Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (11 page)

He met Jimmy's plaintive glare. He wanted to say something. He wanted to tell him that he had also thought about what would have happened if they'd climbed in that car. That the thought of what could have been his life sometimes haunted him, hovered around approaching corners, rode the breeze like the echo of a name called from a window. He wanted to tell Jimmy that he occasionally sweated through his old dream, the one in which the street gripped his feet and slid him toward that open door. He wanted to tell him he hadn't truly known what to make of his life since that day, that he was a man who often felt light with his own weightlessness, the insubstantial nature of his character.

But they were in a morgue with Jimmy's daughter lying on a steel table in between them and Whitey's pen poised over paper,

so all Sean said to the plea in Jimmy's face was: "Come on, Jim. Let's go get that coffee."

Sean again comes up short. Later, we learn the more immediate cause of his adult malaise: His stage manager wife, Lauren, has left him and taken their daughter with her. (See Low Tension Fixes Part II: Delaying Backstory in chapter twenty-three.) As the murder investigation unfolds, the emerging evidence and suspects gradually engage Sean's mind, and then his heart. He seeks to lay to rest the past, and at one point visits his father, a retired cop with knowledge of the arrest and jail cell suicide of one of the men who kidnapped Dave. His father sees no good in stirring up memories, and the encounter leaves Sean still unsatisfied:

Sean used the remote to unlock the car, and he was reaching for the door handle when he heard his father say, "Hey."

"Yeah?" He looked back and saw his father standing by the front door, his upper half dissolved in darkness.

"You were right not to get in that car that day. Remember that."

Sean leaned against his car, his palms on the roof, and tried to make out his father's face in the dark.

"We should have protected Dave, though."

"You were kids," his father said. "You couldn't have known. And even if you could have, Sean . . ."

Sean let that sink in. He drummed his hands on the roof and peered into the dark for his father's eyes. "That's what I tell myself."

"Well?"

He shrugged. "I still think we
should
have known. Somehow. Don't you think?"

In reality, Sean is moving closer to the heart of his motivation. It is the guilt of not protecting his friend that drives him and has made him a detective. He
should
have known how to protect Dave back then, but because he didn't act,
now
he sure as hell is going to find out who killed Katie Marcus.

At the end of the novel he learns that it was none of the developed suspects but other kids who killed Katie: the younger brother of the boy she planned to run away with and his friends. Surprising them at home, Sean finds himself in a standoff: A kid named O'Shea has a gun pointed at Sean, and Sean's partner has a gun pointed at O'Shea. Facing death, recognizing that O'Shea's soul is empty enough for him to fire, Sean discovers why he truly cares:

Sean had seen this before. Back when he was in uniform and sent as crowd control on a bank robbery gone bad, the guy inside gradually growing stronger for a two-hour period, feeling the power of the gun in his hand and the effect it had, Sean watching

him rant and rave over the monitor hooked up to the bank cameras. At the start, the guy had been terrified, but he'd gotten over that. Fell in love with that gun.

And for one moment, Sean saw Lauren looking over at him from the pillow, one hand pressed to the side of her head. He saw his dream daughter, smelled her, and thought what a shitty thing it would be to die without meeting her or seeing Lauren again.

A minute later Sean talks the gun out of the kid's hand. It turns out that Sean cares for the same reasons that all of us get up, fight the traffic and all the rest: Because he loves his family. It is a simple discovery, really, a fundamental commitment that is obvious to almost everyone.

Yet the unfolding of this primary motivation and its revelation to Sean himself at the moment of his ultimate testing gives it a force that not only carries Dave to the finish, but also resolves the conflicts at the heart of the novel's two secondary plot layers. Lehane deftly fuses the layers together and brings Sean's inner journey to a climax all at once. Sean has to live not only to enact justice, but also to put to rest the past and truly love in the present. He searches for, and finds, his irrevocable commitment.

Is there such a moment of ultimate stakes in your current manuscript? If not, fix it on the page. Your hero's testing and eventual commitment will be fixed in your readers' minds for a long time to come.

_______________________EXERCISE

Capturing the Irrevocable Commitment

Step 1: Identify the moment in your story when your protagonist's stakes hit home—when she realizes that there is no turning back. This is the moment of irrevocable commitment.

Step 2: Write out that moment in one paragraph. Start writing now.

Step 3: Look at the paragraph you have written. Notice its shape, feel its effect. Now imagine that this is the first paragraph of your novel.

Follow-up work:
The moment of commitment that you just created has an opposite: a moment of irresolution, a healthy aversion, a justified selfishness, or a similar reaction.
Write that down.
Now find a place earlier in your manuscript to slot this in.
Make the change in your manuscript now.

Conclusion:
You may not wind up directly using the paragraphs you create with this exercise; however, let your hero's inner commitment infuse and underlie all his actions. Let him be driven. When resolve weakens, reinforce it. Strong commitment on the part of your protagonist will generate strong commitment on the part of your reader. The same is true, not surprisingly, when you create strong commitment on the part of your antagonist.

Exposition

W
e all star in our own movie. No one else's life has, for each of us, the immediacy and importance of our own. Nothing is more significant than what is happening to us right now. We are our own most intimate friends. This may sound self-absorbed, but it is a measure of the intensity with which we experience our lives and the importance we attach to what we think, feel, and experience at any given moment of the day.

The protagonist of a novel is no different from us in that respect, or needn't be. Indeed, characters with poorly developed inner lives cannot long sustain reader interest. I am not suggesting writing endless passages of gushy exposition (sometimes called interior monologue), like one finds in low-grade romance novels. Rather, I suggest bringing forward on the page a protagonist's self-regard: that reflection and self-examination that shows us that a character has a compass-true sense of themselves and a grasp of the meaning of what is happening to them at any given moment in the story.

An example of this can be found in Richard Russo's
Empire Falls,
which I discussed earlier. In the book, Miles Roby is the humble proprietor of the local diner, but that doesn't keep him from being self-reflective. Committed to painting the steeple of his parish church despite his fear of heights, Miles frequently procrastinates by talking with his friend Father Mark. One day he finds Father Mark staring up at the steeple:

"God Himself, a couple of stories up ... so close."

"I was just thinking how far
away
it is," Miles admitted. "But then I was contemplating painting it."

"That does make a difference," Father Mark said.

"Actually I wasn't contemplating painting so much as falling."

Interesting, Miles thought. Like himself, Father Mark, as a child, had been reassured by the imagined proximity of God, whereas adults, perhaps because they so often were up to no good, took more comfort from His remoteness. Though Miles

didn't think of himself as a man up to no good, he did prefer the notion of an all-loving God to that of an all-knowing one.

Miles is a man who admits to himself his own discomfort in the presence of God. How can we not admire that? By taking us deep inside Miles, Russo shows us something universal not about Miles's faith but about his humanity.

In Philip Pullman's astonishing fantasy
The Golden Compass,
set in a magical world much like Earth in Edwardian times, the heroine is young Lyra Belacqua, a girl of unusual self-possession and resourcefulness. Pullman enhances her pluck and appeal by taking the opposite approach. Rather than being self-reflective, Lyra is naively self-confident, as in this passage deep in the novel wherein we find Lyra, a practiced liar, captured and in grave danger:

It wasn't Lyra's way to brood; she was a sanguine and practical child, and besides, she wasn't imaginative. No one with much imagination would have thought seriously that it was possible to come all this way and rescue her friend Roger; or, having thought it, an imaginative child would immediately have come up with several ways in which it was impossible. Being a practical liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination at all; it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.