Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook

by Donald Maass

  _________EXERCISE

  Making the Antagonist's Case

  Step 1: What does your antagonist believe in? Why does he feel justified and right? How would the world be better, through his eyes, if things ran the way he would like them to run? Write down your answers.

  Step 2: Make the antagonist's case stronger. Assume that the antagonist actually is correct: What support for her case can be found in philosophy or religion? On a practical level, how would things really be better? Explain in writing.

  Step 3: Choose a character who supports your antagonist, and make the antagonist's case from that character's point of view. Write a paragraph, starting now.

  Follow-up work: Find the moment in your story when your protagonist realizes that your antagonist is right, and why. Write out that moment in a paragraph, starting now.

  Conclusion: Certainly you want your hero to doubt himself at times, don't you? Why not push that all the way and let your hero doubt himself in the extreme? What would be the circumstances? How close to failure does your protagonist come? In that moment, you will be very close to your core values and theme.

  Symbols

  Symbols, which sometimes go by their more academic name, objective correlatives, are another literary device that feels old-fashioned. The very word takes you back to high school English class, doesn't it? Soon we will be discussing stream of consciousness, litotes, parallelism, and syllepsis, eh?

  In their simplest form, though, symbols are anything outward that stands in for anything inward or abstract, such as a mood or an idea. A statement like "He was in turmoil" can feel blunt. Instead, we might substitute an image; say, "Outside, the Siberian Elms held their heads in their hands and swayed, wailing like a chorus of Greek women." The image is indirect, but it nevertheless conveys an inner state.

  Symbols can be glaringly obvious, of course. Think sunsets and trains rushing into tunnels. At their best, though, they are elegant and evocative. Their effect can be subliminal, barely noticed. A device they may be, but they also can be quite powerful.

  One of the most accomplished novels of recent years is Barbara Kingsolver's story of an American missionary family's journey to the Belgian Congo in the 1960s, The Poisonwood Bible. This acclaimed saga is itself, among other things, a bible of breakout fiction technique. Kingsolver's rotating narrators are the four daughters of the Price family, and each is an outstanding example of character delineation. The distinctive voices of Rachel, Leah and Adah (twins), and Ruth May are instantly recognizable.

  Kingsolver also masterfully sketches a cast of secondary African characters, whose depths are suggested even while their culturally different way of thinking ultimately is unknowable to the Prices. The girls' father, fundamentalist preacher Nathan Price, is a fully developed antagonist, tragically dedicated and unable to grasp the impossibility of his mission. The complications faced by the family steadily escalate as the local villagers' mistrust of Nathan Price grows and the Congolese prepare to wrest their country from the brutal grip of Belgium. The novel's many narrative threads are woven together with impeccable care.

  There is so much to admire in The Poisonwood Bible, in fact, that fiction

  writers studying Kingsolver's breakout technique might overlook her deft use of symbols. They can be found all the way through. Even the novel's extended opening image, narrated in flashback by the girls' mother, Orleanna Price, uses the image of a wild okapi stopping to drink in a jungle stream during a family outing. This is a multi-layered symbol for Orleanna's bewilderment at the mystery and beauty of the environment around her, and also for her own essential helplessness:

  She [Orleanna] is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn't. A beautiful animal stands on the other side of the water. They look up from their lives, woman and animal, amazed to find themselves in the same place. He freezes, inspecting her with his black-tipped ears. His back is purplish-brown in the dim light, sloping downward from the gentle hump of his shoulders. The forest's shadows fall into lines across his white-striped flanks. His stiff forelegs splay out to the sides like stilts, for he's been caught in the act of reaching down for water. Without taking his eyes from her, he twitches a little at the knee, then the shoulder, where a fly devils him. Finally he surrenders his surprise, looks away, and drinks. She can feel the touch of his long, curled tongue on the water's skin, as if he were lapping from her hand. His head bobs gently, nodding small, velvet horns lit white from behind like new leaves.

  It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant's afternoon? If was brief, I can promise that much, for although it's been many years now since my children ruled my life, a mother recalls the measure of the silences. I never had more than five minutes' peace unbroken. I was that woman on the stream bank, of course. Orleanna Price, Southern Baptist by marriage, mother of children living and dead. That one time and no other the okapi came to the stream, and I was the only one to see it.

  Have you ever spent 258 words developing a symbol? Kingsolver does that here, to highly poetic effect. In fact, part of what makes her symbols poetic is that all of them emerge from the natural environment around her characters. Nathan Price's garden provides many of them. Price plants his seeds in a flat rectangle of soil, failing to understand that torrential afternoon downpours will swamp the garden; he should, instead, mound the earth around each plant. Sure enough, the rains make a lake of his Eden patch.

  Then, one day early in their stay in the remote village of Kalinga, the Price family finds a nest of baby birds fallen from a hibiscus bush. The baby birds have drowned in the garden. Kingsolver does not belabor the image, but, even so, its effect is felt. Can there be any doubt that Nathan Price's rigid ignorance will have tragic consequences for his children? Later, the poisonwood tree in their yard gives Nathan a hideous, itching rash, and the meaning is the same: Nathan Price is messing with a place he does not understand or respect.

  A more amusing symbol is waiting for the Price family upon their arrival: an African gray parrot named Methuselah who was left for them by their predecessor. Unfortunately, Methuselah mimics human speech. The parrot is, consequently, somewhat foul-mouthed. When Nathan Price first hears Methuselah growl "Piss off," he declares, "That is a Catholic bird." Methuselah gets the girls in trouble, and eventually escapes and flies away into the jungle. He would be nothing more than comic relief, but Kingsolver later brings Methuselah back to devil Nathan Price with his uncensored mimicry. The bird becomes a symbol, standing in for the persistence of the jungle, local culture, political reality, and Price's own failure to have an impact on the community that he has come to convert to Christianity.

  Are there physical objects or recurring events that might serve as symbols in your novel? The exercise that follows asks you not to impose symbols on your manuscript, but to discover them already there, buried like artifacts that readers can happen upon and enjoy, either consciously or not, for the extra meaning that they add to your story.

  Creating Symbols

  Step 1: What is one prominent object, event, or action that appears in your novel? Write it down.

  Step 2: How can that object, event, or action recur at your novel's end? Write that down.

  Step 3: Find three other places where this object, event, or action can recur in the course of the story. Add them to your manuscript.

  Follow-up work: What is the opposite of that object, event, or action? Find a place for that to appear or occur too. Make notes.

  Conclusion: Sometimes called objective correlatives, symbols can be overly obvious, but when cleverly chosen and tactically deployed they can punctuate a story in powerful ways.

  Brainstorming

  Did you ever hear a premise, snap your fingers, and think to yourself, "Now, that is a great idea for a story!" Of maybe you thought, "Dang, I wish I had thought of that one myself!"

  Some ideas are like that: They immediately engage. They are naturals. Right away the story begins to write itself in your head. You can see what will
happen first and exactly how it will go after that. Strangely, although the story already is familiar, so much so that you have begun to appropriate it, your feeling is not "How common," but "How original!"

  What causes that reaction? Why is it that although there are no new stories, some ideas nevertheless feel fresh? I believe that there are several qualities that can invoke that feeling.

  First is the surprising new twist on an old idea. Take the murder mystery: The essential story is the same every time. Someone is killed, and a detective figures out who did it. So familiar is this formula that it is frequently reduced to "whodunit." Many mystery manuscripts are pitched to me, and most feel as tired as the formula. They lack spark, meaning they bring nothing new to the genre. But now and again an idea comes along that's got a brand-new twist.

  Every detective has a method of detection. It started with the ruthless logic of Sherlock Holmes. But logic is not the only way to arrive at a solution. Gut intuition is another, but that, too, has become commonplace. What is left? In Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club, set in 1865 in the city of Boston, a killer is dispatching his victims in gristly ways reminiscent of Dante's Inferno. Since Dante's work is not yet translated into English in 1865, Boston's scholars fear that they will be suspected. It is understandable, then, when this limited circle (the "Dante Club" of the title) bands together to catch the killer and clear their collective name.

  Had Pearl merely assembled, as he does, four famous names of the era (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wads worth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and publisher J.T. Fields) The Dante Club would not have felt original. Historical figures have turned into detectives many times. It is this group's special expertise in Dante and how they employ it to catch a killer that pro-

  vokes a snap of the fingers. Even better, Pearl uses Dante not only to color the killer, but as a lens to view tensions in the halls of Harvard and in the streets of Boston, where waves of immigration are changing the face of America.

  Just as there are methods of detection, there are means of murder, or modus operandi. An example can be found in Alice Blanchard's The Breathtaker. In this whirlwind thriller, Blanchard spins the story of a small-town police chief, Charlie Grover, who must track a serial killer who strikes only during tornados.

  Blanchard told Publishers Weekly in an interview that she likes "when a person is confronted with something huge. When someone murders, they rip through someone's life like a tornado will rip through a land and tear everything apart." So it is for Charlie Grover, who in additional plot layers faces the scars left by a childhood fire that killed his mother and sister, and who in the present copes with a sixteen-year-old daughter who is enchanted by a troubled teenage storm chaser.

  Wounded detectives and detective dads are nothing new. It is the twisters that stir up The Breathtaker and give it originality.

  Combining two stories in unexpected ways can be a synthesis that also feels original. Hollywood novels have been written for years. So have novels about diseases and their effects. But putting those together? That is what Elisabeth Robinson does in The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters), the story of struggling Hollywood film producer Olivia Hunt, who chronicles a year during which her sister in Ohio is diagnosed with leukemia. The parallel stories of Olivia's attempt to produce Don Quixote and her visits to her dying sister are not obviously compatible, but they work together in ways that they would not if they stood alone. Their combination is original.

  Sometimes it is nothing more than the gut emotional appeal of a story that sweeps away comparisons and makes it feel one-of-a-kind. Elizabeth Berg is good at this. She told The Writer that her stories start with nothing more than a feeling, a practice that has pulled her into novels about coming to terms with an abusive father (Durable Goods), women helping a friend through breast cancer (Talk Before Sleep), and a wife's persistence while her husband is in a coma (Range of Motion). None of these premises are particularly new, but Berg's ability to get to the emotional heart of these situations has made her a best seller.

  Nicholas Sparks also can tug at his readers' heartstrings in ways that make his novels more than run-of-the-mill romantic tragedies. Sparks started his first blockbuster, The Notebook, with an ending. Sparks told Writer's Digest that he knew it would have to be powerful enough to generate word of mouth. It involves a death (speaking of high moments), but prior to that his story successfully captures the wonder of everlasting love. Who can resist that? Go deep enough, as Sparks does, and readers may feel that they have never before experienced this special bliss.

  A reversal of the expected also can feel original. For instance, most single women would not care to become pregnant, right? The results of home pregnancy tests usually are dreaded. But in Lauren Baratz-Logsted's debut novel, The Thin Pink Line, named for the telltale line on a pregnancy test strip, London editor

  Jane Taylor finds herself pregnant and learns that she likes it. Her lackadaisical boyfriend suddenly seems ready to commit. Friends and strangers treat her well. When it turns out that she is not pregnant after all, Jane fakes it for nine months. Jane's escalating efforts to maintain the ruse are hilarious, and steadily ratchet up the stakes in Baratz-Logsted's most original reversal.

  Another lighthearted flip-flop of the familiar can be found in Sherrilyn Kenyon's romance Fantasy Lover. Kenyon's heroine is sex therapist Grace Alexander. You would expect that someone in her profession would have a healthy enjoyment of eroticism, but Kenyon neatly upends that expectation. Grace hates sex. Indeed, she has been celibate for four years. Who is the perfect foil for this repression? Who else? A Greek god, and so one is summoned by Grace's friend Selena from the pages of an ancient tome where he is cursed to live until he is called out once in a while to . . . um, lend a hand.

  Julian of Macedon, half god, half mortal, fortunately is up to the job of thawing Grace's libido. In yet another switch it turns out that something else needs thawing: Julian's heart, which is frozen thanks to the once-cruel life that cursed him. These two are inwardly conflicted. Kenyon also, by the way, tosses in a cast of secondary characters that includes Julian's family of Greek gods and goddesses. Talk about complications! Retold myths and fairy tales are common in the romance field today, but Kenyon's employment of the power of reversal makes Fantasy Lover stand out.

  Can a story premise get even more unexpected? If you don't think so, then you have not yet discovered the loopy, inside-out novels of Christopher Moore. In titles like Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story, Island of the Sequined Love Nun, and Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, Moore more than amply demonstrates his gift for originality. In Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings, Moore introduces Nate Quinn, a researcher of whale squeals.

  Nate is swallowed by whale. What is original about that, you ask? Nothing, except that the whale has "Bite Me" scrawled on its fluke, phones a delicatessen to order pastrami on rye, and is part of a huge organism called the Goo. You cannot say you have read that before, can you? With Moore, it is not the basic premise that feels original but its zany and unexpected elaboration.

  Every working novelist must come up with ideas, but beyond the premise is its development into a full-fledged plot. The process by which that happens is brainstorming. Step by step, the logic and progression of the story is worked out until something like a novel comes into focus. No one expects an author to stick precisely to the original outline; indeed, some authors cannot work with outlines at all.

  It doesn't matter. Whether following a map or making it up as he goes along, every novelist sooner or later spins a basic idea into a full novel. Too often in manuscripts, however, I watch the original inspiration become dissipated. What started out as an original-feeling premise turns into a set of ordinary characters and rote complications.

  The key to keeping a novel lively and surprising is remembering the principle of reversal. When mapping out a scene, toss out your first choices and go the opposite way. Why? Because first choices tend to be the
safest choices. We shape action in the ways that we think it ought to go if our novels are going to be accepted by agents, and later by editors. Meaning that they become predictable. Scenes that go in unexpected directions can be more difficult to work out, but they are more engaging to read. (See the Reversing Motives exercise in chapter six.)

  The secret of going the opposite way can be seen clearly in the Breakout Novel Workshops when participants and I together brainstorm a story in about fifteen minutes. We start with basic choices about setting, protagonist, and problem, and then riff. Each time it is the less obvious choices for character or plot that engage the group's interest. There is usually one unexpected (read: original) element that requires a lot of discussion. In the end, though, everyone agrees that this path is more interesting to take.

  So, when cooking up ideas, look for new twists on old ideas. Combine stories. Go for gut emotional appeal, and reverse the expected. Then work out a full story but not in easy and obvious ways. Remember the power of reversal. Take your first impulses, and go the opposite way. That is the secret of brainstorming.

  Will you always be original if you follow this advice? Probably, though sometimes lack of originality cannot be helped: Certain ideas and motifs enter the collective unconscious, and so one year we may find ourselves with a surfeit of novels about, say, coming of age in Eastern Europe. That is what happened in 2002, in fact, when four novels on that subject were published: Arthur Phillips's Prague, Gary Shteyngart's The Russian Debutante's Handbook, John Beckman's The Winter Zoo, and Jonathan Foer's Everything is Illuminated. In cases like that there is nothing to do except to make one's novel as original, and tense, as possible. That will almost always put it ahead of the pack.