Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook

by Donald Maass

  "Hey, man, you've got to stand up for yourself. Lincoln freed the slaves."

  "The Thirteenth Amendment doesn't apply to associates at Reed, Briggs."

  "You're hopeless"—Molinari laughed as he levered himself

  out of the chair—"but you know where we are if you come to your senses."

  That is all that the scene requires, but Margolin goes further, using this opportunity to deepen both Daniel and Molinari:

  Molinari disappeared down the corridor and Daniel sighed. He envied his friend. If the situation had been reversed Joe wouldn't have hesitated to go for a drink. He could afford to give the finger to people like Arthur Briggs and he would never understand that someone in Daniel's position could not.

  Molinari's father was a high muck-a-muck in a Los Angeles ad agency. Joe had gone to an elite prep school, an Ivy League college, and had been Law Review at Georgetown. With his connections, he could have gotten a job anywhere, but he liked white-water rafting and mountain climbing, so he had condescended to offer his services to Reed, Briggs. Daniel, on the other hand, thanked God every day for his job.

  That same evening, Daniel agrees to do a favor for yet another associate, glamorous Susan Webster, who asks him to review late-delivered documents relating to a suit against the firm's client Geller Pharmaceuticals—documents that must be handed to the opposition lawyers the following day in the legal exchange of information called "discovery." Daniel agrees.

  Too late, Daniel realizes that the documents are thousands of pages long, occupying five banker's boxes. It's an impossible task. Daniel pulls an all-nighter, but even so must gloss over most of the material. What is worse, buried in the material handed over the next day is a document that Daniel failed to see: an early memo from a Geller researcher expressing fears that the company's pregnancy drug Insufort may, like Thalidomide before it, cause birth defects.

  This piece of evidence is devastating to Geller's case, and Daniel takes the blame for letting it slip through unnoticed. He loses his job and, worse, is suspected when his firm's founding partner, Briggs, is murdered. Daniel of course is innocent, and also believes that the incriminating memo was a plant. And so it was. After much effort and danger, Daniel and his love interest prove it.

  At the novel's end, Daniel is due an apology and his old job back. Margolin could easily have had Daniel himself demand his due. Instead, he utilizes an unlikely secondary character: Molinari. The associate whom we know as a good-times party animal turns out to have another side, as we see when he confronts the firm's surviving senior partner:

  "Come on in, Joe," J.B. Reed said as his secretary showed Joe Molinari into his corner office. Reed was puzzled by Molinari's visit since he was not working on any of Reed's cases. To be honest, he only remembered Molinari's name because his secretary had told it to him when she buzzed him to say that one of the associates wanted to talk to him.

  "What can I do for you?" Reed asked as Molinari sat down. He noticed that Molinari did not seem nervous or deferential the way of the new associates were in his presence.

  "Something is going on that you need to know about." "Oh?"

  "Just before he died, Mr. Briggs fired Daniel Ames." Reed's features clouded when Molinari mentioned his friend's murder and accused murderer. "That was wrong."

  "I don't see how any of this is your business, Mr. Molinari," Reed snapped.

  Molinari met Reed's fierce gaze and returned one of his own.

  "It's my business," Joe said forcefully, "because Dan is a friend of mine and someone has to tell you what he's done for this firm and Geller Pharmaceuticals."

  Daniel is offered his job back with a raise. (He declines.) By allowing Molinari to stand up for a principle, Margolin gives this minor player an extra dimension. It is a small moment, but one that enriches Margolin's cast and gives his leanly written thriller a touch more texture.

  Could there be more dishy fun than in Cecily von Ziegesar's racy Gossip Girl series of young adult novels about wealthy New York City private school seventeen-year-olds? Hardly. The series debut, Gossip Girl, tells the story of rich and popular Blair Waldorf and her model-gorgeous former friend at the Constance Billard School, the even richer femme fatale Serena van der Wood-sen. Serena, away for a year, has returned to New York and Constance Billard School after being kicked out of an even more exclusive private girls' school in Connecticut for showing up three weeks late for the start of the fall semester. (She was having a great summer in France.)

  Like, we must pause here to explain the world in which these Platinum card girls live: They are barely supervised by their success-driven parents. Anything goes for them—including sex, drugs, and drinking—as long as they keep up appearances. Are we clear? Fabu. Pay attention now. It gets juicier.

  Blair and Serena, once tight, now are estranged but have one thing in common: hunky Nate Archibald. Nate is Blair's boyfriend, but what Blair doesn't know is that a year before Nate had sex with Serena—or, in their private lingo, "parted her Red Sea." (You had to be there.) Nate is a somewhat minor player. He doesn't have much of a role in the story.

  He is, however, torn between Blair and Serena. Blair has decided that she is ready to have sex with him, but he is ambivalent. He's really in love with Serena, but when Nate first sees her upon her return, von Ziegesar contrasts their reactions to each other:

  "Hey, you," Serena breathed when Nate hugged her. He smelled just like he always smelled. Like the cleanest, most delicious boy alive. Tears came to Serena's eyes and she pressed her face into Nate's chest. Now she was really home.

  Nate's cheeks turned pink. Calm down, he told himself. But he couldn't calm down. He felt like picking her up and twirling her around and kissing her face over and over. "I love you!" he wanted to shout, but he didn't. He couldn't.

  Nate was the only son of a navy captain and a French society hostess. His father was a master sailor and extremely handsome, but a little lacking in the hugs department. His mother was the complete opposite, always fawning over Nate and prone to emotional fits during which she would lock herself in her bedroom with a bottle of champagne and call her sister on her yacht in Monaco. Poor Nate was always on the verge of saying how he really felt, but he didn't want to make a scene or say something he might regret later. Instead, he kept quiet and let other people steer the boat, while he laid back and enjoyed the steady rocking of the waves.

  He might look like a stud, but he was actually pretty weak.

  What is Nate going to do? For most of the novel he does nothing, failing to declare himself for Serena or even to take up Blair's offer of her virginity. He has a strong inner conflict, and, though his indecisiveness relegates him to a minor role, we nevertheless feel for him in his dilemma. The dork.

  Medical thriller writer Michael Palmer is adept at making complex medical conditions and procedures easy to understand. He puts conflict and tension on every page, relentlessly raises stakes, and keeps his plots humming. His protagonists are highly sympathetic, true heroes and heroines. Palmer could afford to play these strengths and let the fine points go, but he does not. His secondary characters also shine.

  In The Patient, Palmer tells the story of mechanical engineer and neurosurgeon Jessie Copeland, who has developed a robot, ARTIE, to perform assisted robotic tissue incision and extraction. To the rest of us that means dissolving brain tumors with ultrasound and sucking them out. ARTIE is minimally invasive, a true innovation, but also experimental.

  In the novel's tense second scene, Jessie attempts a tumor removal with the help of her longtime surgical nurse, Emily. It would be enough for Emily simply to support Jessie and be a voice for the progress of the procedure, as in "Uh-oh, the robot's going haywire! We have to abort!" But Palmer has more in mind for Emily than that. As the procedure begins, he generously allows her a larger-than-life moment as she reminds Jessie that ARTIE is still unproven:

  Easy does it, Jess," Emily said. "We always expect more from our kids than they can ever deliver—just ask mine."r />
  Snappy larger-than-life zingers like that make Emily a character with whom we bond. She's not in many scenes, but when she is we care.

  How much attention have you given your secondary characters? Have you taken the trouble to give them extra dimensions, inner conflict, and larger-than-life qualities? If not, why not give it a try? They will make your cast more lively and engaging. The exercise that follows will help you do it.

  ________________EXERCISE

  Secondary Character Development

  Step 1: Pick a secondary character who aids your protagonist. Write the down the name of that character.

  Step 2: Create an extra dimension: Write down this character's defining quality. Write down the opposite of that. Now create a paragraph in which this character demonstrates the opposite quality that you have identified. Start writing now.

  Step 3: Create an inner conflict: Write down what this character most wants. Write down the opposite of that. How can this character want both of things simultaneously? How can they be mutually exclusive? Make notes, starting now.

  Step 4: Create larger-than-life qualities: Write down things that this character would never say, do, or think. Find places where this character can and must say, do, and think those things. Make notes, starting now.

  Follow-up work: Follow the steps above for a different minor character who supports your protagonist.

  Conclusion: You may wonder whether highly developed secondary characters will overwhelm your protagonist and take over the story. Don't worry. If your secondary folk occupy less page time and do not enact the novel's most significant events, they will add luster to the novel without blinding your readers to your story's true hero.

  Antagonists

  Antagonists can be fun to write. In fact, villains can be the most memorable characters in a novel. Think Fu Manchu and Hannibal Lecter. Despite that, the antagonists I encounter in many manuscripts are one-dimensional. They do not frighten me, surprise me, or linger in my memory once the story is over.

  Developing an antagonist is, in a practical sense, no different than developing a protagonist. It demands the same attention to extra dimensions, inner conflict, larger-than-life qualities, and the rest. When developed well, an antagonist is an equal match, or more, for the protagonist. Not only is there a sense that the antagonist really could win, but that the antagonist has feelings and motives as valid and varied as anyone else's. We believe we understand this character.

  Thriller writer Ridley Pearson's novels usually feature Seattle police detective Lou Boldt, but in his stand-alone thriller Parallel Lies, Pearson takes a different track to tell the story of disgraced former cop Peter Tyler, who is called by an old friend at the National Transportation Safety Board to help out Northern Union Railroad, whose trains are being sabotaged. Tyler was kicked out of the force when he nearly beat a black man to death; unfortunately, the Northern Union security officer with whom he must work is a black woman who knows his history.

  You already can see that Pearson is adept at creating complex characters and inherent conflict. However, it is the train-wrecker in Parallel Lies, Umberto Alvarez, who is perhaps this novel's most finely drawn character. Alvarez lost his wife and children when their car stalled at a train crossing and was demolished by a Northern Union locomotive. Now Alvarez is engineering derailments of Northern Union trains. That is as much motive as the plot requires to be effective, but Pearson develops Alvarez more deeply than that.

  First, although Alvarez is grief-stricken to a criminal degree, he is not actually homicidal. He arranges derailments so that no one will get hurt. In the novel's opening, Alvarez is living hobo-style in a boxcar and must defend himself when an intruder attacks him. It is the blood-soaked box that finally puts the authorities on his trail. Alvarez, we can see, is a man to whom bad

  things happen; in other words, he has become the man he is through adverse circumstances.

  Pearson next builds sympathy for Alvarez, who sneaks up to a farmhouse in order to steal fresh clothes from the laundry room. Once inside, we learn how much Alvarez misses his wife:

  The kitchen smelled like a home. God, he missed that smell. For a moment it owned him, the poignant feeling carrying him away, and then the distant sound of shower water caught his attention. It was warm in here, the first warmth he'd felt in days. Was she just warming up the shower, or getting in? Each option offered a different scenario. He crossed toward the laundry room. He wanted to stay here; he wanted to move in. He pulled the jeans into his arms, stepped to his left and reached for the flannel shirt in the pile of dry clothes.

  This building of sympathy pays off as we follow Alvarez's methodical preparations to destroy Northern Union's new F.A.S.T. bullet train on its maiden run from New York to Washington. What Alvarez plans is horrible, but what has been done to him is horrible, too. He believes that Northern Union was at fault in his wife's death, even though an investigation has cleared the railroad of responsibility. As the novel unfolds, Peter Tyler begins to suspect that Alvarez is right: that the railroad was responsible. Although Alvarez is clearly the story's villain, in the end we understand his actions all too well.

  Antagonists are not always villains. Cecily von Ziegesar's Gossip Girl, discussed in the last chapter, is an ensemble novel about the lives of rich private school girls in Manhattan. Chief among them is Blair Waldorf who pines for (well, truthfully, lusts for) handsome Nate Archibald. What prevents her from carrying out her plan to lose her virginity with Nate? The reappearance of her former best friend, stunning Serena van der Woodsen, at the upscale Constance Billard School.

  Serena is Blair's opposition in the novel. She is the antagonist. But Serena is not evil. She is just a girl who is too rich, too beautiful, and too lost to know what she wants. Her junior year abroad in France turned into a journey into dissolution. On returning to New York, she hopes to recapture some of the friendship and fun that she formerly enjoyed with Blair, as we see when she arrives at a dinner party thrown by Blair's parents:

  Serena hugged them happily. These people were home to her, and she'd been gone a long time. She could hardly wait for life to return to the way it used to be. She and Blair would walk to school together, spend Double Photography in Sheep Meadow in Central Park, lying on their backs, taking pictures of pigeons and clouds, smoking and drinking Coke and feeling like hard-core artistes. They would have cocktails at the Star Lounge in the Tribeca Star Hotel again, which always turned into sleepover parties because

  they would get too drunk to get home, so they'd spend the night in the suite Chuck Bass's family kept there. They would sit on Blair's four-poster bed and watch Audrey Hepburn movies, wearing vintage lingerie and drinking gin and lime juice. . . .

  Serena's memories may not be particularly warm and cozy, but her nostalgia is nonetheless heartfelt. When Blair and her friends snub her and begin spreading vile rumors about why she was kicked out of her last boarding school, Serena is understandably confused. She does not plot revenge, though. Instead she goes her own way, getting involved in student filmmaking and eventually crossing paths with a Riverside Prep scholarship boy who worships her from afar, Dan Humphrey, who to his amazement becomes her love interest.

  Blair and Serena have a partial reconciliation at the end of Gossip Girl, but remain at odds. Only future novels will tell whether Serena will remain the series antagonist, or whether that role will fall instead to another—possibly even Blair.

  The antagonist in a breakout novel can even be invisible. Some mystery novels are like that: The killer is unknown until the detective reveals his identity. Stephen L. Carter's The Emperor of Ocean Park is not a murder mystery, as such, since the agent of opposition in the story is dead.

  The mystery in The Emperor of Ocean Park revolves around the "arrangements" left unfulfilled by Oliver Garland, an African-American judge whose nomination to the Supreme Court was ruined by scandal prior to his death. Garland's son, Talcott, is drawn into an investigation of his father's shady connections. His
father's misdoings complicate Talcott's life, which is already encumbered by his wife's own bench nomination, the suspicion of his law school colleagues, and a fake FBI agent who is following him around.

  Talcott chases his father's cryptic clues, which are based on chess strategy, and in the end learns the truths of his own life and the dark secrets of the inner workings of Washington, DC. Plenty of people stand in his way, of course, but the person working most against him throughout is his own dead father.

  Sometimes the antagonist in a breakout novel is nothing more than life itself. For an example, read Patricia Gaffney's powerful story (also set in Washington, DC) about four women friends who form a support group, The Saving Graces. Over the course of several years the friends grapple with infertility, divorce, married lovers, thwarted creativity, terminal cancer, and other challenges. Is there a villain, here? Various characters stand in, but ultimately in The Saving Graces, Gaffeny makes the antagonist nothing more than the relentless, small, unavoidable domestic tragedies that happen to us all.

  As you can see, antagonists come in many shapes and sizes. They can be villains, or they can be life itself. Who, or what, is the antagonist in your novel? How can you develop this opposition for maximum effect? Certainly not by settling for a motive that is nothing more than evil intent.

  Evil is more interesting than that. Villains are best when they are complex. Use the exercise that follows to develop those depths. You may wind up with an antagonist that your readers fear or even adore. Hey, why not shoot for both?

  __EXERCISE

  Developing the Antagonist

  Step 1: Who is the antagonist in your novel? Write the down the name of that character.

  Step 2: Create an extra dimension: write down your antagonist's defining quality. Write down the opposite of that. Now create a paragraph in which your antagonist demonstrates the opposite quality that you have identified. Start writing now.