Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook

by Donald Maass

  Step 3: Create an inner conflict: Write down what your antagonist most wants. Write down the opposite of that. How can this character want both of these things simultaneously? How can they be mutually exclusive? Make notes, starting now.

  Step 4: Create larger-than-life qualities: Write down things that your antagonist would never say, do, or think. Find places where this character can and must say, do, and think those things. Make notes, starting now.

  Step 5: Define your antagonist's personal stakes: What is his main problem, conflict, or goal? Next, write down what would make this problem matter more, and then matter more than life itself. Make notes, starting now.

  Follow-up work: Follow the steps above for a secondary antagonistic character who supports your villain.

  Conclusion: No one is bad all the time. Villains are people, too. Rather than build a villain who is unlike you, use this exercise to build one who resembles you. That might be the most chilling adversary of all.

  ____________________EXERCISE

  The Antagonist's Outline

  Step 1: What is your antagonist's main problem, conflict, or goal? Write that down.

  Step 2: What does your antagonist most want? Write that down.

  Step 3: What is the second plot layer for your antagonist? Write that down.

  Step 4: What are the five most important steps toward your antagonist's goal, or toward resolving her central problem or conflict? A different way to ask that is: What are the five events, actions, or high points, with respect to your antagonist, that you could not possibly leave out? Write those down.

  Step 5: What are the three most important steps toward, or away from, your antagonist's greatest need? Write those down.

  Step 6: Using the material from the above steps, outline the entire novel from the antagonist's point of view.

  Follow-up work: Find five new ways in which your antagonist can advance her own interests. Let these be actions that have nothing to do with your hero; stuff that your villain would do anyway. Note them.

  Conclusion: We are not accustomed to thinking of villains as being on an inner journey, but what human being is not? Humanize your villain. Motivate his actions with kindness. Let her be heroic, helpful, and principled. Hannah Ardent wrote of the "banality of evil." For fiction writers, that means creating not passionless cruelty but evil that wears a compassionate face..

  Enriching Your Cast

  Complexity in a novel generally is a desirable quality, but how do you manage it? Adding plot layers is one way (see Plot Layers in chapter fifteen); enriching your cast of characters is another. One way to achieve that latter effect is not by adding new characters but, paradoxically, by eliminating them; or more accurately put, by combining them.

  Let me explain.

  In Tall, Dark, and Deadly, by The New York Times best-selling author Heather Graham, a Miami criminal defense attorney disappears from her Coconut Grove home. Her fitness therapist neighbor, Samantha Miller, investigates. Sam's story involves some elements that are common to women's fiction, and some that aren't; for instance, the missing neighbor, who is not particularly deserving of help.

  Sam sees the good in Mamie Newcastle, but most others do not. Marnie is an ambitious lawyer with no concern for how scuzzy her clients may be, so long as their cases get her where she wants to go. She is also a man-eater. Early on, it is clear that Marnie even has used elegant and graceful Sam as a means to meet men: "Sam could accomplish with a word, the lift of a brow, a simple look, something that might take her twenty minutes of flirting to do." Some neighbor!

  Graham keeps the elements of her romantic mystery in constant motion, crisscrossing each other in puzzling ways. At the same time, Graham uses characters with combined roles to maintain a sense of narrative cohesion. Marnie leaves behind her buttoned-down assistant, Loretta, who becomes a source of information about Marnie; for instance, that Marnie maintained a financial interest in a strip club, and even stripped there herself once in a while, for kicks.

  The strip club, naturally, becomes a focus of investigation. Meanwhile, the reader learns that a serial killer, who enjoys feeding his victims to the alligators in Miami's canals, is targeting new women who are connected to the club. So far, so good. Graham now, wisely, raises the stakes. Why not put a young and innocent exotic dancer in jeopardy? Graham introduces nineteen-year-old Lacey, who is stripping in secret and who hopes to use the money she earns to travel to New York for a legitimate dance audition. It also happens

  that Lacey is heroine Sam's niece. Graham is raising the stakes and enriching her cast at the same time.

  Early in the novel, Lacey learns from a fellow dancer, whose stage name is Tiger Lilly, that she can make even more money by working private parties, which are set up by a mysterious booker. Tiger Lilly also tells Lacey that their part-time profession is honorable work that employs hundreds of thousands of women, giving Lacey courage. It also turns out that Lacey knows Tiger Lilly from her other job: By day Tiger Lilly is Marnie-the-missing-lawyer's assistant, Loretta.

  This double-role might sound contrived, but it serves nicely to keep the disparate elements of Graham's story connected. Graham finds other uses for this character, too. Sam's partner in the gym where she does her fitness therapy is muscular Joe Taylor, who has an eye for Loretta. Joe turns out to be the mysterious party booker and serial killer. In the novel's conclusion, Joe traps Sam in his cabin-of-horrors with the still alive-but-drugged Marnie.

  Sam has one chance to escape with Marnie, but Graham isn't about to make it easy. Joe has a third drugged victim in the cabin: once again, Loretta. Sam escapes, but only with extreme difficulty thanks to Loretta's now triple function in the story. Any random victim might have served this purpose, but Graham knows that, by combining this bit role with others in the story, she can wring extra tension from it and her keep story elements dancing with each other to the end.

  A combined role also can make for a nice reversal and surprise. In an earlier chapter I discussed Barbara Freethy's Summer Secrets, in which three grown sisters struggle to keep the dark secret of what happened one stormy night on the round-the-world sailboat race they won as teenagers. The youngest sister, Caroline, is prone to risky behavior, especially vis-a-vis men. Early in the novel we learn that she is involved with a much older man, Mike Stanaway, who has a bad reputation. It is said that he beat his wife, and indeed Caroline turns up with purple bruises on her arm. Her sisters are understandably alarmed.

  In the course of the story, Caroline realizes that she has become a drunk like their father. She enters Alcoholics Anonymous, a program in which participants have "sponsors," sobriety mentors. Caroline's sponsor could have been anyone, but Freethy seizes this opportunity to combine roles and work an effective reversal of everyone's expectations:

  "I'm trying to stop drinking," Caroline continued. "Mike is helping me. He's not my boyfriend. He's my sponsor, the person I can call when I'm feeling desperate. Most people don't realize he's been sober for more than a year because of Alcoholics Anonymous. He took me to my first meeting a few weeks ago."

  People can change, and Freethy's three sisters all go through many changes before this multilayered novel is finished.

  Ann B. Ross's Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind is a Southern pecan pie of a novel, rich and hilarious. (What, you don't find pecan pie hilarious?) As illustrated in an earlier excerpt, Miss Julia is Julia Springer, the sixty-ish recent widow of

  Abbotsford, North Carolina's upright and civic-minded banker, Wesley Lloyd Springer. In the course of the novel Ross turns Miss Julia's life upside down: Wesley Lloyd Springer had a mistress, trashy Hazel Marie Pucket, who one day dumps her nine-year-old son on Miss Julia's doorstep. The arrival of Lloyd Jr., sets off a landslide of complications for settled and orderly Miss Julia.

  First, there are legal ramifications. Ross introduces Miss Julia's easy-going but crafty lawyer Sam Murdoch, who explains to Miss Julia not only her rights but how feared she is in the community. Everyone knew about her
husband's affair, but no one had the courage to tell her.

  Next, there is consternation in the "session" (governing body) of Miss Julia's local Presbyterian church. It seems that Wesley Lloyd Springer made verbal promises to fund a new family-oriented activities center, and the church was counting on Miss Julia to make good on those promises out of the considerable estate that her husband left her. Now, with a son suddenly in the picture, the church is afraid the money will go to this rival, nine-year-old claimant. They are plotting to sue to have the will set aside. Someone must tip off Miss Julia, but rather than introducing yet another character to do so, Ross appoints Sam Murdoch to the church's session, though as the novel opens he has resigned because of the maneuver that the session is planning.

  Now, many protagonists have sidekicks or best friends who stick by them and serve as sounding boards throughout a novel. That is not Sam Murdoch's function in Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind. That role is played by Miss Julia's longtime housekeeper, Lillian. Sam is, rather, Miss Julia's sage advisor and troubleshooter—and Miss Julia manages to get herself into quite a lot of trouble before the novel is over.

  So it is natural and satisfying when, tying up loose ends at the novel's conclusion, Miss Julia tells us how she resolved her fear of the sinful sickness that her minister Pastor Ledbetter has told her that she suffers, with the help of—who else?—Sam Murdoch:

  "You better turn me loose, Sam" I said, unable to leave him under my own steam. "Pastor Ledbetter and Dr. Fowler said I'm suffering from"—I lowered my voice, hardly daring to say the word but wanting to protect Sam from the consequences— "nymphomania."

  "Wha-at?" He started laughing and he laughed so hard, I tried to pull away from him so I could hide in a dark corner somewhere. "Oh, Julia, why didn't you tell me you were suffering from this condition?" He ran a finger down the side of my face and said, "Don't you know I've got the cure for that?"

  And he does, and that's really all I'm going to say on the subject.

  I guess Miss Julia doesn't speak her mind about everything. Ann B. Ross does use Sam Murdoch in multiple ways, however, and her novel is warmer for it.

  What about your current manuscript? Are there roles that can be combined? It may take less work than you think to accomplish it—and it may add more than you can measure to your novel's sense of complexity.

  ________EXERCISE

  Combining Roles

  Step 1: In two columns, list the following: (1) The names of all major, secondary, and minor characters. (2) The purpose of each in the story. (Jot down their purposes in as few words as possible, for example: supports the protagonist, supports the antagonist, provides special knowledge, etc.)

  Step 2: If you have ten or fewer characters, cross out the name of one. Delete him from the story. Yes, do it. If you have more than ten characters, cross out the names of two. Go ahead. It's just an exercise.

  Step 3: Your cast list is now shorter by one or two, but there remain one or two functions to be served in the story. Assign those functions to one or more of the remaining characters.

  Follow-up work: Are there other characters in your cast who can take on multiple roles? Go down the list and note the possibilities, then put them into practice. Find at least two more roles to combine into one.

  Conclusion: Were you able to complete this exercise? Some authors have great difficulty with it. Most, though, find that the number of characters in their cast can be reduced. Furthermore, the remaining characters get more interesting. Why? Because not only do they have more to do, but they have become characters who are capable of more.

  Public Stakes

  Things can go wrong in so many different ways, don't you agree? We sometimes think: It can't get any worse than this. But it can. That is the essence of raising the outward, or public, stakes: making things worse, showing us that there is more to lose, promising even bigger disasters that will happen if the hero doesn't make matters come out okay.

  Raising the public stakes is easy in thrillers, mysteries, action adventure novels, and science fiction and fantasy stories. The action in such novels usually has significance for more than just the characters involved. Public safety and security are issues. But what about sagas, coming of age stories, family dramas, and romances? Whether or not everything turns out well in such stories won't make much difference to the rest of the world, will it? Are there public stakes in these novels and, if so, how do they get raised?

  Cowboy romances have become a staple of the genre, and among the best practitioners is Joan Johnston. Her novel The Cowboy is the first of a trilogy of novels about two feuding south Texas ranching families, the Blackthornes and the Creeds.

  What sets them against each other? The Blackthornes are rich; the Creeds struggle. The Blackthorn ranch, Bitter Creek, completely surrounds the Creed spread, Three Oaks. The Blackthorn patriarch, known as Blackjack, covets the Creed land and, as if that were not enough, also covets the Creed matriarch. (She, it must be said, also still loves him from long ago.)

  The feud is nearly overcome by young Trace Blackthorne and Callie Creed when they fall in love as undergraduates at the University of Texas. But then word comes that Callie's younger brother, Sam, has been put in a wheelchair by Trace's younger brother in an accident on the high school football field— or was it an accident?

  Callie must return to the ranch to help her family, leaving her college degree and wedding plans with Trace in the dust. Trace, bitter, disappears, not knowing that Callie is carrying his child. Montagues and Capulets? A secret baby? So far we are in familiar romance territory. An uncaring category romance writer might easily churn these simple conflicts for sixty thousand words and

  tell a story that satisfies her contract, but Johnston has her sights aimed higher. Let us see how she relentlessly raises the public stakes.

  Fast-forward eleven years: Callie is a young widow, having married the Three Oaks foreman, who died a year earlier. Times are hard at Three Oaks. They are barely getting by. Callie doesn't need complications. It is, of course, at this moment that Blackjack has a heart attack and Trace returns to help manage Bitter Creek; and, he hopes, to win back Callie.

  Blackjack, apparently not much slowed by his heart attack, now covets the Creed land more than ever. Any setback to the Creed clan represents a new opportunity to entice them to sell. But Callie is determined not to do that— and is even more determined to resist her all-too-clear attraction to Trace, who she hates for walking out on her, as she sees it, years before.

  Question: Can Callie's twin problems—save the ranch, resist Trace—get worse? Oh, yes, much worse. Is it also possible that her fate can matter to the rest of the world? Are there public stakes here?

  Again, yes. By making Callie's problems outward problems—that is, problems imposed on her by outside forces—Johnston slowly but surely makes Callie's story everybody's story. Who has not had a string of multiple disasters, run-ins with enemies, and just plain bad luck? We all have. Anyone can identify with Callie, especially as her problems compound.

  As Johnston's novel progresses, calamity piles on calamity for Callie. The Creeds are counting on selling some of their fine quarter horses, but four of them are stolen. On the romantic front, at a dance Trace declares his intention to win her back in brusque cowboy fashion:

  "Look at me, Callie," he commanded.

  Callie tried to jerk free, but Trace tightened his hold. She raised her chin and glared at him. "Whatever we had between us is over and done."

  "Not quite," he said.

  She eyed him warily, her heart thumping crazily. "What is that supposed to mean?"

  "I haven't had my fill of you."

  She snorted derisively. "You make me sound like a bottle of beer you haven't finished swilling."

  His voice was low and seductive. "I was thinking of something utterly soft and incredibly sweet I haven't finished sampling."

  Men: Do not try this at home. These are trained romance protagonists. Seriously, Callie does resist Trace, fierc
ely, though it must be noted that thereafter she does spend a terrific amount of time with the man she hates.

  Meanwhile, what about Three Oaks? Things go from bad to worse to horrible. First, Callie's parents are shot out on the range. Her mother is hospitalized, and lack of insurance sets the family back twenty thousand dollars in cash. Her father dies. Callie and her brother Sam, now a wheelchair-bound alcoholic, inherit Three Oaks. Unfortunately, inheritance taxes (a genuine problem for farming and ranching families) make their financial predicament many magnitudes worse. Callie hopes to sell their cattle, but some of the herd comes down with a disease, and the cows are quarantined.

  Blackjack presses his offer to buy Three Oaks, but Callie is resolved to hang on. But how can she do that with no money, not enough help, and mouths to feed? To make matters even worse still, Sam poisons himself with alcohol and winds up in the hospital, too.

  The only answer seems to be accepting a loan from Trace. The payback? Callie must train his cutting horses. And give him sex:

  "That makes me a pretty expensive whore."

  "If that's the way you want to look at it."

  "There isn't any other way of looking at it," Callie said bluntly. "You're asking me to have sex with you for money."

  His expression hardened as he waited for her answer.

  "How much will I be paid for my services? How many times—?"

  "Till I'm tired of you," he said brusquely.

  Those Blackthorne men have a way with women, don't they? Callie accepts his offer. Can her problems get any worse? Certainly. Johnston continues to raise the stakes. Just when Callie has every reason to scrub Trace from her heart for good, he reveals himself as a good man. He turns around Sam's life and wins the love of Callie's two children. He helps Callie in every imaginable way—and isn't too bad in bed, either. For a while it looks like Callie must capitulate.