Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (13 page)

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."

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

A
ntagonists 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.