Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook

by Donald Maass

  The Jardins des Tuileries was once a polluted pit? Yikes! But that's nothing. The Paris Louvre is shortly to be revealed as anything but a serene temple to art; rather, in Brown's novel, it is a cesspool of suspicion, secrets, codes, and murder. There is tension on every page of Brown's novel. Even when nothing big appears to be happening, small anxieties keep us on edge. This thriller thrills all the way.

  Karen Joy Fowler's literary novel Sister Noon, which I also discussed earlier, tells the story of a conventional, turn-of-the-twentieth-century San Francisco spinster, Lizzie Hayes, who falls under the influence of the colorful and questionable Mrs. Pleasant, a woman who is nominally a housekeeper for Thomas and Teresa Bell, but whose actual occupation is somewhere between society benefactress and voodoo queen. Lizzie has questions for Mrs. Pleasant and visits the Bell's "House of Mystery" where Mrs. Pleasant holds sway. Lizzie hopes to get Mrs. Pleasant alone, but the social ritual of serving tea gets in the way:

  Mrs. Pleasant entered the room. "Teresa," she said. She spoke quickly as she moved. "You've met Miss Hayes, then. I'm delighted. She's a woman of good works." She didn't look delighted. She didn't look surprised. Her face was gracious, but this could have been an illusion created by age, the texture of her skin, like a crumpled handkerchief. Her hair was white about her face, but still, even now, when she was in her seventies, mostly black. She's gathered it into a knot with bits curled tightly around her temples. Her eyes were sharp; they seemed to take much in while giving nothing away.

  "Really?" said Mrs. Bell. "Now, she didn't say. I'm rather a creature of ideals, myself."

  "Would you like a cup of tea?" [Mrs. Pleasant asks.]

  Lizzie did not want to stay long enough to drink a cup of tea. She didn't wish to make a social call. She didn't wish to conduct her business in front of the peculiar Mrs. Bell. She couldn't think of a courteous way to send Mrs. Bell from her own drawing room. "Tea would be lovely," she said. "Aren't you kind."

  She took a seat on the couch. Mrs. Pleasant vanished. . . .

  "Don't eat or drink nothing," Mrs. Bell warned Lizzie.

  Is the tea poisoned? Oh, dear. Do you see how Fowler creates strong undercurrents of tension in this outwardly gracious social situation? Read the passage again. Notice the ambivalence in Mrs. Pleasant, and in Lizzie. Notice Mrs. Pleasant's eyes, which are "sharp" and "take much in while giving nothing away." Then there is that warning from Mrs. Bell. Is anybody in this scene relaxed? No. Tension in this scene is as thick as clotted cream on a scone.

  Consequently, we can't wait to see how it comes out. This is in striking contrast to most tea scenes I see in manuscripts, which generally are an excuse to slack off tension, rather than build it. Coffee scenes aren't much better, by and large, despite the bigger caffeine jolt. Cigarettes are disappearing from novels, just as they are disappearing from offices and restaurants, but they, too, have big tension killing potential. They should come with a warning from the Editor General: Can Be Hazardous to Your Scene.

  As I noted in chapter three, Alice Sebold's literary novel The Lovely Bones is a story that, objectively speaking, has no outward tension. The tension that infuses the novel is the inner conflict experienced by Susie Salmon, the murdered fourteen-year-old who narrates the novel from heaven, who is dead but wishes to be alive so that she can grow up.

  But that is not to say that Sebold ignores the need for plot developments or tension within a scene. Early in the novel, Susie's father goes to visit the boy who had a crush on Susie, Ray Singh; however, when Susie's father arrives at the Singh home he encounters Ray's beautiful, icy, and hostile mother. She is outwardly cordial, but her protectiveness of her son is readily apparent:

  A little while later, as my father was thinking of how tired he was and how he had promised my mother to pick up some long-held dry cleaning, Mrs. Singh returned with tea on a tray and put it down on the carpet in front of him.

  "We don't have much furniture, I'm afraid. Dr. Singh is still looking for tenure."

  She went into an adjoining room and brought back a purpose floor pillow for herself, which she placed on the floor to face him.

  "Dr. Singh is a professor?" my father asked, though he knew this already, knew more than he was comfortable with about this beautiful woman and her sparsely furnished home.

  "Yes," she said, and poured the tea. It was quiet. She held out a cup to him, and as he took it she said, "Ray was with him the day your daughter was killed."

  He wanted to fall over into her.

  "That must be why you've come," she continued.

  "Yes," he said. "I want to talk to him."

  "He's at school right now," she said. "You know that." Her legs in the gold pants were tucked to her side. The nails on her

  toes were long and unpolished, their surface gnarled from years of dancing.

  "I wanted to come by and assure you I mean him no harm," my father said. I watched him. I had never seen him like this before. The words fell out of him like burdens he was delivering, back-logged verbs and nouns, but he was watching her feet curl against the dun-colored rug and the way the small pool of numbered light from the curtains touched her right cheek.

  "He did nothing wrong and loved your little girl. A schoolboy crush, but still."

  Here is another scene involving tea, and set in a living room to boot, but do you notice much cream-or-sugar-no-thank-you-isn't-it-lovely-weather dialogue going on here? No. The tension between Susie's father and Ray's mother is under the surface, but not far and not for long. It makes this scene matter.

  Put your tension meter on its most sensitive setting. When your fingers begin to type any scene set in a kitchen, living room, or car going from one place to another, or that involves tea, coffee, cigarettes, a bath, or reviewing prior action, I hope your tension meter will sink into the red zone and set off a screaming alarm in your brain. Low tension alert!

  If that doesn't work, take another look at your novel the next time it comes back from an agent or editor. Does it have enough tension to make every scene, even every paragraph, matter? Have a cup of tea and think it over. Maybe not.

  ______________EXERCISE

  Brewing Tension

  Step 1: Find a scene that involves your hero taking a shower or bath, drinking tea or coffee, smoking a cigarette or reviewing prior action. Look especially in the first fifty pages.

  Step 4: Find a scene set in a kitchen, living room, office, or in a car that your hero is driving from one place to another. Look especially in the first fifty pages.

  Step 5: Cut the scene.

  Step 2: Cut the scene.

  Step 3: If you cannot cut the scene, add tension.

  Step 6: If you cannot cut the scene, add tension.

  Follow-up work: Find ten more low-tension scenes to cut or to juice up with more tension.

  Conclusion: Ninety-nine percent of scenes involving tea, coffee, showers, baths, and cigarettes are by nature inactive. Same thing goes for kitchen, living room, office, and driving scenes. Cut them. They usually are filler. You think you need them, but probably you don't.

  Low Tension Part II: Burdensome Backstory

  One of the most common ways that inexperienced and even practiced novelists bog down their openings is with unnecessary backstory. Now hold on, you may be thinking, what do you mean "unnecessary"? Backstory tells us who a character is, where he came from, how he got to be the way he is. How can his actions make sense unless we know that stuff?

  I do not dispute that backstory can deepen our understanding of a character. That still does not make it necessary. Perhaps it is desirable to learn about a protagonist's past, at times, but when? That is where most novelists run into trouble: They presume that we, the readers, need to learn that history right away. But that is not so.

  Again and again in manuscripts I find my eyes skimming over backstory passages in chapters one, two, and even three. Backstory doesn't engage me, because it doesn't tell a story. It does not have tension to it, usually, or complicate problems.
However, once problems have been introduced, backstory can be artfully deployed to deepen them. It can be particularly useful in developing inner conflicts.

  In Dennis Lehane's Mystic River, Boston detective Sean Devine is in a bad state. As we know from earlier excerpts, he feels empty, devoid of care, unable even to summon interest in the murder of the teenage daughter of a long-ago childhood friend:

  He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.

  Katie Marcus was dead, yes. A tragedy. He understood that intellectually, but he couldn't feel it. She was just another body, just another broken light.

  The case itself is a public sensation and a profound puzzle. As the investigation twists and turns, we begin to wonder why Sean is so distant from it.

  Lehane withholds an explanation for nearly half the book, building Sean's inner mystery until one evening, alone in his apartment, when Sean can no longer avoid himself and the truth of what is bugging him:

  And his marriage, too, what was that if not shattered glass? Jesus Christ, he loved her, but they were as opposite as two people could get and still be considered part of the same species. Lauren was into theater and books and films Sean couldn't understand whether they had subtitles or not. She was chatty and emotional and loved to string words together in dizzying tiers that climbed and climbed toward some tower of language that lost Sean somewhere on the third floor.

  Lehane recounts the course of Sean's marriage and his wife Lauren's progression from college actress to black box director to stage manager for touring shows. But it isn't her travel that wears their marriage down:

  . . . Hell, Sean still wasn't sure what had done it, though he suspected it had something to do with him and his silences, the gradual dawn of contempt every cop grew into—a contempt for people, really, and inability to believe in higher motives and altruism.

  Her friends, who had once seemed fascinating to him, began to seem childish, covered in a real-world retardant of artistic theory and impractical philosophies. Sean would be spending his nights out in the blue concrete arenas where people raped and stole and killed for no other reason but the itch to do so, and then he'd suffer through some weekend cocktail party in which ponytailed heads argued through the night (his wife included) over the motivations behind human sin. The motivation was easy—people were stupid. Chimps. But worse, because chimps didn't kill one another over scratch tickets.

  She told him he was becoming hard, intractable, reductive in his thinking. And he didn't respond because there was nothing else to argue. The question wasn't whether he'd become those things, but whether the becoming was a positive or a negative.

  I don't know about you, but I ache for this weary young cop and his power-lessness to bridge the widening gulf between him and his vibrant wife. This sympathy is evoked by this sad backstory, however, only because we already are deep into the investigation. The facts of the case mean that Sean should care. He knows he should care. He wants to care, but he can't. Over time, his disaffection itself becomes a strong inner conflict that demands a solution. Sean knows that, without genuine zeal, he will be unable to investigate effectively.

  Thus, this backstory passage deepens Sean's inner conflict not just by revealing its source, but by showing us how inevitable, unavoidable, and, finally,

  unsolvable his marriage problems are. With his wife gone, his daughter taken away from him forever, how can Sean possibly regain his thirst for his work? Read it again: Lehane's backstory is not lifeless information; it serves to enhance Sean's inner conflict. But that is only because it comes later in the story.

  As I discussed in earlier chapters, the hero of Jodi Picoult's contemporary retelling of The Crucible, Salem Falls, is a man with a highly tragic backstory. A hint of it arrives on the novel's first page. Jack St. Bride is walking by himself along Route 10 in New Hampshire in the dead of winter, wearing only khaki pants, a white shirt, dress shoes, and a belt:

  He wished he had a winter coat, but you wore out of jail the same outfit you'd worn in. What he did have was forty-three dollars that had been in his wallet on the hot afternoon he was incarcerated, a ring of keys that opened doors to places where Jack no longer was welcome, and a piece of gum.

  Jail? For what crime was Jack incarcerated? Why has no one come to meet him upon his release? Questions leap unconsciously into our minds. Ninety-nine out of one hundred novelists would rush to answer those questions. Not Picoult. She lets them linger for many pages, adding an underlying tension to Jack's new life in the small town of Salem Falls.

  It is only after eighty-nine pages that Jack's employer and lover, Addie Peabody, learns that Jack was an all-girls prep school teacher and soccer coach who plead guilty to the rape of a student. Jack did not rape the girl, but the explanation of how he came to plead guilty is further withheld. Finally, a chapter of backstory halfway through the novel shows Jack in his previous job and his special relationship with a fragile and unstable minister's daughter, teenage Catherine Marsh, who has a dangerous crush on him.

  A couple of key incidents set Jack up for a fall: a toga-clad re-creation of the Peloponnesian War places Catherine's bra in his possession. Later, she pleads with him for help: Her boyfriend wants to have sex and she's not prepared. Jack agrees to drive her to a Planned Parenthood clinic in secret. Their close coach-player rapport works against him even further when Catherine turns her inner pain outward and reveals to her father her "affair" with Jack. Unfortunately, Jack now has her bra in his briefcase and undeniably took her to get birth control pills. His goose is cooked.

  Picoult easily could have left it at that. However, she understands the magnification effect of backstory. Later in the novel, as support for Jack dwindles, she reinforces the goodness of his character for the reader with several more backstory passages. The birth control pill incident is shown in depth, revealing how deeply Jack cares for his students. His sensitivity is shown again in a trip back to Jack's own high school soccer days and his realization that his jock teammates' way of "seducing" girls (getting them drunk and then passing them around) is hurtful and wrong.

  There are even more backstory passages, including a prison sequence that shows Jack's strength, fortitude, and refusal to break. Each passage is strategi-

  cally placed at low moments to bolster sympathy for Jack, or to contrast his good qualities with the small-minded actions of others. If a piece of Jack's life has no conflict-enhancing value, Picoult leaves it out. For instance, we never find out anything about Jack's father, or why he became a teacher, or how he got hooked on the television game show Jeopardy. Why should we? That info contributes nothing to conflict.

  In earlier chapters, I discussed Carolina Moon, Nora Roberts's novel about the return of a wounded young woman, Tory Bodeen, to her hometown of Progress, South Carolina. At age eighteen Tory fled a physically abusive father and went to New York, where she began working in retail stores and gained the experience that will allow her to open an upscale gift boutique in Progress. Early in the novel, however, Roberts makes us aware that something awful happened to Tory in New York.

  A hint of this tragedy arrives unexpectedly when Tory sells the Charleston home in which she is living to raise funds for her fresh start. After the closing her real estate lawyer, Abigail Lawrence, wishes Tory well in her new life, but cannot resist satisfying her curiosity about something:

  "I hope you're happy, Tory."

  "I'll be fine."

  "Fine's one thing." To Tory's surprise, Abigail took her hand, then leaned over and brushed her cheek in a light kiss. "Happy's another. Be happy."

  "I intend to." Tory drew back. There was something in the hand-to-hand connection, something in the concern in Abigail's eyes. "You knew," Tory murmured.

  "Of course I did." Abigail gave Tory's fingers a light squeeze before releasing them. "News from New York winds it way down here, and some of us even pay attention to it now and again. You changed your hair, your name, but I recognized you. I'
m good with faces."

  "Why didn't you say anything? Ask me?"

  "You hired me to see to your business, not pry into it."

  What is the terrible thing that happened to Tory in New York, so terrible that it caused her to change her name and appearance? Roberts reveals nothing further for almost two hundred pages, letting the unanswered question lend the story underlying tension. Finally, in a confrontation with Margaret La-velle, mother of Tory's new lover, Cade, we get another hint. Margaret blames Tory for the murder of her daughter and Tory's childhood friend, Hope, and now warns Tory to stay away from Cade:

  "If you go against my wishes in this, I'll ruin you. You'll lose everything, as you did before. When you killed that child in New York."

  Tory killed a child? Naturally, we want to find out the details, but Roberts makes us wait until the final quarter of the novel. At last we learn that Tory had put her gift of second sight to work for the New York City Police Department and, along the way, had fallen in love with a police detective. Her life was almost normal until one day she provided information about a child kidnapper, a fired housekeeper with a grudge. The kidnapper wanted only money, she reported, indicating that paying the ransom was the safest course.

  Unfortunately, her second sight did not extend to the ex-housekeeper's cohorts who, once they had the money in hand, killed not only the child, but the housekeeper and two pursuing policemen. Tory wound up taking the blame, some of it dished out by the detective who she had thought loved her. The guilt has followed her, never entirely being relieved despite years of therapy and, now, Cade's sympathy.

  As guilty secrets go, this is pretty tame compared to Sophie's Choice, but that is not the point. The point is that Nora Roberts places this backstory late in the novel and thereby gets from it a double punch: It not only fills in Tory's character history, but deepens the pain she is feeling late in the story over the visions she again has begun to have of the victims of the serial killer who haunts her past and present.