Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook

by Donald Maass

  Well, what do you know? Given their history, it is astonishing to hear these revelations from Kate. Kate and Luke have a future after all, which feels all the more remarkable because Spindler has led us to believe that any further contact between Kate and Luke, never mind future, was impossible. It is a gigantic change of direction, and adds a moment of high drama to Spindler's novel.

  Now if only real life college girlfriends reversed themselves like that!

  In City of Bones, as we know from earlier discussions, mystery writer Michael Connelly brings us inside the investigation of the chronic abuse and murder of a boy whose buried bones are unearthed after twenty years. In the course of the novel homicide detective Hieronymous (Harry) Bosch begins a love affair with a rookie cop, Julia Brasher. Julia is older than your average rookie, having entered the academy after fleeing from her father's law firm. When he meets her, she is already cynical but inexperienced enough to still be awed and excited by the job.

  Their love affair goes against department rules (Harry is supervisor rank), but there is something undeniable and lovely about their relationship. Harry feels lucky to be with her. It is obvious that he is falling in love with a good woman.

  And then she dies, shot while a witness is being detained in a parking lot.

  At first we think she will be okay, since she is shot in the shoulder, but the bullet hit a bone—bones again!—and ricocheted inside her body, piercing her heart. Harry's own heart is pierced through, too, as we see at Julia's graveside:

  He grabbed a handful of dirt from the mound and walked over and looked down. A whole bouquet and several single flowers had been dropped on top of the casket. Bosch thought about holding Julia in his bed just two nights before. He wished he had seen what was coming. He wished he had been able to take the hints and put them into a clear picture of what she was doing and where she was going.

  Slowly, he raised his hand out and let the dirt slide through his fingers.

  "City of bones," he whispered.

  This passage not only captures the pathos of a love lost too soon, but sends echoes of the sacrifices it takes to be a cop reverberating through the rest of the novel. In a way, we are not surprised by the decision that Harry makes at the end of the novel when, getting ready to move offices due to a promotion, he ruminates as he is cleaning out his desk drawer:

  When the drawer was almost clear, he pulled out a folded piece of paper and opened it. There was a message on it [written by Julia].

  Where are you, tough guyf

  Bosch studied it for a long time. Soon it made him think about all that had happened since he had pulled his car to a stop on Wonderland Avenue just thirteen days before. It made him think about what he was doing and where he was going. It made him think of Trent and Stokes and most of all Arthur Delacroix and Julia Brasher. It made him think about what Golliher had said while studying the bones of the murder victims from millenniums ago. And it made him know the answer to the question on the piece of paper.

  "Nowhere," he said out loud.

  Harry puts his badge and gun in the desk drawer, locks it, and walks out, Code 7, done with police work. It is impossible to be unaffected by the death of a lover, and Harry is no exception. Connelly does not duck out on the consequences of the high moment he created in Julia's fatal shooting. He brings those consequences down full force on his detective—and on us.

  There you have it, story events that create high moments: forgiveness, self-sacrifice, reversals of direction, moral choices, and death. Do any of these occur in your current manuscript? If not, is there a place for them?

  _EXERCISE

  Creating High Moments

  Step 1: In your novel is there one character who can be forgiven by another? What is being forgiven? When? Why? Write out the passage in which that happens.

  Step 2: In your novel is there a character who can sacrifice herself, or something dearly loved, in some way? Who is it? What does he sacrifice? Note it now.

  Step 3: In your novel is there a character who can change direction? Who is it? What causes the turnabout? When does it happen? Note it now.

  Step 4: In your novel is there a character who faces a moral choice? Who? What choice? How can that choice become more difficult? Make notes.

  Step 5: In your novel is there a character whom we do not expect to die, but who can nevertheless perish? Kill that character.

  Follow-up work: Using the notes you made above, incorporate each of those high moments into your novel.

  Conclusion: For a novel to feel big, big things must happen: irrevocable changes, hearts opening, hearts breaking, saying farewell to one well loved whom we will never meet again. Create these moments. Use them. They are the high moments that make a novel highly dramatic.

  Bridging Conflict

  Did you ever arrive early for a party? It's awkward, isn't it? The music isn't yet playing. Your host and hostess make hurried conversation with you while they set out the chips and dip. You offer to help, but there's nothing you can do. You feel dumb for getting there too soon.

  That's how I feel when I read the opening pages of many manuscripts. Pieces of the story are being assembled, but nothing is happening just yet, and often the guest of honor, the protagonist, hasn't arrived. In fact, no one I like has shown up yet. Later on the story will be in full swing, but for now I wonder why I bothered to accept this invitation.

  Bridging conflict is a story element that takes care of that. It is the temporary conflict or mini-problem or interim worry that makes opening material matter. There are thousands of ways to create it. Even the anticipation of change is a kind of conflict that can make us lean forward and wonder, What is going to happen?

  Brian Moore is one of our more reliable novelists, having brought us The Statement, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, among many others. In The Magician's Wife, Moore spins the story of Emmeline Lambert, who in Second Empire France is married to a stage magician and inventor, Henri, who is recruited by the government to so dazzle an Algerian marabout (living saint) with his illusions that, outclassed, the marabout will be unable to wage a holy war. That, anyway, is the plan.

  However, Emmeline does not immediately know that. Her husband tells her only that they have been invited by the Emperor to attend a weeklong series, a lavish royal house party. Emmeline, who is from a modest middle-class background, is terrified by the prospect and raises objections: "A week? What are we going to wear? We don't belong in that world."

  She also worries that Henri is being asked in order to perform, that she has no ladies maid and he no valet. Her husband overrules all her objections, stating that it is an honor to be invited, that they can afford the clothes, and in any event the Emperor has summoned him on a matter of national

  importance. This simple argument nicely supplies the tension that holds our attention until the next stage of the game.

  I hate most prologues. Typically, they are "grabber" scenes intended to hook the reader's attention with sudden violence or a shocking surprise. Mostly they do neither, not because they lack action but because the action is happening to characters about whom I know little; indeed, it is common in prologues for novelists not to name the players. When a nameless victim is killed by a faceless sicko . . . well, honestly, why should I care? I can see that twenty times a night on television.

  And then there are prologues like that in Steve Martini's courtroom thriller The Jury, which opens with the introduction of a beautiful and ambitious ex-model turned molecular electronics researcher (yeah, I know) in San Diego named Kalista Jordan. As she relaxes one evening in a hot tub at her apartment complex, she hears unusual sounds in the courtyard around her. A killer is creeping up on her.

  Many authors would be content with the low-grade suspense that generates, but Martini doesn't leave it at that. He adds tension by taking us inside Kalis-ta's head to reveal the difficulties she is having at her research lab:

  This evening she'd had another argument with Da
vid. This time he'd actually put his hands on her, in front of witnesses. He'd never done that before. It was a sign of his frustration. She was winning and she knew it. She would call the lawyer and tell him in the morning. Physical touching was one of the legal litmus tests of harassment. While she was sure she was more than a match for David when it came to academic politics, the tension took its toll. The hot tub helped to ease it. Enveloped in the indolent warmth of the foaming waters, she thought about her next move.

  It emerges that Kalista seeks to be the director of the lab and its twenty-million-dollar annual budget. To reach her goal, she has undercut her boss's authority on part of the funding and has developed allies in the chancellor's office.

  What will be the downfall of Dr. David Crone (the David mentioned above), though, is his complete lack of tact. When Kalista is murdered, the police seize on him as the suspect with the best motive. Crone does himself no favors with his poor social grace. It is up to Martini's crack attorney, Paul Madriani, to clear the name of this difficult client. The first chapter picks up the trial midstream, but meanwhile Martini has held our attention and simultaneously has won sympathy for the defendant by showing us the victim's true colors while she was alive.

  One of the most sustained examples of bridging conflict in recent fiction can be found in Daniel Mason's tour-de-force debut novel The Piano Tuner. This historical tale tells of a London piano tuner, Edgar Drake, who specializes in rare Erard grand pianos. Drake is recruited to journey to upper Burma to tune an Erard that was transported to the far jungle at the insistence of an eccentric army Surgeon-General and naturalist, Anthony Carroll, whose whims are tolerated by the army only because he is able to keep the peace among the local tribes. Drake is intrigued by Carroll's reputation and the challenge of getting there.

  He sets off, but it is almost two hundred pages before Drake reaches Carroll. The trip from London, across the Mediterranean by steamship, over the Red Sea, though India by train, by ship to Rangoon, then on to Mandalay, there to languish for many days due to bureaucratic delays, should, by rights, be nothing but boring travelogue. Mason, however, fills the journey with bridging tension of every type.

  There is Drake's longing for his wife, and his long letters home telling of his maladjustments to the strange conditions he meets. He meets strangers with mysterious stories, embarks on a tragic tiger hunt, and encounters friction in the barracks. His adventures escalate tales of Carroll—from both those who hate him and those who venerate him—and at last, in Mandalay, he meets Khin Myo, the mysterious Burmese woman who becomes his guide and with whom he becomes—tragically, it turns out—infatuated.

  Mason does not indulge in mere travelogue; instead, he turns Drake's journey into a series of mini-stories. The dread and fascination Drake feels about meeting Carroll gradually builds, too, making the trip itself one that I, for one, thought could only end in a sense of anti-climax. I was wrong. Carroll proves to be every bit as large as anticipated.

  How do you bridge from your opening page to your novel's main events? Do you just get us there, filling space with arrival, setup, and backstory? Or do you use the preliminary pages of your manuscript to build tension of a different sort?

  _____EXERCISE

  Developing Bridging Conflict

  Step 1: Does your novel include a prologue that does not involve your protagonist, or one or more opening chapters in which your hero does not appear? Move your hero's first scene to page one. Yes, really do it. See how it feels.

  Step 2: Once your protagonist arrives on stage, what business do you feel must be included before the first big change, conflict, problem, or plot development arrives? Write down those steps.

  Step 3: What is the bridging conflict that carries us through those opening steps to the first big change, conflict, problem, or plot development? Write it down.

  Step 4: Open your manuscript to page one. How can you make that bridging conflict stronger at this point? Make a change that makes the conflict more immediate and palpable.

  Step 5: Turn to page two. Repeat the previous step. Continue until you reach the first big change, conflict, problem, or plot development.

  Follow-up work: Find four places in your novel, ones that fall between plot developments or scenes, in which the problem does not immediately arrive. Add bridging conflict.

  Conclusion: To maintain high tension it isn't necessary to keep your novel's central conflict squarely front and center. Bridging conflicts adds contrast and variety, and makes even peripheral action matter. It is what keeps your readers' eyes glued always to the page, even when your main plot is taking a break.

  Low Tension Part I: The Problem With Tea

  The most controversial part of my Writing the Breakout Novel workshop is this exercise, in which I direct authors to cut scenes set in kitchens or living rooms or cars driving from one place to another, or that involve drinking tea or coffee or taking showers or baths, particularly in a novel's first fifty pages. Participants looked dismayed when they hear this directive, and in writer's chat rooms on the Web it is debated in tones of alarm. No one wants to cut such material.

  Best-selling author Jennifer Crusie even tracked me down at a writers retreat in Kentucky to debate the point about kitchens. She argued that kitchens are the hearth and heart of family, the anchoring point where what is normal is demonstrated and what is abnormal is discussed. Without kitchen scenes, she argued, how can you tell a family story?

  Indeed. It's hard to find a novel, even a novel discussed in this workbook, that does not have scenes set in kitchens, cars, showers, or what have you. Tea and coffee frequently are served. And they work. So how do these breakout authors get away with it when in 99.9 percent of manuscripts that I read such scenes invite me to skim (which I do)?

  The reason is that in careless hands such scenes lack tension. They do not add new information. They do not subtract allies, deepen conflict, or open new dimensions of character.

  Typically, scenes like these relax tension, review what already has happened, and in general take a breather. They are a pause, a marking of time, if not a waste of time. They do not do anything. They do not take us anywhere. They do not raise questions or make us tense or worried. No wonder they do not hold my attention. Am I being harsh? If you go by the novels I have cited as examples in this workbook, it might seem so. Hey, these novels are best sellers, critical successes, and award winners.

  But these are breakout novels. Yes, they work, even when tea is being served.

  The manuscripts that I am complaining about. . . well, frankly, most of them never see print. And for good reasons. Let's take a look at some breakout novels and see how their authors make potentially low-tension scenes work.

  Is there anything necessary about driving a hero across Paris from his hotel to a murder scene? No, not really. Suppose that scene tells us nothing new about the murder? Worse, suppose it involves a catalog of Paris monuments and sights? Worse still, suppose the author takes up an entire chapter with this drive. Does that sound dynamic? Certainly not.

  However, in the hands of Dan Brown in his massive best-seller The Da Vinci Code, which I discussed earlier, that is exactly what occupies the third chapter. Brown's protagonist, American symbologist Robert Langdon, is driven from the Hotel Ritz to the Paris Louvre museum in a police car. He is not driven at top speed. No one's life is at stake. Langdon takes in the sights as they go. But Brown takes this mundane act of traveling from here to there and invests it with subtle tension:

  Outside, the city was just now winding down—street vendors wheeling cars of candied amandes, waiters carrying bags of garbage to the curb, a pair of late night lovers cuddling to stay warm in a breeze scented with jasmine blossom. The Citroen navigated the chaos with authority, it's dissonant two-tone siren parting the traffic like a knife.

  "Le capitaine was pleased to discover you were still in Paris tonight," the agent said, speaking for the first time since they'd left the hotel. "A fortunate coincidence."

&nbs
p; Langdon was feeling anything but fortunate, and coincidence was a concept he did not entirely trust. As someone who had spent his life exploring the hidden interconnectivity of disparate emblems and ideologies, Langdon viewed the world as a web of profoundly intertwined histories and events. The connections may be invisible, he often preached to his symbology classes at Harvard, but they are always there, buried just beneath the surface.

  Notice how Brown uses the contrast of the late-night city winding down with the car's siren cutting traffic "like a knife" to create a mood of unease. The driver's casual, offhand comments are too studied. They feel menacing, somehow. Langdon himself is uneasy. Nothing is an accident, he believes; everything is connected. He is in this police car for a reason he cannot yet see, and is connected to events and mysteries that have not yet been revealed.

  That is indeed the case, as we soon learn, but even in this preliminary moment Brown is working to create a sense of foreboding. He keeps Langdon, and us, off balance. And what of the sights? Brown uses even these, working from Langdon's unique point of view, to show us that things are not always what they seem:

  When they reached the intersection of Rue de Rivoli, the traffic light was red, but the Citroen didn't slow. The agent gunned the sedan across the junction and sped onto a wooded section of Rue Castiglione, which served as the northern entrance to the famed Tuileries Gardens—Paris's own version of Central Park. Most tourists mistranslated Jardins des Tuileries as relating to the thousands of tulips that bloomed here, but Tuileries was actually a literal reference to something far less romantic. This park had once been an enormous, polluted excavation pit from which Parisian contractors mined clay to manufacture the city's famous red roofing tiles—or tuiles.