Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook

by Donald Maass

  Mostly, though, originality is within everyone's reach. Practice the techniques of brainstorming: new twists on old ideas, combining stories, gut emotional appeal, and reversing the expected. Those techniques will steer you to some challenging, and definitely interesting, choices for your story.

  ____________________EXERCISE

  Developing Brainstorming Skills

  Step 1: Pick a time and place. Pick a protagonist. Pick a problem. Start brainstorming a story.

  Step 2: Every time you write down an idea, reverse it. Go the opposite way. See where it takes you.

  Follow-up work: Go through your folder of story ideas. Put a check mark on those that offer a new twist on an old idea, or that have gut emotional appeal. Try combining ideas. Also try tuning them upside down and inside out. Reverse them. See what happens.

  Conclusion: Whatever you do, push your premises and plotlines further. Do not be satisfied with just a good story. Be satisfied only with a story that is original, gut grabbing, unexpected, layered, and complex. In other words, stop working only when your story is great. How will you know? I cannot tell you, but I can say this: It will take longer than you think. Keep pushing.

  The Pitch

  Whether we're aware of it or not, we all pitch stories all the time. Did you see a movie last weekend? Did you tell your co-workers about it at the office on Monday morning? Your quick take on that film is the kind of pitch that either turns on or turns off your co-workers. You are selling it. (Or panning it.)

  In the book publishing business everyone must pitch: author to agent, agent to editor, editor to sales rep, sales rep to buyer, bookstore owner to customer. The worst pitchers by far are authors. I know. I get those pitches in the form of query letters: 250 of them per week. The majority of them are ineffective, full of hype and needlessly long plot synopsis. Some rattle on for pages in microscopic fonts, lines crammed together and spread out to the outer edges of the page.

  In response, most queries get from us form rejections. A smaller number get a personal response from me, and only a handful (two to six a week) inspire me to request a portion of the manuscript to sample. That is a low ratio of success. Some of the manuscripts on which I pass may be brilliantly written—who knows? The letters pitching them are not.

  Why not? I have talked with authors across the country in pitch crafting workshops, and several answers consistently emerge. In pitching their stories authors feel anxious. They do not know the agent to whom they are writing, or the agent's taste. Will their novel appeal? What about it will appeal? What if the crucial detail that would appeal to a particular agent is the detail that is left out?

  Then there is the problem of boiling down a 450-page story, say, into four punchy lines. How can one possibly do that? Isn't it better to put in as much of the plot as possible?

  From the receiving end of these pitches, I can tell you that it is not. Long plot summary overwhelms the person getting the pitch, and hype has the opposite of the intended effect. Sometimes at writers conferences I sit in rooms where authors are meeting one-on-one with agents and editors. Again and again, I watch my colleagues' eyes glaze over as nervous writers launch into

  rambling plot summaries or spew empty hype about the impact their novels are certain to have and about the gigantic size of their likely audiences. Query letters along those lines produce the same numbed glaze.

  So, what does work in query letters? First, brevity. With 250 queries arriving each week, that is appreciated. Second, writing in a straightforward and businesslike way. This is, after all, a business transaction. Third, just enough about your novel to tell me whether I would like to have a look.

  Ah. That's the tough part. What is "just enough"? Think about it: In the office on Monday morning, how much does it take to suggest to you that you might like to go see the movie that opened last weekend? Not much. The same is true in queries. All I need to get hooked on a story is to know its category, the setting, the protagonist, and the main problem. Add to that one unusual detail that makes this story different from any other like it, and you've probably got me.

  Start with category. Keep it simple: Mainstream? Literary? Mystery? Thriller? Women's? Romance? Science Fiction? Fantasy? Historical? Western? Horror? Young Adult? You can get more specific than that, I guess, but why bother? The category only locates your novel on a mental map of the publishing business, telling me to which group of editors I might submit it and the section of the bookstore in which it ultimately will live and find its readers.

  Setting and protagonist? Those are easy, and again, keep them simple. You can flesh out either one, but only a little coloring is needed. Is there inherent conflict in your setting? Is it a world of clashing values? Fine. Done. Is your protagonist conflicted? Okay. A snippet about that is enough.

  What is the main problem? After doing the exercises in this book that should be easier to say simply. Some query writers find a reduction of the central conflict too frightening. They prefer to start with the inciting incident, the moment when the problem begins, and let the story blossom from there. That approach can work, but it is tricky and dangerous. Once cruising down the highway of plot summary it is tempting to stay on it. My advice: Exit immediately.

  The detail that makes the story different usually is lacking, even in letters that go on for pages. So many novels sound ordinary and unoriginal, like I have read them before. Probably I have. There are no new stories, after all, just new ways of telling them. And that is what I am interested in. What is different about the method of detection in this mystery novel? What makes that romance heroine's desire more aching than any other's? How about the era portrayed in your historical? What is your new angle on it? What is the twist or turn in your mainstream novel that no one sees coming? Yes, give it away! Why are you saving it?

  Can a query letter truly persuade me to request a manuscript based on so little? Yes, and they do. It doesn't take much. The best queries are confident. They put across the essence of the story in one hundred words or less. I have seen it done in forty words and fewer. That is hard to believe, I know, but why would I lie? Take it from a pro.

  I must pitch every day. Knowing how little is needed by the editors, sub-

  agents, scouts, and producers with whom I work, I keep my pitches short. A certain amount of enthusiasm in my voice can help, and maybe is necessary, but that is because I am an objective third party. From a self-interested author, enthusiasm sounds like hype. It doesn't work.

  I usually let the story itself do the work, in fact. If a story is solid, it doesn't take much pushing for savvy editors to see its potential. By way of example, let me show you a couple of pitches that I recently e-mailed to editors.

  The first is a smallish but beautifully written literary novel set in contemporary Cuba, full of fine observation of late Castro era Havana and elsewhere. The main character is a dying revolutionary hero who worries that his grandson does not embrace the values that he fought for. Indeed, the grandson does not. He longs for change. In between is a son/father who feels hopeless and stuck in a menial job. There is rich detail and moving incident throughout this novel—far too much to convey in a pitch. So I did not try:

  In Karen Campagna's debut literary novel, Snowfall on Ha-bana, three generations of Cuban men—Lazaro, Ruben, and Andres—journey in a beautiful vintage Packard across the length of Cuba with a very dangerous cargo in the trunk. Riding with them is Lazaro's beautiful nurse, Flores, whose presence changes them all in different ways as their journey becomes a metaphor for the past, present, and future of Cuba.

  Category, setting, protagonist(s), and problem—the "dangerous cargo" in the trunk. The extra detail is the beautiful nurse who rides with them. As you can see this is a simple pitch, just sixty-seven words, but every editor to whom I sent it asked for the manuscript. I do not know whether or not the novel will sell. That is now up to the novel itself. The pitch, though, did its job: Getting the manuscript into editors' hands.

  A more challenging
pitch was for a World War II thriller of exceptionally high quality. In this story about the rescue of a train full of Dutch Jews on their way to the camps in Eastern Europe in 1942, the author weaves in many plot layers. The hero begins as an antihero, a hit man for New York Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky.

  This amoral thug, nicknamed Mouse, is sent on the rescue mission to watch over Meyer Lansky's money, which is funding this desperate plan. Throughout the course of the story he transforms from amoral crook to proud Jew to true hero. He falls for a girl in the Dutch resistance who teaches him the meaning of love while he teaches her how to kill. A host of secondary characters is included, among them a hot-headed commando who hates Mouse, the commando's beautiful English girlfriend, a Dutch partisan who is desperate to rescue his wife in Amsterdam, the wife who is saved in a heart-stopping act of self-sacrifice, a German SS officer under pressure to round up Jews to meet impossible quotas, a Dutch police officer who is a double agent . . . you get the idea.

  Big cast, big story. There is no way to get all that into a pitch, but it wasn't necessary. It was enough merely to suggest the novel's complexity:

  In Gregg Keizer's WWII thriller The Longest Day, it is 1942. Jewish leaders, aware of the deportation of Western European Jews to the death camps, conceive a bold plan to call the deportations to the attention of Allied leaders. A commando team is ready. The problem? No money. For financing, they turn to New York gangster Meyer Lansky, who sends his cash in the company of an amoral hit man, "Mouse" Weis, who hates the whole idea. Mouse plans to kill the commando team and make off with Lan-sky's money, but it is not to be.

  Through a brave Dutch resistance operative named Reka, Mouse discovers the transforming power of love and the courage to wear a yellow star. Hampered by a commando team wracked by conflict, racing against a German officer who knows in advance their every move, on the longest day of their lives Mouse and Reka together attempt what the SS has declared will be impossible: the diversion of a train full of Dutch Jews to the North Sea coast for rescue.

  Even at 173 words, the above leaves out enormous chunks of Keizer's novel. Nevertheless, the above pitch propelled the manuscript into the hands of an editor at G.P. Putnam's Sons. After that, Keizer's superb first novel did the work. Putnam's pre-empted the competition with a six-figure advance.

  An even more complex novel that I am currently pitching is an ancient Egyptian saga, a breakout-scale novel by mystery novelist Lynda S. Robinson. Robinson's prior series featured the Chief of State Security for the boy king Tutankhamen, Lord Meren. Robinson here brings Meren back for a gigantic thriller, pitting him against the most deadly adversary Egypt has ever known, his ex-lover and undercover operative Anath, whom Tut has had tortured and executed (so Meren thinks) for treason. With many points of view and a panoramic portrayal of the splendor that was ancient Egypt, Robinson orchestrates a sage of enormous richness and complexity.

  How to boil it down? Here's how I did:

  In The Warrior King, Tutankhamen's powerful empire is beset by outside enemies and torn from within by grasping factions. The son of a heretic, Tut's hold on power is precarious. Only the wise and canny Lord Meren, Tut's spy master, keeps the boy king on his throne. But their father-son relationship, once more important to Meren than life itself, has been ruined by Tut's decision to kill the only woman that Meren has ever truly loved, the traitorous spy Anath. Unknown to both Meren and Tut, Anath has survived her gristly execution and, with the help of the Hittite king Suppiluliumas, has conceived a vast plan to undermine Egypt and wreck hideous revenge on Tut and Meren. Only king and mentor working together can save the empire—yet how can they succeed when their respect and trust has been irrevocably shattered?

  Again, tons of action and several huge subplots are left out of brief description. But so what? It is enough merely to suggest something of the sweep and grandeur of the whole.

  Use the exercise that follows to hone down the essentials of your story, then trust your premise to excite the agents and editors whom you have targeted. After all, your story is original, isn't it? The world in which it is set is rife with conflict, right? You have invested your story with power and gut emotional appeal? Right, then. You have it all.

  __________________EXERCISE

  Constructing the Pitch

  Step 1: Write down your novel's title, category, setting, protagonist, and central problem: the main conflict, goal, need, yearning, or hope.

  Step 2: Write down one colorful detail that makes any one of the above elements different.

  Step 4: Write down these five words: love, heart, dream, journey, fortune, destiny.

  Step 5: Set a timer for five minutes. Five minutes only! In that time, write a one-paragraph pitch for your novel, incorporating the material you wrote down in steps one-three. In your last sentence, use one of the words you wrote down in step four.

  Follow-up work: Put away your pitch for a week or more, then re-read it. Shorten it to one hundred words. Put it away for another week. Now shorten it to fifty words.

  Conclusion: In pitching, less is more. It is fear that makes us blather on and on about our stories, killing interest in them with every juicy detail that we pile on. Save those for the novel itself. In your pitch, keep it clean and simple. Say less than you want to. Interest in your novel will be that much greater for your restraint.

  Outlines are an essential tool for working novelists, yet even full-time professionals can feel anxiety when faced with writing them. "I'm no good at outlines," many say to me. "How long does it have to be? Can you send me examples?"

  This from long-published fiction writers! In a way their anxiety is understandable. There are no courses I know of in outline writing. I can find no books on the subject, no anthologies of successful outlines. It is an arcane art. Even so, every novelist sooner or later must practice it.

  Many fiction writers—possibly even half of them, judging from my informal surveys—do not outline their novels in advance. Many simply hate them. They find that plotting ahead of time is obstructive, a brake on creative flow. Such novelists prefer to feel their way through a first draft, counting on subsequent rewrites to fix any problems and shape the final story. There is nothing wrong with that. It is fine to allow the unconscious mind to guide the process.

  However, even intuitive, organic writers sooner or later must face up to the necessity of outlines. Agents request them. Publishers may require them when an option novel is proposed. Hollywood executives can demand them, too, for the sake of convenience. Sooner or later, every novelist has to outline.

  You might suppose that the process is easier once a novel is complete, and it can be. It is relatively simple to take a manuscript and summarize it chapter by chapter. Authors who do that, however, are missing an opportunity. Outlining can be a creative act either before or after a novel is written.

  In fact, I strongly recommend that you let it be so. If you are reading this appendix merely to learn how to format an outline for a novel that already is complete, please reconsider. Use the outlining process to discover new dimensions in your story. There are aspects of your novel that you have not yet discovered, and the outlining process will help you illuminate them. You see untapped potential in others' manuscripts, right? The same probably is true of yours.

  If you are planning a story that you have yet to write, the outlining process can be more than drawing a map of what already is in your head. It can expand your mind. There is potential in every premise, and the outline process can develop that. Do not be satisfied merely to sketch your story, or even to flesh it out. Reach for its heights; pull from its depths. The finished outline should surprise you.

  Now, some technical points: How long should an outline be? At every writers conference I attend, I get that anxious question. Fiction writers are confused. Some agents say they want two pages, I am told, others ten. What is right?

  It amazes me that authors expect consistency in agents' preferences. How can there be consistency? Some agents like short
outlines, others like outlines with more detail. What's the big deal? Write both. The process I will lead you through in this appendix will show you how both are done.

  There also is no magic number of pages for a detailed outline. War and Peace needs more than ten pages, don't you think? Write as long an outline as your novel needs. That said, an outline of less than five pages probably will feel thin, while an outline of more than twenty-five pages probably will feel overburdened. Shoot for ten pages; add more if needed.

  Format? Single-spaced or double-spaced is your choice. If you single space, add a line break between paragraphs to make it easier on the eyes. The majority of outlines I see are double-spaced, however, so why not use that format?

  For some reason, outlines seem most effective when they are written in the third person and the present tense. Don't ask me why. Perhaps they are more visual, more like film treatments. Who knows? All I can tell you is that professionally written outlines are almost always third person and present tense, regardless of the person and tense of the novel. Stick with that. It reads well and is expected.

  For God's sake, include the ending. You wouldn't believe how many authors imagine that they will spoil the story, or fail to entice agents or editors to read the entire manuscript by including it. Rubbish. Agents and editors are pros. They need to know that you can handle the whole story.

  What sort of tone are you going for? Objective: commenting on the action of the novel, its themes, and so on? Actually, the most effective outlines are those that are like reading the novel in miniature. They bring us inside characters' heads using strong point of view and highlight the story's turning points in various ways. The outline template on the pages that follow will give you a solid plot spine, the extra layers and subplots that add texture, a sense of the characters' inner lives and changes, and ways to highlight key moments. It may even show you your novel in a way that will enrich it with new material.