Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (15 page)

Step 2: What does your antagonist most want? Write that down.

Step 3: What is the second plot layer for your antagonist? Write that down.

Step 4:
What are the five most important steps toward your antagonist's goal, or toward resolving her central problem or conflict? A different way to ask that is: What are the five events, actions, or high points, with respect to your antagonist, that you could not possibly leave out?
Write those down.

Step 5: What are the three most important steps toward, or away from, your antagonist's greatest need? Write those down.

Step 6: Using the material from the above steps, outline the entire novel from the antagonist's point of view.

Follow-up work: Find five new ways in which your antagonist can advance her own interests. Let these be actions that have nothing to do with your hero; stuff that your villain would do anyway. Note them.

Conclusion:
We are not accustomed to thinking of villains as being on an inner journey, but what human being is not? Humanize your villain. Motivate his actions with kindness. Let her be heroic, helpful, and principled. Hannah Ardent wrote of the "banality of evil." For fiction writers, that means creating not passionless cruelty but evil that wears a compassionate face..

Enriching Your Cast

C
omplexity in a novel generally is a desirable quality, but how do you manage it? Adding plot layers is one way (see Plot Layers in chapter fifteen); enriching your cast of characters is another. One way to achieve that latter effect is not by
adding
new characters but, paradoxically, by
eliminating
them; or more accurately put, by combining them.

Let me explain.

In
Tall, Dark, and Deadly,
by
The New York Times
best-selling author Heather Graham, a Miami criminal defense attorney disappears from her Coconut Grove home. Her fitness therapist neighbor, Samantha Miller, investigates. Sam's story involves some elements that are common to women's fiction, and some that aren't; for instance, the missing neighbor, who is not particularly deserving of help.

Sam sees the good in Mamie Newcastle, but most others do not. Marnie is an ambitious lawyer with no concern for how scuzzy her clients may be, so long as their cases get her where she wants to go. She is also a man-eater. Early on, it is clear that Marnie even has used elegant and graceful Sam as a means to meet men: "Sam could accomplish with a word, the lift of a brow, a simple
look,
something that might take her twenty minutes of flirting to do." Some neighbor!

Graham keeps the elements of her romantic mystery in constant motion, crisscrossing each other in puzzling ways. At the same time, Graham uses characters with combined roles to maintain a sense of narrative cohesion. Marnie leaves behind her buttoned-down assistant, Loretta, who becomes a source of information about Marnie; for instance, that Marnie maintained a financial interest in a strip club, and even stripped there herself once in a while, for kicks.

The strip club, naturally, becomes a focus of investigation. Meanwhile, the reader learns that a serial killer, who enjoys feeding his victims to the alligators in Miami's canals, is targeting new women who are connected to the club. So far, so good. Graham now, wisely, raises the stakes. Why not put a young and innocent exotic dancer in jeopardy? Graham introduces nineteen-year-old Lacey, who is stripping in secret and who hopes to use the money she earns to travel to New York for a legitimate dance audition. It also happens

that Lacey is heroine Sam's niece. Graham is raising the stakes and enriching her cast at the same time.

Early in the novel, Lacey learns from a fellow dancer, whose stage name is Tiger Lilly, that she can make even more money by working private parties, which are set up by a mysterious booker. Tiger Lilly also tells Lacey that their part-time profession is honorable work that employs hundreds of thousands of women, giving Lacey courage. It also turns out that Lacey knows Tiger Lilly from her other job: By day Tiger Lilly is Marnie-the-missing-lawyer's assistant, Loretta.

This double-role might sound contrived, but it serves nicely to keep the disparate elements of Graham's story connected. Graham finds other uses for this character, too. Sam's partner in the gym where she does her fitness therapy is muscular Joe Taylor, who has an eye for Loretta. Joe turns out to be the mysterious party booker and serial killer. In the novel's conclusion, Joe traps Sam in his cabin-of-horrors with the still alive-but-drugged Marnie.

Sam has one chance to escape with Marnie, but Graham isn't about to make it easy. Joe has a third drugged victim in the cabin: once again, Loretta. Sam escapes, but only with extreme difficulty thanks to Loretta's now triple function in the story. Any random victim might have served this purpose, but Graham knows that, by combining this bit role with others in the story, she can wring extra tension from it and her keep story elements dancing with each other to the end.

A combined role also can make for a nice reversal and surprise. In an earlier chapter I discussed Barbara Freethy's
Summer Secrets
, in which three grown sisters struggle to keep the dark secret of what happened one stormy night on the round-the-world sailboat race they won as teenagers. The youngest sister, Caroline, is prone to risky behavior, especially vis-a-vis men. Early in the novel we learn that she is involved with a much older man, Mike Stanaway, who has a bad reputation. It is said that he beat his wife, and indeed Caroline turns up with purple bruises on her arm. Her sisters are understandably alarmed.

In the course of the story, Caroline realizes that she has become a drunk like their father. She enters Alcoholics Anonymous, a program in which participants have "sponsors," sobriety mentors. Caroline's sponsor could have been anyone, but Freethy seizes this opportunity to combine roles and work an effective reversal of everyone's expectations:

"I'm trying to stop drinking," Caroline continued. "Mike is helping me. He's not my boyfriend. He's my sponsor, the person I can call when I'm feeling desperate. Most people don't realize he's been sober for more than a year because of Alcoholics Anonymous. He took me to my first meeting a few weeks ago."

People can change, and Freethy's three sisters all go through many changes before this multilayered novel is finished.

Ann B. Ross's
Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind
is a Southern pecan pie of a novel, rich and hilarious. (What, you don't find pecan pie hilarious?) As illustrated in an earlier excerpt, Miss Julia is Julia Springer, the sixty-ish recent widow of

Abbotsford, North Carolina's upright and civic-minded banker, Wesley Lloyd Springer. In the course of the novel Ross turns Miss Julia's life upside down: Wesley Lloyd Springer had a mistress, trashy Hazel Marie Pucket, who one day dumps her nine-year-old son on Miss Julia's doorstep. The arrival of Lloyd Jr., sets off a landslide of complications for settled and orderly Miss Julia.

First, there are legal ramifications. Ross introduces Miss Julia's easy-going but crafty lawyer Sam Murdoch, who explains to Miss Julia not only her rights but how feared she is in the community. Everyone knew about her husband's affair, but no one had the courage to tell her.