Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (22 page)

All of these doings are tightly woven together. What accounts for the 600-page length difference between
The Crimson Petal and the White
and
Gossip Girl
? Style. Faber's ambling narration minutely details every scene. Von Ziegesar's writing provides as much character detail, but speeds through the action with frenetic music-video pacing. The racy world of privileged Manhattan private school girls feels no less vast than Faber's tapestry of Victorian sexual politics, though, thanks to von Ziegesar's liberal use of subplots.

Are there subplots that can be developed in your novel? Some writers are afraid to add subplots, for fear their story will run away with them. That fear is unfounded. Subplots may make a novel sprawl, but if carefully woven together with the main layers (see the Follow-up Work in the following exercise), the novel not only will hang together, but will have the rich tapestry feeling of real life.

____________ _ EXERCISE

Adding Subplots

Step 1: Who are your novel's most important secondary characters? Write down the names of one, two, or three.

Step 2:
What is the main problem, conflict, or goal faced by each of these characters?
Write those down.

Step
3: For each, what are three main steps leading to the solution to that problem, the resolution of that conflict, or the attainment of that goal? Another way to ask that is, what are three actions, events, or developments—with respect to these secondary characters—that you could not possibly leave out?
Write those down.

Step 4:
Outline each secondary character's story. While your protagonist is at work on the main problem, what is each character doing to solve his own problem?
Make notes, starting now.

Follow-up work: Weave your plot layers together with your subplots using the method in the Building Plot exercise found in chapter sixteen. Add the nodes of conjunction that you discover to your novel.

Conclusion:
Can subplots and secondary characters steal the show? Of course. If they steal it effectively enough, it is even possible that you have the wrong protagonist. But that would be unusual. Most subplots are underdeveloped or nonexistent. This exercise can help give subplots a vital pulse.

Turning Points

A
turning point in a story is point at which things change. It could be the arrival of new information, a shift in the course of events, a reversal, a twist (such as revealing a character's second role), a challenge, or a disaster.

Cooking up turning points is easy enough: All stories have them. Making them as dramatic as possible is a bit more difficult. Heightening takes work. But it is work that pays off in a more active, exciting, and involving novel.

Sometimes a turning point simply involves letting go of an old way of looking at things. An example of this can be found in Jodi Picoult's
Salem Falls,
which was discussed in an earlier chapter. Protagonist Addie Peabody is hung up on her daughter, Chloe, who died ten years earlier. Addie refuses to acknowledge that Chloe is gone. She cooks meals for Chloe that never get eaten and keeps Chloe's room preserved exactly as it was when she died. Addie has not even changed Chloe's bedsheets.

One day, Addie stings her new lover, Jack St. Bride, by telling him that he will never mean more to her than Chloe. Later, Addie awakens in Chloe's room feeling remorse:

- Frustrated, she threw back the covers of the bed and began to pace through the house. At the bottom of the stairs, she automatically touched the small picture of Chloe that hung there, the same way she did every time she came up and down, as if it were a mezuzah. And that was the moment she realized she'd lied.

Jack might never mean more to her than Chloe. But God, he meant just as much. . . .

"I love him," she murmured out loud, the words bright as a handful of new coins. "I
love
him.
I
love him." . . .

In Chloe's room, she stripped the bed. She carried the linens downstairs in a bundle, remembering what it had been like to hold her newborn just like this in her arms and walk her through her colic at night. She threw the sheets and pillowcases into the washing machine, added soap, and turned the dial.

The fresh scent of Tide rose from the bowl of the machine. "Goodbye," Addie whispered.

In this passage, Picoult heightens Addie's inner change with an outer action: Laundering (after ten years!) the sheets that her dead daughter slept on the last night of her life. One might not think of the scent of laundry detergent as a symbol, but Picoult makes it a powerful indicator of change. Really, it is herself that Addie is washing clean.

Recall my earlier examination of Barbara Freethy's romantic novel
Summer Secrets.
Freethy's plot has plenty of turning points, thanks to the (count 'em) three stories of three sisters that she spins out. The oldest sister is bookstore owner Kate McKenna. Kate keeps a tight lid on her feelings, and on her two sisters, because of the horrible secret that they share. An additional difficulty is their alcoholic, restless father, Duncan, who, after a triumphant but tragically marred round-the-world sailboat race eight years earlier, promised Kate that he would never race again. As the novel opens, Duncan breaks that promise and signs on as skipper for an upcoming ocean race. Kate is livid.

Kate's temper uncharacteristically breaks, and the man who happens to catch the heat is a reporter, Tyler Jamison, who is investigating the famous sailing McKenna sisters and their father. Note how Freethy heightens this minor turning point of Kate's with careless words that create a major outburst:

[Tyler says:] "Not so fast. Tell me what's wrong."

"I've had it," she replied. "I've had it with lies. I've had it with people making promises that they have no intention of keeping. They just say the words they think you want to hear, then they do whatever they want. And no one changes. People say they'll change, but they don't. No matter how hard you try, what you say, you can't make them do what they don't want to do. I give up. I quit. I'm throwing in the towel, putting up the white flag. I just wish I had a handkerchief or something. But you don't have one, because you're not a gentleman, and men don't carry handkerchiefs anymore, and it's all such a mess!"

Phew! We get the point. Freethy heightens with more than forceful prose. She also effectively uses settings to make tense moments more dramatic. During the fateful race eight years earlier, Kate's fiancee, Jeremy, was lost at sea one night in a storm. She has never gotten over her loss. Passion rises between Kate and Tyler, but it cannot get very far until her feelings for Jeremy get out in the open, which early on Kate is not ready to do, as we discover:

"Are you still in love with Jeremy?"

Her mouth went dry. When had this suddenly become so personal? "My feelings are my own, and they will stay that way. Now I'm going home and you're going somewhere else."

Now, let me ask you: Where would you set this exchange? In Kate's living room? In Tyler's rental car? Freethy sets it in the cemetery where Jeremy is buried, which Kate goes to visit and where Tyler tracks her down. The answer to his question—"Are you still in love with Jeremy?"—seems pretty obvious from this, but that is the point. Kate refuses to answer, but anyone, including Tyler, can readily see the truth.

Major life turning points involve accepting loss, such as the end of a relationship or the end of a life. Earlier I discussed Alice Sebold's
The Lovely Bones,
in which fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon is abducted, raped, and murdered. From heaven, she narrates the stories of those left behind, some of which, of course, involve coming to grips with the permanence of her death. The first is Susie's father, whose grief hits as he examines the ships-in-bottles that Susie helped him to make:

I watched him as he lined up the ships in bottles on his desk, bringing them over from the shelves where they usually sat. He used an old shirt of my mother's that had been ripped into rags and began dusting the shelves. Under his desk there were empty bottles—rows and rows of them we had collected for our future ship building. In the closet were more ships—the ships he had built with his own father, ships he had built alone, and then those we had made together. Some were perfect, but their sails browned; some had sagged or toppled over after the years. Then there was the one that had burst into flames the week before my death.