Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook

by Donald Maass

  As I discussed in previous chapters, a major secondary character in Mary Alice Monroe's Skyward is teenager Brady Simmons. Brady comes from a poor South Carolina low country family. When his father shoots an eagle near the bird of prey rescue clinic that is the focus of the novel's action, Brady takes the rap because the fine will be less for a juvenile. Brady also is sentenced to community service—at the clinic for birds of prey. Angry about everything, he arrives at the clinic vowing to make everyone at this "rehab joint" as miserable as him.

  That is not quite how things go. The clinic becomes the vehicle for Brady's salvation. The clinic's head and the novel's protagonist, Harris Henderson, unaware that Brady did not shoot the eagle, grudgingly gives him a chance, but only the slimmest:

  Brady's head shot up. "I thought I was going to be working with the birds."

  Harris's eyes flashed. He wanted to tell him hell would freeze over before he'd let him touch his birds. He took a moment to rein in his anger at the kid's arrogance before saying in a level voice, "Let's get this understood right from the start. No one gets to care for the birds without approval. Not any volunteer. And you, Brady Simmons, are not a volunteer. You're going to have to work extra long and extra hard to earn that approval from me. We're all here to serve those birds. It's not the other way around." . . .

  Brady shot the man a wary glance.

  "You'll start by working with a by-product of birds. See that bottled soap over there? And those scrub brushes? And that

  hose? Lijah here's going to show you how to use all that stuff along with some of that muscle power you've got to scrub clean every one of those kennels."

  Brady is going to clean out the bird's cages—all for a crime he did not commit. This kid's got problems, not the least of which is his attitude. He needs a break. He needs a friend. He needs a girlfriend. He needs a real father. Most of all, he needs self-respect and a new outlook on the world.

  Can he get these things? At first Brady doesn't even know he wants them, but soon enough he yearns for change, though the level of his hope is limited. He'll settle for getting by. Finding a friend is beyond his vision. Getting a girl is pretty much out of the question, given his conviction. His father is a hopeless, violent redneck. As for working directly with the birds of prey—that is too much to hope for.

  Here's what happens: Elijah Cooper, a wise old griot (African-American oral historian) who works at the clinic, patiently takes Brady under his wing. Slowly, Brady begins to change. He does his work without complaint and earns the respect of the other volunteers and, eventually, even of Harris Henderson.

  More than friends, he finds supporters and cheerleaders, among them a brainy and beautiful African-American teenager, Clarice Gaillard, who volunteers at the clinic. Clarice warms to Brady, encourages him, and helps him study. Eventually their relationship even gets a bit physical. Brady's opinion of himself changes, his grades improve, and he begins to think about applying to colleges.

  Most of all, Brady begins to discover his affinity for the birds, and to understand the relationship between falcons and humans. His transformation begins one day as he watches Harris retrain a convalescing hawk to hunt. Brady thinks it looks easy; that the hawk is following its instincts, nothing more. Also on hand is a resident bird, Risk, who is not on a tether and yet does not fly away. Brady asks Elijah why:

  "They choose to stay."

  When Brady looked back, puzzled, Lijah shook his head. "That's what I mean exactly. Birds of prey ain't the same as the rest of the birds. You can't just train raptors. They ain't like dogs neither. Those animals want to please. Not raptors. They be proud and independent. That being their nature, you can't go demanding obedience from them. Can't do that with a child, neither. All you can do is ask."

  Brady listened, feeling the words take root in his heart. At sixteen years old, he'd had enough of people making him jump when they said jump.

  "That's why," Lijah concluded, "to work with raptors, you first have to be humble."

  "Humble?" he asked, confused.

  "That's the truth," Lijah confirmed with a solemn nod. "And

  that be a hard, hard lesson for a man to learn. With a raptor, you're never the master. You're the student. You have to learn the ways of the hawk. To learn the spirit of the hawk."

  Having learned the lesson of humility, even Harris recognizes that Brady has something special, and offers to train him as a falconer. This is more than Brady ever dreamed he could get, but even better than winning the chance to work with the birds, for Brady, is the winning the respect of Harris:

  "There was a time when only lords and kings could fly peregrine falcons," he told Brady. "Having one was a sign of status. A privilege. And a great responsibility, not only to the bird but to oneself. When you fly your bird, Brady, you fly with him." ...

  He saw Brady's shoulders straighten as his chest expanded.

  Even Brady's father eventually recognizes the change in his son, and is himself transformed by it, as we see when late in the novel they go fishing together and Brady's father hooks an undersized spot tail, which he refuses to throw back:

  "Aw, no one gives a damn about that, anyway," said Roy, opening the fish bucket on the bottom of the boat.

  Brady shifted his weight on the narrow slat and took a breath. "I do," he said.

  Roy paused, the wiggling fish dangling from his hand. He eyes his son narrowly and considered. "You telling me you care about this puny fish?"

  "Yes, sir."

  His father shook his head and chuckled low in his chest. "If that don't beat all. Those tree huggers really got to you, didn't they?" He held up the fish to look at it up close. "Explain it to me how this one little fish is gonna make one scrap of difference in that big river out there?" . . .

  As he began trying to explain his newfound beliefs to his father, he was amazed when the belligerence on Roy's face slackened and he actually began listening to what his son had to say.

  "See, if everyone went and kept the undersized fish they'd caught, that would be thousands of fish each summer that wouldn't grow to breed. Wouldn't be long before they'd die out and there'd be no fish left for anybody. But if I tossed my undersized fish back in the water, and the next guy did, and so on and so on then we can all come back here and go fishing another day. So the way I figure it, it does make a difference if I put that puny fish back in this river. Leastwise, I'd know I did the right thing. A man can live with that."

  His father shook his head and half smiled. But he didn't laugh

  at him. To Brady's surprise, he leaned over the edge of the boat and tossed that puny fish back into the river.

  It seems that Brady even may have gained a better father. Brady has exceeded his own expectations. By changing, he gains more than he could possibly have hoped for, and what can make a novel more satisfying than that? Throughout Skyward, Monroe draws parallels between the healing of wild birds of prey and the healing of humans, and when in the epilogue we see that Brady has become a full-fledged falconer, we know that Monroe theme carries truth: By looking to the natural world around us and observing carefully, we can find the solutions to a sky full of human troubles.

  Oh, in case you think that Brady's story wraps up too neatly, I should point out that in the end he doesn't get the girl. When some of Brady's former redneck friends shoot a rooster that Brady has bonded with and insult Clarice as well, Clarice begs him not to seek revenge for her sake, or anyone else's, but to take the high road and succeed for himself alone. This leap is too big for Brady, and the resulting argument results in their breakup:

  "But you got to know how I feel about you."

  She shook her head and said fervently, "Don't go there. Please."

  "You can't deny there's something."

  Clarice took a long, pained breath and dropped her hand. "No, I can't."

  Then just when his heart jumped in hope, she dashed it quickly.

  "But be real, Brady. There'd be so many problems and hassles that I can't even be
gin to list them. And why even bother? I'm graduating next week and then I'm going straight to California [to Stanford University]. I've got my own life. My own plans. Plans that don't include you."

  "Oh." He stepped back, his face flaming, and stuck his hands in his pockets. "Forget it."

  "Brady, it's not like I don't care."

  He twisted his mouth.

  "Don't do this. Not now. Let's just leave it the way it is."

  "Yeah? And how's that?" . . .

  "Two people who worked together at something they loved. Who had some good times. Friends. I like to think good friends."

  Just friends? Ouch. Monroe is a fine enough novelist to know that you can't always get what you want. Except in the case of Clarice, Brady really doesn't have to settle too much. Neither do we. Because Monroe fully plays out her theme through this secondary character, our satisfaction is magnified.

  In Ann B. Ross's Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind, we already know rich Southern banker's widow Julia Springer is served up a gumbo of problems when her husband's illegitimate nine-year-old son arrives in her life. Among these is the challenge to her husband's will, and later to her own mental competence, that is being mounted by her local Presbyterian church, which is counting on her inheritance from her dead husband to fund a family activities center.

  Her pastor's attempts to cause her to doubt her decision-making capability, to seduce her by proxy, and generally to undermine her willpower, are oily and shameful. They also are amplified by a larger denominational problem that surfaces one Sunday morning when Pastor Ledbetter preaches against ordaining women in the Presbyterian Church on the grounds that the practice is not supported by scripture. Miss Julia has a low opinion of this sermon:

  I tried my best to tune him out, tired of church politics that pitted one group of men against another group of men over women's role in the church. I already knew Pastor Ledbetter's position. He held that women's duties consisted of covering their heads, their mouths, and their casserole dishes, and I'd done all three about as long as I wanted to. But when he tied all the woes of the church to women officers, I could've wrung Paul's neck, and Timothy's, too, for giving men like Pastor Ledbetter justification for their prejudices. And don't tell me, as he'd done before, that a woman's submission elevates and ennobles her. I knew all about submission, and all it had gotten me was the humiliation in khaki pants sitting next to me.

  Opposition to the ordination of women is a bigger problem than Miss Julia can solve; indeed, than Ross or any of us can solve by ourselves. However, by introducing the issue into the story, Ross ties it (with a bit of a stretch, it must be admitted) to Miss Julia's predicament. The parallel enriches the story, as well as setting its social context.

  It doesn't necessarily take much to create the effect of amplifying theme. Heather Graham's Tall, Dark, and Deadly, previously discussed vis-a-vis combining roles, is about the disappearance of Miami criminal defense attorney Marnie Newcastle. Her neighbor, Samantha (Sam) Miller, investigates, but the investigation is complicated by the arrival of a new neighbor, the lover who dumped Sam five years earlier, rock star Rowan Dillon.

  At one point Rowan's Cuban housekeeper, Adelia, becomes the means for opening further the sense of eternal connection felt by those left behind by the missing, especially when the disappearances in question are unexplained:

  She'd had a husband once, but they had locked him up years and years ago in a Cuban prison, and she didn't even know if he was alive anymore, if she was really a wife or a widow. . . .

  "Your husband may very well be dead, Adelia."

  "I know."

  "But you should know, in case you wish to remarry—"

  "No," Adelia said, turning the wedding band on her finger.

  "Mario and I were deeply in love. He would not recognize me now—I am chubby, si? But once I was slim, so pretty, and he was so handsome. Proud—he had to say what he believed. So they took him away, but I will always love him. I will just keep praying. Am I silly? A silly old chubby woman?"

  "No, Adelia, you're beautiful, and your thoughts are beautiful," Sam told her.

  This theme—the power that the disappeared have over those left behind— explains why Sam feels compelled to find out what happened to her neighbor Marnie. This theme is further developed when Sam and Rowan's backstory finally is revealed (halfway through the novel, please note!) and with it the reason that Rowan closed the door on Sam five years earlier. Rowan was still married at the time he met Sam, but his wife had disappeared. He was questioned by the police, and then:

  "All right. This is the truth, and I swear it, and I don't beg people to believe me, not matter how much I want them to. Dina was self-destructive, and I knew it. When she returned, she was in sorry shape. I had married her. I could never have lived with myself if I hadn't tried to help her."

  "You might have said that to me then."

  "At the time? Exactly what should I have said? 'Oh, excuse me, thank you, you've been a fabulous lover, but they've found my wife, I didn't do away with her after all, but she's a drug addict and I need to be with her'?"

  She swung on him then. "Yes!"

  Well, yes, that might have helped, don't you think? Anyway, even more powerful than the effect of a disappearance, Graham is saying, is the effect of a return. Unresolved businesses and unfulfilled commitments that otherwise might be let go are, in the wake of a return, impossible to forget. Breezy and commercial as Tall, Dark, and Deadly may be, Graham does not ignore the need to amplify her theme.

  In Empire Falls by Richard Russo, discussed in previous chapters, protagonist Miles Roby, a man over-educated for his job as proprietor of the local diner, is harried by his nemesis, town sheriff Jimmy Minty. It would have been easy to make Jimmy simply a small-minded, small-town stereotype, but Russo is more expansive. In a late-night confrontation with Miles, Jimmy states his case:

  "Thing is, Miles, people in this town like you. A lot of people. You got friends, even some important friends. I admit it. But here's something that might surprise you. People like me too. Something else? I got friends. Might surprise you to hear we even got some of the same friends. You're not the only one people

  like, okay? And I'll tell you something else. What people around here like best about me? They like it that they're more like me than they are like you. They look at me and they see the town they grew up in. They see their first girlfriend. They see the first high school football game they ever went to. You know what they see when they look at you? That they ain't good enough."

  For a moment there, we feel that Jimmy Minty has a point. Empire Falls has a lot to do with the effect of not fitting in; of feeling like an outsider in your own town. Being part of a place, and what that means, is a major theme in Russo's novel. When Jimmy Minty makes his case, he is touching upon that theme, albeit from a different perspective than Miles.

  What are the themes of your current novel, and how are you developing them? Whether you are making your points by creating a backward antagonist, or by giving other characters parallel problems, or by introducing problems that are bigger than your protagonist, or by showing us what your character is aiming for (or at least will settle for), be sure that you have a means to bring out what you want to say. A novel that has nothing to say will have a tough time breaking out.

  ________EXERCISE

  Alternate Endings

  Step 1: With respect to the story as a whole, what does your protagonist want? Write that down.

  Step 2: If your protagonist cannot get that, what would she take second? Write that down.

  Step 3: If he can get nothing else, what would he settle for? Write that down.

  Step 4: Work out alternate endings for the novel based on each of the above answers. How would each ending go? Make notes.

  Follow-up work: Again thinking of the story as a whole, what outcome would be more than your protagonist possibly could hope for?

  Conclusion: Ah! The answer to that last question may open up even more possible
outcomes for the story. Could it be that your protagonist (or you) has her sights set too low? Even if that dream outcome is not practical, how can that vision of greater good be incorporated into the story?

  __________EXERCISE

  The Larger Problem

  Step 1: Thinking about the story as a whole, what is the main problem facing your protagonist? Write that down.

  Step 2: What is the bigger problem beyond that? Write down your answer.

  Step 3: What is the problem that your protagonist cannot solve? Write that down, too.

  Step 4: Find ways to introduce into the story the bigger problem and the problem that cannot be solved. How can that be accomplished? Make notes.

  Follow-up: What is the main problem in your protagonists second plot layer? Write it down and follow the steps above to develop a secondary theme.

  Conclusion: Every issue conceals a bigger issue. At the heart of every big issue is a dilemma that has no answer. While it may sound downbeat to introduce these elements into your story, in fact they will amplify the problem at hand. The ripples that they send outward in your readers' minds are, in essence, your novel's deepest issues or, to put it another way, its theme at work.

  _________________EXERCISE

  Same Problem, Other Characters

  Step 1: What is the main problem in the novel? Write that down.

  Step 2: Who else in the story besides your protagonist could have that problem? How would it manifest differently for these other characters? Write down your answers.

  Step 3: Incorporate the results of the previous step into the story. Make notes.

  Follow-up work: Who in your story could have the opposite problem? Incorporate that into your novel.

  Conclusion: Just as it is advisable to strengthen your theme, it is also no problem to run counter to it. Does your hero rescue his family from the wilderness, struggling against nature? What about the hermit who helps them? He lives at peace with nature, yes? His struggle may be the opposite: to connect again with his fellow man.