy's face was: "Come on, Jim. Let's go get that coffee."
Sean again comes up short. Later, we learn the more immediate cause of his adult malaise: His stage manager wife, Lauren, has left him and taken their daughter with her. (See Low Tension Fixes Part II: Delaying Backstory in chapter twenty-three.) As the murder investigation unfolds, the emerging evidence and suspects gradually engage Sean's mind, and then his heart. He seeks to lay to rest the past, and at one point visits his father, a retired cop with knowledge of the arrest and jail cell suicide of one of the men who kidnapped Dave. His father sees no good in stirring up memories, and the encounter leaves Sean still unsatisfied:
Sean used the remote to unlock the car, and he was reaching for the door handle when he heard his father say, "Hey."
"Yeah?" He looked back and saw his father standing by the front door, his upper half dissolved in darkness.
"You were right not to get in that car that day. Remember that."
Sean leaned against his car, his palms on the roof, and tried to make out his father's face in the dark.
"We should have protected Dave, though."
"You were kids," his father said. "You couldn't have known. And even if you could have, Sean . . ."
Sean let that sink in. He drummed his hands on the roof and peered into the dark for his father's eyes. "That's what I tell myself."
"Well?"
He shrugged. "I still think we should have known. Somehow. Don't you think?"
In reality, Sean is moving closer to the heart of his motivation. It is the guilt of not protecting his friend that drives him and has made him a detective. He should have known how to protect Dave back then, but because he didn't act, now he sure as hell is going to find out who killed Katie Marcus.
At the end of the novel he learns that it was none of the developed suspects but other kids who killed Katie: the younger brother of the boy she planned to run away with and his friends. Surprising them at home, Sean finds himself in a standoff: A kid named O'Shea has a gun pointed at Sean, and Sean's partner has a gun pointed at O'Shea. Facing death, recognizing that O'Shea's soul is empty enough for him to fire, Sean discovers why he truly cares:
Sean had seen this before. Back when he was in uniform and sent as crowd control on a bank robbery gone bad, the guy inside gradually growing stronger for a two-hour period, feeling the power of the gun in his hand and the effect it had, Sean watching
him rant and rave over the monitor hooked up to the bank cameras. At the start, the guy had been terrified, but he'd gotten over that. Fell in love with that gun.
And for one moment, Sean saw Lauren looking over at him from the pillow, one hand pressed to the side of her head. He saw his dream daughter, smelled her, and thought what a shitty thing it would be to die without meeting her or seeing Lauren again.
A minute later Sean talks the gun out of the kid's hand. It turns out that Sean cares for the same reasons that all of us get up, fight the traffic and all the rest: Because he loves his family. It is a simple discovery, really, a fundamental commitment that is obvious to almost everyone.
Yet the unfolding of this primary motivation and its revelation to Sean himself at the moment of his ultimate testing gives it a force that not only carries Dave to the finish, but also resolves the conflicts at the heart of the novel's two secondary plot layers. Lehane deftly fuses the layers together and brings Sean's inner journey to a climax all at once. Sean has to live not only to enact justice, but also to put to rest the past and truly love in the present. He searches f
or, and finds, his irrevocable commitment.
Is there such a moment of ultimate stakes in your current manuscript? If not, fix it on the page. Your hero's testing and eventual commitment will be fixed in your readers' minds for a long time to come.
_______________________EXERCISE
Capturing the Irrevocable Commitment
Step 1: Identify the moment in your story when your protagonist's stakes hit home—when she realizes that there is no turning back. This is the moment of irrevocable commitment.
Step 2: Write out that moment in one paragraph. Start writing now.
Step 3: Look at the paragraph you have written. Notice its shape, feel its effect. Now imagine that this is the first paragraph of your novel.
Follow-up work: The moment of commitment that you just created has an opposite: a moment of irresolution, a healthy aversion, a justified selfishness, or a similar reaction. Write that down. Now find a place earlier in your manuscript to slot this in. Make the change in your manuscript now.
Conclusion: You may not wind up directly using the paragraphs you create with this exercise; however, let your hero's inner commitment infuse and underlie all his actions. Let him be driven. When resolve weakens, reinforce it. Strong commitment on the part of your protagonist will generate strong commitment on the part of your reader. The same is true, not surprisingly, when you create strong commitment on the part of your antagonist.
Exposition
We all star in our own movie. No one else's life has, for each of us, the immediacy and importance of our own. Nothing is more significant than what is happening to us right now. We are our own most intimate friends. This may sound self-absorbed, but it is a measure of the intensity with which we experience our lives and the importance we attach to what we think, feel, and experience at any given moment of the day.
The protagonist of a novel is no different from us in that respect, or needn't be. Indeed, characters with poorly developed inner lives cannot long sustain reader interest. I am not suggesting writing endless passages of gushy exposition (sometimes called interior monologue), like one finds in low-grade romance novels. Rather, I suggest bringing forward on the page a protagonist's self-regard: that reflection and self-examination that shows us that a character has a compass-true sense of themselves and a grasp of the meaning of what is happening to them at any given moment in the story.
An example of this can be found in Richard Russo's Empire Falls, which I discussed earlier. In the book, Miles Roby is the humble proprietor of the local diner, but that doesn't keep him from being self-reflective. Committed to painting the steeple of his parish church despite his fear of heights, Miles frequently procrastinates by talking with his friend Father Mark. One day he finds Father Mark staring up at the steeple:
"God Himself, a couple of stories up ... so close."
"I was just thinking how far away it is," Miles admitted. "But then I was contemplating painting it."
"That does make a difference," Father Mark said.
"Actually I wasn't contemplating painting so much as falling."
Interesting, Miles thought. Like himself, Father Mark, as a child, had been reassured by the imagined proximity of God, whereas adults, perhaps because they so often were up to no good, took more comfort from His remoteness. Though Miles
didn't think of himself as a man up to no good, he did prefer the notion of an all-loving God to that of an all-knowing one.
Miles is a man who admits to himself his own discomfort in the presence of God. How can we not admire that? By taking us deep inside Miles, Russo shows us something universal not about Miles's faith but about his humanity.
In Philip Pullman's astonishing fantasy The Golden Compass, set in a magical world much like Earth in Edwardian times, the heroine is young Lyra Belacqua, a girl of unusual self-possession and resourcefulness. Pullman enhances her pluck and appeal by taking the opposite approach. Rather than being self-reflective, Lyra is naively self-confident, as in this passage deep in the novel wherein we find Lyra, a practiced liar, captured and in grave danger:
It wasn't Lyra's way to brood; she was a sanguine and practical child, and besides, she wasn't imaginative. No one with much imagination would have thought seriously that it was possible to come all this way and rescue her friend Roger; or, having thought it, an imaginative child would immediately have come up with several ways in which it was impossible. Being a practical liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination at all; it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.
So now that she was in the hands of the Oblation Board, Lyra didn't fret herself into terror about what had happened to the gyptians. They were all good fighters, and even though Pantalai-mon said he'd seen John Faa shot, he might have been mistaken; or if he wasn't mistaken, John Faa might not have been seriously hurt. It had been bad luck that she'd fallen into the hands of the Samoyeds, but the gyptians would be along soon to rescue her, and if they couldn't manage it, nothing would stop Iorek Byrni-son from getting her out; and then they'd fly to Svalbard in Lee Scoresby's balloon and rescue Lord Asriel.
Pullman's passage is written in the objective point-of-view, with the author observing and commenting upon his young protagonist. Yet despite that removal, and his description of Lyra as an unimaginative child, Pullman nevertheless conveys Lyra's view of herself: childishly confident, certain of her allies, trusting of her own ultimate safety. While Lyra may not consciously reflect on these qualities of herself, the author does so for her, and the effect is no less intimate than Richard Russo's passage above.
Recall mystery writer Janet Evanovich's series protagonist, Stephanie Plum, from an earlier chapter. Stephanie is not exactly a deep thinker. The Trenton, New Jersey, bail bond hunter is, rather, a beer swilling, blue-collar ball-buster. But even though the word philosophy may not be in her vocabulary, Stephanie nevertheless always has a few wry things to say about herself, as in this early
passage in One for the Money in which she recounts how, despite maternal warnings to the contrary, neighborhood bad boy Joe Morelli managed to lure her, at age six, into a dilapidated garage to teach her a special "game":
"What's the name of this game?" I'd asked Joseph Morelli.
"Choo-choo," he said, down on his hands and knees, crawling between my legs, his head trapped under my short pink skirt. "You're the tunnel, and I'm the train."
I suppose this tells you something about my personality. That I'm not especially good at taking advice. Or that I was born with an overload of curiosity. Or maybe it's about rebellion or boredom or fate. At any rate, it was a one-shot deal and darn disappointing, since I'd only gotten to be the tunnel, and I'd really wanted to be the train.
Self-observations like this (never mind Stephanie's scathing and hilarious observations of others) make her enormously appealing. We all wish we could be funny about ourselves, and sometimes we are. But Stephanie is funny on every single page.
In your latest manuscript, how does your protagonist regard himself? What does he see in the mirror? What is the condition of his mind, heart, and soul at any given point in the story?
In life it is difficult, if not impossible, to like someone whom we do not know. But when someone is self-revealing we (usually) are drawn to him. In any event, honesty about oneself is a positive quality. It takes courage to take a hard look inside. Give your protagonist that courage, and you will give your readers a character whose strength they can see and whose inner life is rich and accessible.
__________________EXERCISE
Deepening Exposition
Step 1: In your manuscript pick a moment in which a point-of-view character does not react to what is happening, or when in fact nothing is happening and the action of the story is paused or static.
Step 2: Write a paragraph of exposition delineating this character's self-conscious thoughts about her own state of mind, emotional condition, state of being or soul, or perception of the state of the world at this point in time. Start writing now.
> Follow-up work: Repeat the above steps at four more points of deep exposition (passages in which we experience a character's thoughts and feelings).
Conclusion: Passages of exposition can be among the most gripping in your novel. Indeed they better be, since nothing is "happening." When nothing overtly is going on, make sure that a great deal is at work beneath the surface. Otherwise you novel will have dead spots that your readers will skip.
Creating Secondary Characters
The world is full of people, and so are most novels. But how believable are the secondary characters who fill them out? Too many merely enter, fulfill a function in the story, then exit. They are forgettable, because they are not real. They act in only one way; usually exactly the way we expect.
Secondary characters do not have to be like that. They can engage us as strongly as the primary players do. When that happens it is because the author has bothered to make those characters in some way as multidimensional, conflicted, or surprising as the novel's major characters are. That's tough to do, especially when there is limited space in which to develop them, but it can be done.
Legal thriller writer Phillip Margolin is a lean writer, lavishing attention on the technical details that make credible the cases portrayed in his novels, but otherwise sketching his settings, stories, and characters with efficiency. Even so, he treats his secondary characters as more than props.
In The Associate, Margolin spins the story of Daniel Ames, a young associate at Portland, Oregon's most prestigious law firm: Reed, Briggs, Stephens, Stottlemeyer, and Compton. Daniel's background is blue collar, not blue chip. He believes that his hold on success is tenuous. He works late hours.
In the novel's opening Margolin has another young lawyer, Joe Molinari, a good-times sort of guy, amble into Daniel's cubicle one evening to cajole him out for an associates' happy hour at a nearby steakhouse. Daniel declines to stay at work, and Molinari ribs him: