Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook

by Donald Maass

  In an earlier chapter I discussed Empire Falls, by Richard Russo, in which Janine is the estranged wife of the novel's protagonist, Miles Roby. At the outset of the novel she is planning to marry an obnoxious local entrepreneur, Walt Comeau, owner of a fitness center. Once overweight, she is now in shape and brimming with self-confidence, regret about her marriage to Miles, and admiration for Walt:

  Back when they got married, she hadn't even known who she was, her own self, never mind her intended. At least now Janine knew who Janine was, what Janine wanted, and, just as important, what Janine didn't want. She didn't want Miles, or anyone who reminded her of Miles. She didn't want to be fat anymore, either. Never, ever, again. Also, she wanted a real sex life, and she wanted to act young for a change, something she hadn't been able to do when she actually was young. She wanted to dance and have men look at her. She liked the way her body felt after dropping all that weight, and by God she liked to come. For Janine, at forty, orgasms were a new thing and she damn near lost her mind every time she had another. . . .

  It was Walt Comeau who'd taught her about herself and her body's needs.

  Much later, disillusioned with Walt Comeau (who styles himself The Silver Fox), she reexamines her view of him during a high school football game they attend with her daughter, Tick, and her mother, Bea:

  Janine was sitting next to her own destiny, of course, and that destiny was itself perched on a damn hemorrhoid cushion. "Oh, leave the child alone, Walt," she heard her mother say, and she then saw through her tears that her husband-to-be had returned, no doubt sneaking down the row behind her just as Tick had done. Apparently he'd given his stepdaughter a kiss on top of the head and been handed his usual rebuff by way of thanks.

  "What makes you think a pretty fifteen-year-old girl wants to be kissed in public by an old goat like you?" Bea asked him.

  " 'Cause I'm a good-looking old goat," said Walt... [He notices that Janine is upset.] ... The only thing to do was to cheer her up. So he began crooning an apropos lyric of Perry Como's.

  "The way that we cheered/Whenever our team/Was scoring a touchdown," he warbled, nudging her, in the idiotic hope of getting her to sing along.

  Perfect, Janine thought. At last she finally understood her hus-band-to-be's infatuation with Perry Como, which had nothing to do with the singer's good looks, charm, or silvery foxiness. The fucker was simply Walt's contemporary.

  Notice how Janine's unit of measurement of Walt has shifted from orgasms to hemorrhoids. Russo's strong point-of-view writing enhances this change in one character's view of another.

  In Phillip Pullman's complex and compelling fantasy The Golden Compass, also discussed in an earlier chapter, orphan Lyra Belacqua is raised by the scholars of Jordan College, Oxford. But she is no ordinary child. She is (or so she is told) the niece of powerful Lord Asriel, heretic and researcher into the mysterious matter of Dust, and (unknown to her) she is a child whose destiny is great and dangerous. One day she is introduced to the elegant Mrs. Coulter, whose ward she will become. At first meeting her at a college dinner, Lyra is awed:

  "Are you a female Scholar?" said Lyra. She regarded female Scholars with a proper Jordan disdain: there were such people, but, poor things, they could never be taken more seriously than animals dressed up and acting in a play. Mrs. Coulter, on the other hand, was not like any female Scholar Lyra had seen, and certainly not like the two serious elderly ladies who were the other female guests. Lyra had asked the question expecting the answer No, in fact, for Mrs. Coulter had such an air of glamour that Lyra was entranced. She could hardly take her eyes off her.

  A day later, Lyra is on her way to London with Mrs. Coulter and their respective daemons, talking animal companions that in Pullman's world are, in effect, the external manifestation of each individual's soul. Lyra's awe deepens:

  And now she was on her way to London: sitting next to the window in a zeppelin, no less, with Pantalaimon's sharp little ermine paws digging into her thigh while his front paws rested against the glass he gazed through. On Lyra's other side Mrs. Coulter sat working through some papers, but she soon put them away and talked. Such brilliant talk! Lyra was intoxicated: not about the North this time, but about London, and the restaurants and ballrooms, the soirees at embassies or ministries, the intrigues between White Hall and Westminster. Lyra was almost more fascinated by this than the changing landscape below the airship. What Mrs. Coulter was saying seemed to be accompanied by a scent of grownupness, something disturbing but enticing at the same time: it was the smell of glamour.

  Months later, the educated and pampered Lyra learns that Mrs. Coulter is the primary procurer for the General Oblation Board, known among street urchins as the Gobblers because they make children disappear. (Among the missing is Lyra's special friend Roger.) The stolen children are used—hideously, we later learn—in experiments probing the nature of Dust in the arctic North.

  Furthermore, Lord Asriel is now captive and being held in the Northern fortress of Svalbard, which is guarded by fearsome armored bears. Lyra runs away. When next she glimpses Mrs. Coulter months later, as a captive among the other kidnapped children in the research facility in the North, her view of her former guardian and her monkey deamon has changed:

  [Lyra] jumped down, pushed back the locker, and whispered to Pantalaimon, "We must pretend to be stupid till she sees us, and then say we were kidnapped. And nothing about the gyptians or Iorek Byrnison especially."

  Because Lyra now realized, if she hadn't done so before, that all the fear in her nature was drawn to Mrs. Coulter as a compass needle is drawn to the pole. All the other things she'd seen, and even the hideous cruelty of the intercision, she could cope with; she was strong enough, but the thought of that sweet face and gentle voice, the image of that golden playful monkey, was enough to melt her stomach and make her pale and nauseated.

  Lyra's dread is deepened by the knowledge, imparted to her earlier, that, in fact, Lord Asriel is her father and Mrs. Coulter is her mother. Pullman thus deepens the significance, and fearsome power, of Lyra's greatest adult ally and enemy.

  How does your protagonist's picture of himself change throughout the course of your novel? How does she view others in the story, and how do those views change? How do others see your protagonist? How do those assessments, in turn, alter? Delineate these shifts in your characters' self-perceptions and perceptions of each other. It is yet another way to tighten the weave of the story.

  ______________EXERCISE

  Measuring Inner Change

  Step 1: Find a moment in your manuscript when your hero is speaking with a major secondary character, or when that secondary character carries the point of view while speaking with your hero.

  Step 2: Create a paragraph in which your hero assesses this other character; that is, delineates for himself this other character's qualities, mood, or situation in life. Put simply, how does your hero see this character right now? Start writing now.

  Alternately, have your point of view character regard your hero by the same criteria. How does she view your hero at this particular moment? Start writing now.

  Step 3: Move forward to a later point in the story when these two characters are again together on the page. Repeat the previous step. How does your hero view this character now?

  Alternately, how does that character view your protagonist at this point? Start writing now.

  Follow-up work: Find three points in the story in which to delineate your antagonist's view of your protagonist. Write a paragraph for each.

  Conclusion: Allowing characters occasional moments to take stock of each other is a powerful way to mark each player's progress through the story. How have events affected each? Possibly one character sees your hero carrying a load of care, while another imagines that she has never looked so alive. Examine your hero from several points of view; later, show us how those views have shifted.

  Setting

  How many settings are there in your current novel? From how many points of vi
ew is each of them seen? Each outlook on each location is an opportunity to enrich your story. In you novel, how many of those opportunities are you taking?ow many settings are there in your current novel? From how many points of view is each of them seen? Each outlook on each location is an opportunity to enrich your story. In you novel, how many of those opportunities are you taking?

  In Sarah Waters's moody, erotic Victorian novel Affinity, fragile Margaret Prior volunteers as a visitor to the female inmates at London's Millbank Prison. Following her first visit, she later recounts her journey through the institution's linked pentagonal buildings in the company of its warden, Mr. Shillitoe:

  I had a plan of Millbank's buildings from Mr. Shillitoe a week ago, and have had it pinned, since then, on the walls beside this desk. The prison, drawn in outline, has a curious kind of charm to it, the pentagons appearing as petals on a geometric flower— or, as I have sometimes thought, they are like the coloured zones on the chequer-boards we used to paint when we were children. Seen close, of course, Millbank is not charming. Its scale is vast, and its lines and angles, when realized in walls and towers of yellow brick and shuttered windows, seem only wrong or perverse. It is as if the prison had been designed by a man in the grip of a nightmare or a madness—or had been made expressly to drive its inmates mad. I think it would certainly drive me mad, if I had to work as a warder there.

  Waters's choice of words for Miss Prior ("wrong or perverse" and "designed by a man in the grip of a nightmare") not only conveys the frightening and oppressive effect that the prison has upon her narrator, but also foreshadows the variety of madness into which Miss Prior herself will slip as the result of her lesbian affair with an inmate. The psychological effect of the place upon Miss Prior is striking—or is it perhaps more that Miss Prior is projecting her apprehension of her own fearful inclinations upon the place?

  A place also can lift spirits as well as sink them, as South Carolina novelist

  Dorothea Benton Frank shows in her debut novel Sullivan's Island. As I discussed in an earlier chapter, the book tells the story of Charleston real estate executive Susan Hayes, who retreats to her family's summer home on Sullivan's Island following the discovery that her husband is having an affair:

  Coming to the island made me feel younger, a little more reckless, and as I finally went back to my car and closed the door— pausing one moment to lower the audio assault of the radio—I realized the island also made me lighthearted. I was willingly becoming re-addicted. As we arrived on the island, I pointed out the signs of summer's early arrival to Beth, my fourteen-year-old certified volcano.

  "Oh, my Lord, look! There's Mrs. Schroeder!" I said. "I can't believe she's still alive." The old woman was draped over her porch swing in her housecoat.

  "Who? I mean, like, who cares, Mom? She's an old goat."

  "Well, honey, when you're an old goat like her, you will. Look at her, poor old thing with that wet rag, trying to cool her neck. Good Lord. What a life."

  "Shuh! Dawg life better, iffin you ask me!"

  I smiled at her. Beth's Gullah wasn't great, but we were working on it.

  Is it the special qualities of Sullivan's Island working their magic, or would Susan have felt a sense of renewal arriving anywhere other than Charleston? It hardly matters. The beauty of seeing a locale through a particular perspective is that the point-of-view character cannot be separated from the place. The place comes alive, as does the observer of that place, in ways that would not be possible if described using objective point of view.

  In alternate chapters, Frank's novel flashes back to the 1950s to relate the series of events that lead to her father's murder, so she later believes, by the Klu Klux Klan. In the first flashback, which we saw part of in an earlier chapter, Susan drives with her father to the rural side of the island to collect the new black housekeeper that the family has hired, the latest in a long string. On this drive young Susan views the island in an entirely different way, thereby giving us a glimpse of a white Southern girl's awareness of race in the 1950s:

  I felt the spirits of freed slaves ambling along the roadside with great baskets on their heads filled with Sweetgrass and palmetto fronds for weaving more baskets to harvest rice or to hold vegetables. I saw small loads of just-picked cotton on the back of a buckboard wagon on the way to market, drawn by the slow clip-clop of a broken-down horse or mule.

  When I came out here to Snowden, the hair on my arms stood up from goose bumps. Even though my family never owned a slave in all its history in the Lowcountry, my ancestors had prob

  ably condoned it. Coming here to old plantation country made me uncomfortable having white skin. In the carefree existence of Island living, I never had to think about what slavery must've been, but out here in the country reminders were everywhere.

  When point-of-view writing is done well, place and perception are inextricably entwined. A place is filtered not only through the person, but through the person's age, social station, personality, and where they are in their life's development.

  In The You I Never Knew, Susan Wiggs made a transition from historical romances to a contemporary setting and broke out. As we saw in an earlier chapter, at the story's outset, Seattle graphic artist Michelle Turner is driving to Montana with her difficult sixteen-year-old son, Cody. She is going there to donate a kidney to her father, a retired movie star from whom she has been estranged for years. As they approach the ranching town of Crystal City, Michelle is reminded why she once was drawn to paint the area:

  The valley slumbered in midwinter splendor, as if the entire landscape was holding its breath waiting for the far-distant springtime.

  She read the names on every rural mailbox they passed— Smith, Dodd, Gyenes, Bell, Jacobs. Most people who settled in the area seemed to stay forever. Each farm lay in perfect repose, a picture waiting to be painted: a white house with dark green shutters, a wisp of smoke twisting from the chimney, window-panes glowing at the first touch of twilight.

  There was a time when this sight had pierced her in a tender spot. She had painted this very scene long ago. Her brush had given life to the hillocks of untouched snow, to the luminous pink sunset, and to the fading sky behind alpine firs with their shoulders draped in white and icicles dripping from their branches. On a poorly prepared canvas with second rate paints, she managed to convey a sense of soaring wonder at the world around her. It was a good painting. Better than good. But young. Impossibly, naively young as she had never been since the day she left this town in anguish and disgrace.

  In contrast to the disquiet that Crystal City stirs in Michelle is the calm that the place inspires in Sam McPhee, a rodeo star turned doctor. Sam is the cowboy who got Michelle pregnant at age eighteen; he is Cody's father, though he does not yet know that as he looks at the same landscape on the same evening that Michelle is driving back into town with his son:

  Sam McPhee stared out the window at the ripples of snow on the hills behind his house. Though it was a familiar sight, he lingered there, watching as the last light of day rode the broken-

  backed mountains. The sight was a restful thing for a man to hold in his chest. In his youth, he'd carried the image with him no matter where he went, from Calgary to Cozumel, and when the time came to figure out where home was, he didn't need to look any further than these hills.

  Sam's serenity is soon to be shattered, just as Michelle will eventually lose her restlessness and settle in Crystal City, in Sam's arms. They start the novel in opposite states of mind, and Wiggs uses Crystal City itself to illustrate the contrast.

  Our perception of place changes as we change. The difference between a town as remembered from long ago and how it seems now is the difference between who we once were and who we are now. The same is true of characters in fiction. Take them anywhere and show us how they feel about the place, or how that places makes them feel, and you will reveal to us volumes about their inner frozenness, or growth.

  So get to it.

  _______EXERCISEr />
  The Psychology of Place

  Step 1: Pick a high moment, turning point, or climax involving your protagonist. Where is it set?

  Step 2: Write a paragraph describing how this place makes your character feel, or how your protagonist feels about this place. Start writing now.

  Step 3: Move forward one week in time or backward one week in time. Return your protagonist to this place. Write a paragraph describing how it makes your character feel now. Start writing now.

  Follow-up work: What is the setting that recurs most often in your novel? From whose point of view is it most often seen? Count the number of times that character is in that place. Write a list, and for each return to that place find one way in which that character's perception of it changes.

  Conclusion: Bringing to life the world of your novel is more than just describing it using the five senses. A place lives most vividly through the eyes of characters. The unique way in which each one sees what is around him is how the setting itself becomes a character in the story. Think about it: By itself, landscape is unchanging. (Well, mostly.) It takes a person to perceive its differences over time. Delineate those evolving perceptions, and the world of your novel will feel rich, dynamic, and alive.

  Point of View

  As we have seen, most contemporary novels are written from the point of view of their characters, and this point of view can be quite intimate. (First person is, of course, as intimate as you can get.) There are plenty of alternate points of view to employ, if you like, including the objective and authorial points of view, older approaches now somewhat out of fashion. Whatever your choice, point of view is the perspective you give your readers on the action of the story. It pays to make it strong.