by Donald Maass
His father gave him a befuddled smile and Sean matched it with his own.
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"Hey, Dad."
"Yeah."
"You telling me that nothing ever happened in your past that you don't think about, turn over in your head a lot?"
His father sighed. "That's not the point."
"Sure, it is."
"No, it isn't. Bad shit happens to everyone, Sean. Everyone. You ain't special."
But Sean is special, and so is the case of the murder of Katie Marcus. It draws together all three of the layers that Lehane has given his hero. Because it is Sean's job to investigate, he cannot avoid revisiting the past he shares with the victim's father, Jimmy, and the prime suspect, Dave. Nor can he avoid the loss of his wife, whose spooky phone calls torment him as much as his survivor's guilt. Sean is a man beset by multiple conflicts, outer and inner. Who cannot identify with that?
In his complex and erotic literary novel The Sixteen Pleasures, Robert Hel-lenga demonstrates a similar flair for laying down plot layers. The novel's opening paragraph nicely reveals the two principle reasons that his heroine, American book conservator Margot Harrington, decides to travel to Florence in 1966:
I was twenty-n.ne years old when the Arno flooded its banks on Friday 4 November 1966. According to the Sunday New York Times, the damage wasn't extensive, but by Monday it was clear that Florence was a disaster. Twenty feet of water in the cloisters of Santa Croce, the Cimabue crucifix ruined beyond hope of restoration, panels ripped from the Baptistry doors, the basement of the Biblioteca Nazionale completely underwater, hundreds of thousands of volumes waterlogged, the Archivio di Stato in total disarray. On Tuesday I decided to go to Italy, to offer my services as a humble book conservator, to help in any way I could, to save whatever could be saved, including myself.
Thus, Margo embarks on an outer journey (visit Italy, save rare books) and an inner journey, a search for the self that she could not find in America in the mid-sixties:
Instead of going to Harvard, I went to Edgar Lee Masters College, where Mama had taught art history for twenty years. Instead of going to graduate school I spent two years at the Institute of Paper Technology on Green Bay Avenue; instead of becoming a research chemist I apprenticed myself to a book conservator in Hyde Park and then took a position in the conservation department of the Newberry Library. Instead of getting married and having a daughter of my own, I lived at home and looked after
Mama, who was dying of lung cancer. A year went by, two years, three years, four. Mama died; Papa lost most of his money. My sister Meg got married and moved away; my sister Molly went to California with her boyfriend and then Ann Arbor. The sixties were churning around me, and I couldn't seem to get a footing.
Margot is a woman clearly in need of an awakening, and where better to find it than in Italy? Margot's two layers are strong; all that remains is for Hellenga to weave them together, which he does by means of a masterfully conceived device that becomes the node of conjunction between these two journeys—and which I will discuss in the next chapter. Stay tuned.
Best-selling novelist Nora Roberts cut her teeth writing short "category" romances, but has since become expert at building the layers that turn romance stories into breakout-level fiction. Her best-selling novel Carolina Moon is the story of a wounded young woman who returns home to face her past, and who finds love in the process.
There's nothing new in that. That story has been told hundreds, maybe thousands, of times. Roberts does not allow her novel to remain that simple, however. She starts with a strong first layer: As a child, heroine Tory Bodeen was regularly and savagely beaten with a leather belt by her fanatic, sharecropper father. Tory longs to face those memories in the town where they happened, open an upscale gift store there, and prove to herself that she can be happy.
Brutal childhood beatings would be plenty to load up any backstory, but Roberts goes further. At age eight, Tory had a special friend in Hope Lavelle, whose family owned the land that Tory's father farmed. One night the two girls planned to sneak out of their homes for a midnight adventure. Hope escapes to their rendezvous in the woods, but Tory is prevented by her father, who chooses that night to administer another beating.
Eight-year-old Hope is raped and murdered. Even in the present day, the murderer remains at large. This second layer of guilt and mystery also might be enough to heap on a heroine, but not for Roberts. To this burden she adds another: Tory has the gift of second sight. She can "see" the minds and memories of others, particularly those who have suffered extreme distress. On the night Hope was murdered, Tory helplessly saw the whole thing happen, sharing the horror of the incident—though not the knowledge of who murdered her best friend.
That makes three layers, by my count. But why stop there?
Tory's gift of sight continues to plague her into the present. She would like to be free of this "gift," but Roberts has other plans: Soon enough, Tory's sight reveals to her the horrific experiences of fresh victims of Hope's long-ago killer. Tory must both cope with the psychological pain of what she witnesses and follow the imperfect trail opened by her visions—for not only is the identity of Hope's killer within reach, that killer now has targeted Tory.
Enough? No way. Roberts has still more in mind. Her heroine is staunchly uninterested in men, having been badly burned by an early love: "I don't intend to be involved again. Once was enough." Naturally, there is a fabulous and caring man waiting for her in her home town of Progress, South Carolina. The identify of this love interest provides one of the powerful nodes of conjunction that connects up the now—Do I have this right?—five layers of Tory's story.
Childhood memories to face down, an unsolved murder, painful-but-persis-tent visions of violence, a love that she does not want yet cannot avoid . . . there's a lot happening in the life of Tory Bodeen, don't you agree? Is this plot overloaded? I would argue that it is effectively layered: It is the multiplicity of Tory's problems that makes Carolina Moon engrossing—and Nora Roberts one of America's best-selling storytellers.
How many layers have you heaped on your protagonist in your current manuscript? Just one? Heck, get busy! As you can see, even two layers may be too few to build a breakout novel.
______EXERCISE
Building Plot Layers
Step 1: What is the name of your protagonist? Write that down.
Step 2: What is the overall problem he must solve? Write that down.
Step 3: What additional problems can she face? Not complications to the main problem (we dealt with those in the last exercise) but altogether different problems? Write those down.
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Follow-up work: For each plot layer (or at least for each two) that you have added, work out at least four steps or scenes that you will need to bring this narrative line to its climax and resolution. Make notes for these additional steps or scenes.
Conclusion: Have you ever noticed how everything seems to happen at once? Good things come in threes. When it rains it pours. Layers give novels the rich texture of real life. Building them into your story is extra work, but the reward is a rich resonance and complexity.
Weaving a Story
Having added layers to your novel, the next step is to get them working together; that is, to connect them. Without links you might as well be writing separate novels (sequels, I suppose) for each layer. Finding reasons for your layers to coexist is what I call weaving them together.
The particular devices you use to make the connections happen are called nodes of conjunction. A setting in your story may recur, serving double duty in different layers. A character who faces his own problem in a subplot may bring relief, or introduce a complication, to your protagonist, who is facing his own conflict. Secondary characters can get dragged into storylines they did not expect to grapple with. These are the ways in which storylines cross.
As we saw earlier, for example, Will Klein, the hero of Harlan Coben's twisty thriller
Gone for Good, has several big problems. First, his older brother Ken, whom everyone believes murdered Will's one-time girlfriend eleven years before and then disappeared, is innocent—or so Will believes. Several none-too-pleasant people disagree and want to find Ken, who is still alive and at large. Will needs to find him before others do.
Second, Will's girlfriend, Sheila Rogers, has vanished, but not without leaving behind her fingerprints at the scene of a double homicide. Will knows that she, too, is innocent. As if those things were not enough, a shadowy hit man called The Ghost is on Will's trail, as well. But why?
These three layers easily could send Coben's plot careening out of control, but he skillfully weaves them together. Will is a counselor of runaway teens, and two of the most important people in his life have now run away, too. But the FBI sees it in a more sinister light, as is clear when they come to question Will and his co-worker Squares about Sheila's disappearance:
"Are you aware," Fisher said, "of Ms. Rogers's criminal record?"
I tried to keep a straight face, but even Squares reacted to that one.
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Fisher started reading from the sheet of paper. "Shoplifting. Prostitution. Possession with intent to sell."
Squares made a scoffing noise. "Amateur hour."
"Armed robbery."
"Better," Squares said with a nod. He looked up at Fisher. "No conviction on that one, right?"
"That's correct."
"So maybe she didn't do it."
Fisher frowned again.
I plucked at my lower lip.
"Mr. Klein?"
"Can't help you," I said.
"Can't or won't."
I still plucked. "Semantics."
"This must all seem a little deja vu, Mr. Klein."
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"Covering up. First for your brother. Now your lover."
Thus, Coben puts Will on the FBI's bad side on two counts—and also begins to draw these two sides of the story together. A second node of conjunction occurs when The Ghost summons a New York gangster, Philip McGuane, to see him in a graveyard. The Ghost wants something from McGuane:
"You have sources, Philip. Access to information I don't." The Ghost looked at the tombstone, and for a moment McGuane thought he saw something almost human there. "Are you sure he's back?"
"Fairly sure," McGuane said.
"How do you know?"
"Someone with the FBI. The men we sent to Albuquerque were supposed to confirm it."
It quickly becomes clear that The Ghost and McGuane are talking about Will's brother, but alert readers will also pick up that Albuquerque is where Sheila's fingerprints were left at a murder scene. Thus, the runaways in Will's life have crossed somehow. A while later Will finds someone lying in wait for him in his apartment: The Ghost, whom we now find out is someone known to Will from his childhood, violent John Asselta, who is no less scary now:
He tilted his head, and I remembered the way he would simply lash out. John Asselta had been a classmate of Ken's, two years ahead of me at Livingston High School. He captained the wrestling team and was the Essex County lightweight champ two years running. He probably would have won the states, but he got disqualified for purposely dislocating a rival's shoulder. His third violation. I still remember the way his opponent screamed in pain.
Look again: Now The Ghost is tied to Ken, and the three plot layers are stitched together. Exactly how remains to be seen. Still more connections are forged later in the story. Katy, nineteen-year-old sister of the long-ago murdered Julie, forces her way into Will's investigation. It is Katy who finds the next node of conjunction, this one between her dead sister and Will's runaway girlfriend:
"I still don't get it, Katy."
"Sheila Rogers went to Haverton, Will. With Julie. They were in the same sorority."
I stood, stunned. "That's not possible."
"I can't believe you don't know. Sheila never told you?"
I shook my head. "Are you sure?"
"Sheila Rogers of Mason, Idaho. Majored in communications. It's all in the sorority booklet. I found it in an old trunk in the basement."
"I don't get it. You remembered her name after all these years?"
"Yeah."
"How come? I mean, do you remember the name of everyone in Julie's sorority?"
"No."
"So why would you remember Sheila Rogers?"
"Because," Katy said, "Sheila and Julie were roommates."
The plot, as they say, thickens. Or, to put it another way, Harlan Coben has found yet another clever way to weave his plot layers together. The two loves of Will's life, one murdered eleven years earlier and his current girlfriend, by this point in the story also murdered, knew each other. A trip to Haverford reveals that a third sorority sister was killed by strangulation, too—this time in North Dakota. Much more is going on than Will knew—or than the FBI told his family way back when. They must knowingly have lied to them about the case, Will realizes.
But why? Now the FBI is an additional thread woven in. The investigators are playing a double game, and how they fit into the overall picture is one of the many surprises waiting at the end of Coben's novel. Julie, Sheila, Ken, The Ghost, McGuane, and the FBI are all connected in a seemingly elaborate (but once revealed, fiendishly simple) set of circumstances. Coben skillfully spaces out his nodes of conjunction to keep us guessing—and also to keep his plot layers tightly woven.
In the last chapter I mentioned Robert Hellenga's rich and complex literary novel The Sixteen Pleasures, the story of American book conservator Margot Harrington, who travels to Florence to aid in the saving of rare books damaged in the disastrous flooding of the river Arno that year. As important as that
mission is, Margot also hopes to find in Italy the self that she somehow missed finding as a young woman back home. Hellenga, winner of many grants and prizes, employs a node of conjunction that in one brilliant stroke brings together Margot's outer and inner journeys.
Here is how the twin layers of Margot's story intersect: Her work brings her to a convent library where she is given an unusual project. Bound inside the covers of an old but ordinary prayer book is a rare copy of Aretino's lost erotic sonnets, The Sixteen Pleasures, banned and burned by the Pope of its time, illustrated with highly explicit drawings. It is worth a fortune. The abbess wishes both to preserve it and to keep it out of the hands of her bishop, who almost certainly will use it to finance his own interests instead of the convent's. She asks Margot to restore the volume—and then to arrange for its sale in secret.
For Margot, the volume is both the book conservation challenge of a lifetime and, in its content, an awakening to the sexuality lying dormant inside her. Her sensual side finds release in her affair with an older roguish and charming art scholar, Dottor Alessandro (Sandro) Postiglione, a man with a gift for happiness. As the story unfolds, Hellenga deftly shows us that Margo's act of book conservation and Sandro's awakening of Margot really are much the same thing:
The more I got to know this man, the more I loved him. I loved him for himself, and for his bald head and for his uncircumcised uccello (his little bird that sang so sweetly in the night); I loved him for his attentiveness; I loved him because he seemed so at home in this world and because at the same time he was so hopelessly unworldly; I loved him because he'd invested half his money in a fast-food restaurant and the other half in a scheme to export low-calorie wine to the United States; I loved to see him crossing the piazza, I loved to find him waiting for me in the station when my train came back from Prato; I loved to come home and find him waiting for me in his old silk robe; and I loved him for the things I learned about him from others, which seemed great and heroic: on the night of the flood, for example, he opened up his apartment to all the people living on the lower floors who had no place to go, and he waded to the Uffizi to help rescue the paintings in the restoration rooms in the basement and the self-portraits in the Vasari Corridor, which
was in danger of collapsing into the Arno.
And I loved him for being so good at his work, for being a true craftsman. He was a man who cared about things, who cherished them, who spent his life preserving them.
Possibly Sandro's greatest work of preservation is Margot herself; although, lest the story be too easy, it also gradually emerges that Sandro is not entirely a saint. Indeed, his charm conceals a selfishness and uniquely Catholic surrender to his fate—a fate that leads to heartbreak for Margot.
Also in the last chapter, I mentioned Nora Roberts's very different novel,
Carolina Moon. As we know, in this story Roberts creates five plot layers— that is, big problems—for her heroine, gift store owner Tory Bodeen, to overcome: (1) the crippling memory of the brutal beatings her father administered to Tory as a child; (2) the unsolved rape and murder of Tory's childhood friend Hope Lavelle; (3) the second sight that plagues Tory with painful visions of the suffering of others; (4) Hope's killer still at large, killing others, and now after Tory; (5) a love interest who is unwanted by Tory.
How does Roberts weave these plot layers together? Principally by having characters cross from one storyline to another. For instance, Tory's murdered childhood friend had an older brother, Cade Lavelle. Whom do you think falls in love with the adult Tory when she returns to her hometown? Bingo. Cade draws together the murder in Tory's past and the problem of her resistance to men.
A further node of conjunction is that Cade's mother, Margaret, and Hope's surviving twin sister, Faith, are not at all pleased by Tory's return to the town of Progress; indeed, they blame Tory for Hope's death, since it was a nighttime adventure jointly planned by Tory and Hope that drew Hope to the woods where she was murdered. In the present, Faith takes her hatred of Tory so far as to try to sabotage Tory's effort to heal from the beatings her father inflicted (layer one), as we see the first time Faith confronts Tory:
"You believe in fresh starts and second chances, Tory?"