Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook

by Donald Maass

  How do parents look at their children? Is there any way to describe them that is not a cliche? Of course there is. In Skyward, discussed previously, Mary Alice Monroe finds one by being true to her novel's protagonist, Harris Henderson, head of a South Carolina rescue clinic for birds of prey. Harris's whole life is ospreys, owls, kites, and eagles—so much so that he feels helpless to raise his own pre-schooler, Marion.

  This is particularly a problem when Marion, a problem child at the best of times who was abandoned by her mother, develops juvenile diabetes. The finger prick needed for an insulin level check six times a day becomes an occasion for force-ten temper tantrums:

  He looked again at his daughter curled up on the couch watching TV. How sweet and innocent she appeared. And how deceiving it was. He shook his head, took a deep breath and braced himself for what was coming.

  "Marion? It's time to do the test."

  Instantly, all sweetness fled from her face as she jackknifed her knees to her chest, locking her arms tight around them. "No!" she shouted.

  "Come on, honey. You know we've got to do this."

  "No!"

  Harris released a ragged sigh. So, it was going to be another fight. As he walked toward her, she backed up against the armrest and cowered in the corner of the sofa, her hands up, nails

  out, to ward him off. She looked just like one of the wild, terrified birds when he reached to grab them—all glaring eyes and ready to attack.

  Under siege himself, Harris reverts to seeing things in a way that is natural to him: in terms of birds of prey. It isn't until the arrival of a nursing-trained nanny, Ella Majors, that Harris finds out how to handle his daughter: as a little human being. Meanwhile, with just a few words Monroe's strong point-of-view writing reveals reams about her novel's protagonist.

  Susan Wiggs uses a mother's view of her teenaged son in The You I Never Knew, discussed in earlier chapters, in the same way. Her novel's heroine, Michelle Turner, has returned to Crystal City, Montana, to donate a kidney to her father, and has brought along her Seattle-sophisticated son, Cody. When Cody gets interested in a local cowgirl, Michelle is relieved:

  Good, she thought. Maybe he'd finally get over his obsession with Claudia Teller, his girlfriend since the start of the school year. Claudia was a beautiful pale predator who never met Michelle's eyes and who answered her admittedly chirpy questions with monosyllables. Claudia had introduced Cody to cigarettes and Zima, and probably to things Michelle hadn't found out about yet. There was no creature quite so intoxicating as a provocative teenage girl. And no creature quite so malleable as a teenage boy on hormone overload. A girl like Claudia could make Eagle Scouts steal from their grandmothers. She wore makeup with the brand name Urban Decay. She had bottle red hair and kohl-deepened eyes, and she was as seductive as Spanish fly on Cody's defenseless adolescent libido. The most popular girl in school, she wielded her power over him with casual ruthlessness.

  Notice the damning details ("Urban Decay") and the hyperbolic language "seductive as Spanish fly" and "casual ruthlessness") that Wiggs uses to convey Michelle's sense of protectiveness toward her "defenseless" teenaged son. As we come to find out, Michelle's protectiveness derives in no small way from her own seduction at age eighteen by a handsome cowboy, Sam McPhee, who got her pregnant with Cody and whom she remeets, with life-changing consequences, in Crystal City.

  Young adults have their own view of the world, especially the grown-up realm of work and corporations. They see its shallowness and money-chasing hypocrisy in a way, naturally, that no other generation before has seen. Since the time of Holden Caulfield, youth disaffection has been a staple of fiction. How, then, can a writer capture that disaffection in a way that reflects the discovery and outrage of each new generation?

  In her striking debut, Silk, a dark urban fantasy, Caitlin R. Kiernan finds an original language with which to express the outsider point of view of the

  marginal world of goths, post-punks, and the gay/lesbian community of Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1990s. One of the novel's twin protagonists is Daria Parker, songwriter and bassist for the local band Stiff Kitty. As the novel opens, Daria, on her way to rehearsal one early evening, regards Birmingham at quitting time and notes its mix of old and new:

  Tailpipe farts and the gentle rev of engines made in Japan and Germany, the office monkeys calling it a day, reclaiming their cars from the parking garages spaced out along the length of Morris Avenue. Daria closed her eyes, exhaling slow smoke through her nostrils, listening to the bumpity sound of wheels on the polished unevenness of the street. Behind her, behind the offices, the sudden air horn blat and dinosaur herd rumble of a freight train, hurrying along one or another of the six tracks that divided downtown Birmingham into north and south.

  Clearly this is not the vocabulary of an insider, of the "office monkeys." Kiernan's language not only anchors Daria's point of view, it also prepares us for a strange and scary tale of dread, dreams, and crawling terrors that may or may not come from the mind of goth/lesbian store owner Spyder Baxter, the novel's other protagonist. The urban underbelly and its horrors once belonged exclusively to novelist Poppy Z. Brite, but with strong point-of-view writing and a fine-tuned feeling for nameless dread that recalls Lovecraft, Bradbury, and King, Kiernan has taken a share of this territory for herself.

  What sort of singing voice do you have? Soprano? Alto? Tenor? Bass? What kind of soprano—bright? What kind of tenor—high? Is your voice pop, smooth, operatic, or belting? The type of singing voice you have makes a difference to the sound that comes out of your mouth, correct?

  So it is with your "voice" in your novel. What kind of voice is it, exactly? That will in large part be determined by your choice of point of view, but more than that by how you use that point of view. Are the voices of your characters ordinary and generic, or are they highly colored and specific? Heighten point of view throughout your manuscript, and you will strengthen your story's impact.

  _________EXERCISE

  Strengthening Point of View

  Step 1: Open your manuscript at random. Through whose point of view are we experiencing this scene? Write down that character's name.

  Step 2: On this page of the manuscript, select anything that the point-of-view character says, does, or thinks. Heighten it. Change the dialogue. Exaggerate the action. Grow the emotion, thought, or observation to make it even more characteristic of this character.

  Follow-up work: Turn to another page at random. Whose point of view is it now? Can you heighten anything. Repeat the steps above once in every scene in your novel.

  Conclusion: What would happen if you actually did the follow-up exercise above, instead of just thinking about it? Your novel would take longer to write, but wouldn't it be stronger? When I pose this question in the workshops there are groans, but also nods of agreement. Weak point of view is a common failing of manuscripts; the cure is painstaking, page-by-page strengthening of point of view. Good news: The next exercise is a tool that might make the job easier.

  Character Delineation

  Having sharpened the points of view you have chosen for your novel, it is time to take the next step and make sure that your characters sound, act, and think differently from each other. That is the business of character delineation.

  The USA Today best-seller list is a great place to spot breakout novelists, particularly those whose work appears as original paperbacks. One author who has made it to that list is Barbara Freethy. Novels like One True Love, Some Kind of Wonderful, and Love Will Find a Way established her as a storyteller with a gift for warm, family-oriented stories—usually with a primary romance, a secondary couple, and a long-held secret driving the plot.

  In Summer Secrets, discussed in earlier chapters, Freethy takes her strengths several steps further. This time there are three women: Sisters, bound together by the secret of what happened on a round-the-world sailboat race that brought them fifteen minutes of fame, a winners' trophy, and a boatload of secrets. Among other thing
s, Freethy faces the task of making these three sisters different from each other, and she does this effectively.

  The oldest is Kate, protective, responsible, and understanding; as well as bossy, opinionated, and critical. She watches over their once-magnetic father, Duncan, now a land-locked alcoholic. Formerly a wild adventurer, Kate now is (well, perhaps) a play-it-safe bookstore owner on the island of Castleton in Puget Sound:

  Kate loved her view of the waterfront—loved the one from her house in the hills even better—but more than anything she appreciated the fact that the view didn't change every day. Maybe some would call that boring, but she found it comforting.

  The wind lifted the hair off the back of her neck, changing that feeling of comfort to one of uneasiness. Wind in her life had meant change. Her father, Duncan McKenna, a sailing man from the top of his head to the tips of his toes, always relished the wind's arrival. Kate could remember many a time when he had

  jumped to his feet at the first hint of a breeze. A smile would spread across his weatherbeaten cheeks as he'd stand on the deck of their boat, pumping his fist triumphantly in the air, his eyes focused on the distant horizon. The wind's up, Katie girl, he'd say. It's time to go.

  And they'd go—wherever the wind took them. They'd sail with it, into it, against it. They'd lash out in anger when it blew too hard, then cry in frustration when it vanished completely. Her life had been formed, shaped, and controlled by the wind. She'd thought of it as a friend; she'd thought of it as a monster. Well, no more.

  She had a home now, an address, a mailbox, a garden. She might live by the water, but she didn't live on it.

  The middle sister, Ashley, now a photographer, is the most fragile. Since the race eight years earlier she has grown afraid of boats and the ocean, as we learn early in the novel when she tries to board a boat during a Castleton race week to snap a portrait of the crew:

  Water splashed over the side of the dock, and she took a hasty step backward. She felt small and vulnerable on this bobbing piece of wood with a storm blowing in. The sea had often made her feel that way. Her father had always told her to look the ocean right in the eye, never back down, never give up, never give in. There was a time when those brave, fighting words had given her courage. Then she'd learned through hard experience that the ocean didn't back down or give in, either. That if it was man or woman against nature, nature would win.

  The youngest is Caroline, a reckless young woman who smokes too much, drinks too hard, and flirts too easily. A hair stylist with piercings and a tattoo, she also is impulsive and rebellious. The contrast between the three is pronounced, and nicely summed up in one early moment when the three sisters contemplate whether or not to tell their father that their boat named Moon Dancer, sold years before, has now sailed back into Castleton's harbor—and with it the one man who knows the secret of what happened during the fateful race:

  Once again, both sisters looked to Kate for the answer to their problem. They'd played out this scene many times before— Caroline eating chocolate, Ashley biting her fingernails while Kate paced.

  The exercise underlying this chapter works toward creating a point-of-view vocabulary that will distinguish one character from another; however, it is not always necessary to be inside characters' heads to accomplish delineation.

  In his best-selling literary novel The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides has five women to distinguish from one another: five suicidal teenage sisters ranging in age from thirteen to seventeen. Adding to this challenge, Eugenides's novel is narrated by an outside observer, a narrator who speaks with one voice for the whole puzzled Michigan town where the suicidal sisters live and die. Moreover, this narrator's point of view is almost wholly objective.

  Eugenides does not slip us inside anyone's head. He achieves his delineations by sheer force of objective observation, as in this early scene when the narrator attends the one and only party that the sisters are allowed to throw. As "we" (as I mentioned, the narrator speaks for an entire Michigan town) enter the downstairs rec room where the party is underway, "we" realize for the first time that the pretty Lisbon girls are all different people:

  We saw at once that Bonnie, who introduced herself now as Bonaventure, had the sallow complexion and sharp nose of a nun. Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope. Therese Lisbon had a heavier face, the cheeks and eyes of a cow, and she came forward to greet us on two left feet. Mary Lisbon's hair was darker; she had a widow's peak and fuzz above her upper lip that suggested her mother had found her depilatory wax. Lux Lisbon was the only one who accorded with our image of the Lisbon girls. She radiated health and mischief. Her dress fit tightly, and when she came forward to shake our hands, she secretly moved one finger to tickle our palms, giving off at the same time a strange gruff laugh. Cecilia was wearing, as usual, the wedding dress with the short hem. The dress was vintage 1920's. It had sequins on the bust she didn't fill out, and someone, either Cecilia herself or the owner of the used clothing store, had cut off the bottom of the dress with a jagged stroke so that it ended above Cecilia's chafed knees. She sat on a barstool, staring into her punch glass, and the shapeless bag of a dress fell over her. She had colored her lips with red crayon, which gave her face a deranged harlot look, but she acted as though no one were there.

  No one is going to mix up the sisters after such sharp, detailed descriptions— especially not Cecelia, who kills herself during the party by throwing herself on the spikes of the fence that surround their yard. Gradually, the narrator's review of later-available evidence, his "interviews" with those who knew the girls, and his close observation of the events of the "year of the suicides" further separates the sisters—and the very different reasons for their deaths.

  In a way, you almost cannot pile on too many details that make one character distinct from another. Michael Chabon's third novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which won a Pulitzer Prize, tells the story of two cousins who ride the crest of popularity of comic books before, during, and after World

  War II. At the novel's opening, Chabon introduces one of them, Sam Klayman in a passage that piles detail upon detail to bring alive an uniquely Brooklyn adolescent, even before Sam has spoken or done a single thing:

  Houdini was a hero to little men, city boys and Jews; Samuel Louis Klayman was all three. He was seventeen when the adventures began: bigmouthed, perhaps not quite as quick on his feet as he liked to imagine, and tending to be, like many optimists, a little excitable. He was not, in any conventional way, handsome. His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin pointed, with pouting lips and a blunt, quarrelsome nose. He slouched, and wore clothes badly; he always looked as though he had just been jumped for his lunch money. He went forward in the morning with a hairless cheek of innocence itself, but by noon a clean shave was no more than a memory, a hoboish penumbra on the jaw not quite sufficient to make him look tough. He thought of himself as ugly, but this was because he had never seen his face in repose. He had delivered the Eagle for most of 1931 in order to afford a set of dumbbells, which he had hefted every morning for the next eight years until his arms, chest and shoulders were ropy and strong; polio had left him with the legs of a delicate boy. He stood, in his socks, five feet five inches tall. Like all of his friends, he considered it a compliment when somebody called him a wiseass. He possessed an incorrect but fervent understanding of the workings of television, atom power, and antigravity, and harbored the ambition—one of a thousand—of ending his days on the warm sunny beaches of the Great Polar Ocean of Venus. An omnivorous reader with a self-improving streak, cozy with Stevenson, London, and Wells, dutiful about Wolfe, Dreiser, and Passos, idolatrous of S.J. Perelman, his self-improvement regime masked the usual guilty appetite. In his case the covert passion—one of them, at any rate—was for those two-bit argosies of blood and wonder, the pulps. He had tracked down and read every biweekly issue of The Shadow
going back to 1933, and he was well on his way to amassing complete runs of The Avenger and Doc Savage.

  It is as if Chabon filled in several delineation charts and dumped their entire contents into his second paragraph!

  How are your characters different from one another? In your mind, I am sure they are all quite different—but how is that specifically conveyed to your readers? Use charts to create separate vocabularies, traits, actions, and more for your characters. You will be surprised how much more individual they become.

  _____________EXERCISE

  Improving Character Delineation

  Step 1: In the following chart the columns A, B, and C are for different point-of-view characters in your story. (You can add more columns.) For each character, work down the list of common words on the left and write in the word that character A, B, or C would use instead.

  Follow-up work: For each point-of-view character list unique gestures, rationalizations, ways of procrastination, peeves, hot buttons, sentimental triggers, principles to live by, superstitions, or anything else that bears upon the way this character speaks or thinks. Use them in writing from his point of view.

  Conclusion: Have you ever read a novel in which all the characters talk alike and seem alike? That is weak point-of-view writing. Strong point of view is more than just the words a character uses. It is her whole way of feeling, thinking, speaking, acting, and believing. Each will feed into the point of view. One character's cadence and sentence structures will be different from another's. So will his words, so will his thoughts, so will his actions and reactions. Make your characters different from each other, just as are people in life. That way, your novel will have the variety and resonance of real life, too.

  Theme

  There are so many different ways to discover and develop the themes in your novel. Themes can be motifs, recurring patterns, outlooks, messages, morals—any number of deliberate elements that make your manuscript more than just a story; indeed, that makes it a novel with something to say.