Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook

by Donald Maass

  Because once again, my life has changed overnight. If I have learned anything, it is that nothing goes as I plan. I need to adjust, to move, to allow myself to go with whatever happens, however it happens.

  I wish I had done that more with Laura.

  I think of her sometimes, usually at sunrise, when the light is so golden that it makes the land seem brighter than it can ever be. And, despite myself, I find hope in that light.

  It is as Martin said on the last night of his tife. Only a man who has seen the darkest night can appreciate the light.

  I am just beginning to appreciate it. And for the first time, I am turning toward it, believing it will lead me home.

  Admittedly, Hamilton and Nelscott are writing series, so it is perhaps easier for them to write open-ended last lines than for some others. With stand-alone novels, a last line signals the close of the story. It is the final note of resolution and release, and so a touch of lyricism is called for.

  Lisa Wingate's warm and life-affirming literary novel, Tending Roses, tells the story of suburban achiever Kate Bowman, who travels with her husband, Ben, and infant son to the family farm in Missouri to face the task of convincing her frail and memory-impaired grandmother to enter a nursing home. It turns out Kate and Ben have bigger problems than Kate's grandmother, though, and it is through reading her grandmother's journal, an account of simpler times, that Kate discovers the secrets of a happy life.

  At the end of the novel (get out your hankies) Kate's grandmother dies. Kate, newly pregnant, goes to her grandmother's grave to tend the roses growing there. There in the graveyard at dusk, Kate at last savors the peace and joy in life that she has received from her grandmother's life:

  The light around me dimmed slowly as another day surrendered its grasp on the land. On the hillside, the roses nodded on the breeze, as if inviting the fireflies to come out and dance.

  Such a pretty line! Wingate captures a feeling of closure, of peace, of ending, and of beginning all at the same time. The surrender is not the day's, but Kate's; it is a surrender to life itself.

  Have you yet reached the last line of your current novel? If you have, go back. If you haven't, pause when you get there. Take the time to get your last line just right. Whether its leads forward or lifts our spirits or softly closes a door, make it a line we will remember—especially when we see your next novel on the bookstore shelves.

  ________EXERCISE

  Enhancing First and Last Lines

  Step 1: What is the intrigue factor in your opening line? What question does it pose, or what puzzle does it present? Write that down.

  Step 2: If you are not able to answer the question in the first step, try shortening your first line. If that doesn't work, audition your second line for the lead spot. Or combine elements from your first paragraph into one short, super-charged sentence. Whatever you do, choose or construct a different first line.

  Follow-up work: Work on your last line until it has wit, a touch of poetry, or a sense of dawning peace. Try it out on others.

  Conclusion: Whether it is a sigh of satisfaction, a soaring passage of word art, or nothing more than a clever exit line, put the same effort into your last line as went into your first. A book needs front and back covers to hold together; in the same way a novel needs strong brackets to bind it.

  Moments in Time

  There's no doubt that immersing ourselves in another world is one of the pleasures of reading a well-written novel. But as a writer, how can you capture the world of the story, and the lives of its characters, in just the right way? As the exercise in this chapter shows, it is, in part, a matter of selecting individual moments to freeze for the reader.

  In Jeanne Ray's Julie and Romeo, sixty-ish Boston florist Julie Roseman stirs up her family's longstanding feud with a rival florist family when she falls in love with her sixty-ish counterpart, Romeo Cacciamani. Their first kiss erases all past wrongs and ignores all future conflicts:

  This was the part that no one told me while they discussed the evils of the Cacciamanis. No one said they were such good kissers. I was dreaming, sinking, swimming in a warm dark river of kissing, kissing hands and chins, every kiss soft. I could smell the soap on his skin and the fabric softener in his undershirt. I could smell his hair and taste his mouth, which still tasted like sake and rice. Oh, Romeo, this makes it all worthwhile, all those nights of working late and coming home alone, crying over the books and the roses that came in with brown spots on every petal, the worrying about Sandy and Nora and the children, the anger at Mort, the missing my parents, all of it lifted off of me and was washed back by the sea of tender kissing, maybe not forever but for now, and frankly, what else was there?

  Who knew that fabric softener could be so romantic? Ray uses the details at hand along with the drunken, repetitive rush of kissing imagery to suggest a moment suspended in time. She does not describe Julie's emotions, but evokes them by saying what they are not: not loneliness, not sorrow, not worrying, not anger, not missing the departed. Kissing is the opposite of that. We see exactly what she means.

  This frozen moment is warm because it captures the out-of-time feeling of

  kissing. Think about it: When you kiss your partner, do you think about anything else? (Oh? You do? Sorry. Then you are missing the moment. Get into it, why don't you?)

  An extremely fine distinction between one place and another is drawn by Dennis Lehane in Mystic River. Lehane's story, as we know, concerns three childhood friends in the blue-collar section of Boston known as East Buckingham: Sean Devine, Jimmy Macus, and Dave Boyle. At the outset there might not seem to be much to distinguish one boy from another, but not all of them live on the same side of East Buckingham:

  Jimmy and Dave came from the Flats, down by the Penitentiary Channel on the south side of Buckingham Avenue. It was only twelve blocks from Sean's street, but the Devines were north of the Ave., part of the Point, and the Point and the Flats didn't mix much.

  It wasn't like the Point glittered with gold streets and silver spoons. It was just the Point, working class, blue collar, Chevys and Fords and Dodges parked in front of simple A-frames and the occasional small Victorian. But people in the Point owned. People in the Flats rented. Point families went to church, stayed together, held signs on street corners during election months. The Flats, though, who knew what they did, living like animals, sometimes, ten to an apartment, trash in their streets—Wellie-ville, Sean and his friends at Saint Mike's called it, families living on the dole, sending their kids to public schools, divorcing. So while Sean went to Saint Mike's Parochial in black pants, black tie, and blue shirt, Jimmy and Dave went to the Lewis M. Dewey School on Blaxston. Kids at the Looey & Dooey got to wear street clothes, which was cool, but they usually wore the same ones three out of five days, which wasn't. There was an aura of grease to them—greasy hair, greasy skin, greasy collars and cuffs. A lot of the boys had bumpy welts of acne and dropped out early. A few of the girls wore maternity dresses to graduation.

  So if it wasn't for their fathers, they probably would never have been friends.

  Why does Lehane bother to delineate the differences between the Point and the Flats, a difference of only twelve blocks? Because later in the story these small distinctions will be greatly magnified. Sean becomes a police detective, while Jimmy owns a bar. Their different approaches to enacting justice when Jimmy's eighteen-year-old daughter is murdered is one of many layers of tension in this multi-layered novel. The difference between a private school uniform and street clothes grows up into the difference between a badge and a baseball bat; the difference between the rule of the law and the law of the jungle.

  In Alan Furst's finely written and literary-feeling WWII espionage novel The Polish Officer, Captain Alexander de Milja finds himself recruited into the Polish resistance and put in charge of smuggling the country's gold reserves out of Warsaw beneath the floorboards of a train. As the train chugs through the countryside south of Warsaw, the passengers are given a choice o
f disembarking or continuing onward:

  From the last car, de Milja watched the crowd carefully. But the reaction was subdued: a number of family conferences conducted in urgent whispers, and avalanche of questions that God himself, let alone a train conductor, couldn't have answered, and more than a little head shaking and grim smiling at the bizarre twists and turns that life now seemed to take. The Polish people, de Milja realized, had already absorbed the first shock of war and dislocation; now it was a question of survival; ingenuity, improvisation, and the will to live through catastrophe and see the other side of it. So when the train stopped it Pilava, only a few people got off. The farther from Warsaw the better—what consensus there was among the passengers seemed to follow that line of reasoning.

  Furst uses this brief pause, occasioned by a piece of incidental detail, to freeze a unique moment in the chronology of Poland's fall to the Nazi's. It is only a few days into the occupation, yet already people have begun to adjust to the new reality. They are newly flexible. Their experience has not yet hardened with long oppression. They are defeated, yet it is the early days.

  Indeed, a month later the mood of the Polish public has shifted again:

  Now the war was over, a pleasant autumn.

  Hitler had what he wanted. Maybe he did, after all, have a right to it, a case could be made, you had to accept the reality of politics in central Europe. The days were cool and sunny, the harvest in, a little fog in the morning and geese overhead. Germany had Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and was, officially, officially, at war with England and France. But this was politics; eddies and swirls and tidal shifts in the affairs of diplomats. Slowly the sun warmed the squares and plazas, the boulevards and little winding streets and, by midmorning, all across Europe, it was just right for a coffee on the cafe terrace.

  What a stunning evocation of the ordinariness of a sunny autumn day during wartime! But not just any day: a day in the first autumn of defeat, before rationing, before the restrictions of occupation, before the walling off of Warsaw's ghetto and before the deportations to labor camps. It is a unique moment in Poland's—really, all of Europe's—history, and Furst's eye for detail gives us a snapshot of the minute, the mood, the public shrug of acceptance, the remoteness of far-off politics, the sunny stillness in the cafes and plazas of Warsaw. Once again, this moment in time will quickly pass, but its freezing in this passage gives Furst's story a sense of forward progress, a step along the way.

  In her breakout first novel Sullivan's Island, South Carolina novelist Dorothea Benton Frank captures a moment that is not so much historical as social and political. Frank's novel tells the layered story of Susan Hayes, who returns to her family's summer home on Sullivan's Island to reinvent herself after the breakup of her marriage. In alternate chapters, Frank flashes back to the 1950s to recount the events leading up to the death of Susan's father at the hands, Susan suspects, of the Klu Klux Klan. It is a time of racial upheaval, a fact that Susan notes as she and her father drive across the island to pick up their new housekeeper, who is the latest in a long string of black housekeepers in their home:

  We lowered the car windows and didn't utter a single syllable about how hot the car was as he backed out of the driveway and started down Middle Street toward the small business district. It was a sticky Saturday in the middle of June and we'd been out of school and shoes for about three weeks as another summer got under way. The United States was in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, which as far as we knew was something happening at lunch counters in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and Montgomery, Alabama. When Medgar Evers was murdered, we thought for a moment how that could happen to our daddy, but he was white and nothing like that ever happened around Charleston. We were frightened, but we were just kids and not focused on it. All the same, violence was everywhere that summer, in the newspapers and in our house.

  Because of the high attrition rate of our housekeepers, we hadn't ever had a stretch of time to consider the grave injustices done to the Negro population at a close look. But the world was evolving in front of our eyes and we were changing our minds about a lot of things.

  This passage may not be as elegantly written as Furst's, but it nevertheless freezes a moment of American social history and relates it to what is happening to Susan during one childhood summer.

  Sullivan's Island was an original paperback that initially shipped, I am told, 450,000 copies and hit The New York Times best-seller list for three weeks. Today it has more than 700,000 copies in print. This goes to show that elegant prose isn't the key to success. A great story is, and capturing a story's social context is one way to give it a sense of resonance; ripples that spread outward and lend a story a sense of larger significance.

  Whether it is suspending a single moment and isolating its emotional details from all other moments, or whether it is capturing the shifts in the public mood from one week to the next, or whether it is picking up the social nuances that make one place different from the place next door to it, freezing a moment in time is a highly effective way to heighten the reality of the story.

  How do you delineate these in your current manuscript? Can you identify six passages in which you go beyond simple scene setting to capture the flavor of a moment in time, the feeling of an historical era of the uniqueness of a place like no other?

  If not, is there any reason not to put that stuff in?

  ______EXERCISE

  Freezing Moments in Time

  Step 1: Find in your novel a moment of transition, a pause, a moment of character definition or testing, a place where the action can be momentarily frozen, or the prelude to (or the aftermath of) an important plot event.

  Step 2: What are three things that make this minute in time different from any other minute in time? Write those down.

  Step 3: What are three things that make this place uniquely different from any other place? Write those down.

  Step 4: What are three things that define the social world of the story at this precise moment? Write those down.

  Step 5: Use the details generated in any of the steps above to craft a paragraph that freezes for the reader how the world looks and feels to your point of view character at this moment. Pin down the unique feeling of this time, this place, or this social world. Start writing now.

  Follow-up work: Choose four other moments in time to freeze in the novel and delineate them using the steps above.

  Conclusion: Here is where to apply your powers of observation. You notice things, don't you? You get the world's ironies, appreciate its wonders, and pick up details that others miss, right? Of course you do. You are a writer. Okay, now is the time to use those gifts. Give your protagonist the same awareness of the world that you have, or maybe one that is keener. His observations of time, place, and society will further reveal, delineate, and define this character. How we look at the world is as distinctive as the fingerprints we leave on drinking glass. Make sure that your protagonist has a distinctive take on things, too. He will spring alive in yet new ways for your reader.

  Inner Change

  We grow and change. We also note the growth and change in others. The moments in breakout novels in which such changes are observed are milestones that measure the journey that is each story. Changes in characters— or rather, characters' perceptions of the changes within themselves and others—may happen within a scene or across long stretches of time. It doesn't matter. Inner changes calibrate a plot, lending it a sense of inexorable progress and pace.

  Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's best-selling series Left Behind is a saga of the days following the Rapture foretold in the book of Revelation. The first volume, Left Behind, begins with a vivid account of the aftermath of the instant disappearance of millions of faithful people selected for salvation. The novel opens on a full 747 passenger jet flying overnight from Europe to Chicago. In the middle of the night one hundred passengers vanish, their clothing and jewelry remaining behind in their seats. The point-of-view character in this scen
e is the plane's pilot, Rayford Steele, who at the novel's opening is fantasizing about his senior flight attendant, Hattie Durham, a young and sexy contrast to Rayford's fanatically religious wife:

  Rayford tried to tell himself it was his wife's devotion to a divine suitor that caused his mind to wander. But he knew the real reason was his own libido.

  Besides, Hattie Durham was drop-dead gorgeous. No one could argue with that. What he enjoyed most was that she was a toucher. Nothing inappropriate, nothing showy. She simply touched his arm as she brushed past or rested her hand gently on his shoulder when she stood behind his seat in the cockpit.

  The simultaneous disappearance of millions of people has caused chaos on the ground. Traffic accidents and airline crashes are the first consequences. Following a harrowing landing at O'Hare, Rayford and his crew find the airport in a state of disarray. Because roads out of the airport are blocked,

  Rayford hops a helicopter ride away from the terminal soon after learning that his wife and son probably are among the disappeared. He also finds Hattie Durham in the only available seat in the helicopter—his lap:

  He had been playing around on the edges of his mind with the girl in his lap, though he had never gone so far as touching her, even when she often touched him. Would he want to live if Hattie Durham were the only person he cared about? And why did he care about her? She was beautiful and sexy and smart, but only for her age. They had little in common. Was it only because he was convinced Irene was gone that he now longed to hold his wife?

  There was no affection in his embrace of Hattie Durham just now, nor in hers. Both were scared to death, and flirting was the last thing on their minds.

  In this passage, LaHaye and Jenkins convey a remorseful change of view on Rayford Steele's part, but at the same time demonstrate the effect of the profound upheaval that is the Rapture. The event blows away temporary desires and petty concerns, and puts old loves into a new perspective. In the face of disaster, what really matters is thrown into sharp relief.