Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (23 page)

He smashed that one first.

My heart seized up. I turned and saw all the others, all the years they marked and the hands that had held them. His dead father's, his dead child's. I watched him as he smashed the rest. He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of my death, and afterward he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass. The bottles, all of them, lay broken on the floor, the sails and boat bodies among them. He stood in the wreckage.

Notice how Sebold uses these fragile objects as the expression of the father's unbearable rage. Sebold also uses an object, a photograph of Susie, as the focal point in showing the grief of the classmate who loved Susie, an Indian boy named Ray Singh, the only boy who she ever kissed. Ray does not attend her memorial service, but rather grieves alone:

Ray Singh stayed away. He said goodbye to me in his own way: by looking at a picture—my studio portrait—that I had given him that fall.

He looked into the eyes of that photograph and saw right through them to the backdrop of marbleized suede every kid had to sit in front of under a hot light. What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone. He knew that no one ever really looked the way they did in photos. He knew he didn't look as wild or as frightened as he did in his own. He came to realize something as he stared at my photo—that it was not me. I was in the air around him. I was in the cold mornings he had now with Ruth, I was in the quiet time he spent alone between studying. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow, to set me free. He didn't want to burn my photo or toss it away, but he didn't want to look at me anymore, either. I watched him as he placed the photograph in one of the giant volumes of Indian poetry in which he and his mother had pressed dozens of fragile flowers that were slowly turning to dust.

Pressing a photograph in a volume of poetry might not seem terribly dramatic, but in Sebold's hands this small action heightens the inner turning point that Ray Singh has reached: the time when he must put away his feelings for a girl who is no more.

Take a look at the turning points throughout your manuscript. Are they as dramatic as they possibly can be? No—I guarantee it. Go back to work on them. Use stronger words, handy objects, dramatic gestures, more evocative settings—whatever it takes to wring out of them all that they have to give.

___________EXERCISE

Heightening Turning Points

Step 1: Pick a turning point in your story. It can be a major change of direction in the plot or a small discovery in the course of a scene.

Step 2:
Heighten it.
Change the setting in some way. Make the action bigger. Magnify the dialogue. Make the inner change experienced by your point-of-view character as cataclysmic as an earthquake.

Step 3: Take the same moment, and underplay it. Make it quieter. Take away action. Remove dialogue. Make the transition small and internal, a tide just beginning to ebb.

Follow-up work:
Go through your novel and find the turning points in twenty scenes. Find ways to heighten (or pointedly diminish) them.

Conclusion:
Most manuscripts
I
read do not feel dynamic. The stories do not stride forward in pronounced steps. Many authors are afraid of exaggerating what is happening, of appearing arty. That is a mistake. Stories, like life, are about change. Delineating the changes scene by scene gives a novel a sense of unfolding drama, and gives its characters a feeling of progress over time.

The Inner Journey

P
lot developments create easy-to-see turning points. Less easy to identify are your protagonist's inner turning points: the moments when self-perception changes. Call it growth, call it exposition, call it whatever you like. It is when we get inside your hero's head and find out who he is right now.

In
City of Bones,
Michael Connelly's protagonist is homicide detective Hier-onymous (Harry) Bosch. Harry, as I discussed earlier, is Connelly's series hero, but Connelly does not keep him emotionally frozen. Harry evolves. Toward the end of
City of Bones,
Harry finds himself again in hot water for a serious breach of police department regulations. He expects to be forced to retire. Instead, he is given an unexpected promotion and is moved to the downtown Los Angeles precinct. Although this is so that he can be watched more closely, it nevertheless is an unexpected boon:

Now it was Bosch who was having the drink and falling asleep in his chair. He sensed he was at a threshold of some sort. He was about to begin a new and clearly defined time in his life. A time of higher danger, higher stakes and higher rewards. It made him smile, now that he knew no one was watching him.

Harry does indeed begin a new phase at the end of the story, though not the expected one. (See chapter twenty.) Paradoxically, because Connelly is so careful to pinpoint his hero's inner turning points along the way, we are never sure where those turnings of heart, soul, and mind will lead. Unchanging characters cannot surprise. Dynamic characters take us on journeys, and journeys necessarily involve surprises. Think about it: When did a lengthy trip in your own life ever go exactly as expected? Not often, I bet.

In
Mystic River,
Dennis Lehane tells the story of three Boston friends, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus and Dave Boyle, who, as we know from earlier excerpts, were present together at a childhood tragedy: Dave's abduction by two roving child molesters. In the present day the tragedy assumes Greek proportions as Jimmy slowly becomes convinced that Dave has murdered

Jimmy's teenaged daughter, Katie. He kills Dave, but immediately learns from Sean that he was wrong: Dave has committed a murder, but not Katie's.

Lehane now has the problem of providing a resolution for this instrument of backward justice, which he does in the novel's final pages:

[Jimmy] left the window and splashed warm water on his face, then covered his cheeks and throat with shaving cream, and it occurred to him as he began to shave that he was evil. No big thing, really, no earth-shattering clang of bells erupting in his heart. Just that—an occurrence, a momentary realization that fell like gently grasping fingers through his chest.

So I am then. . . .

In the paragraphs that follow, Jimmy weighs his past crimes and finds that some of them, in some ways, worked for the good. He decides to commit to his neighborhood and pay attention to some of the kids he knows there.

He finished shaving, looked one more time at his reflection. He was evil. So be it. He could live with it because he had love in his heart and he had certainty. As trade-offs went, it wasn't half bad.

I am not sure that all killers achieve peace as easily, but in changing Jimmy Marcus's heart Lehane orchestrates an inner turning that allows Jimmy—and us—to go on. Jimmy's mistake is worst than most, needless to say, but, because he can forgive himself, we ultimately can forgive him, as well.

Let's again look at Robert Hellenga's literary novel
The Sixteen Pleasures
and see how the author takes his heroine, book conservator Margot Harrington, through a number of inner turning points. One of the more elegant points occurs early in Margot's affair with Florentine art scholar Sandro Postiglione. It is 1966, and Margot has gone to Florence to help preserve books damaged in the flooding of the river Arno. One day she finds herself in the Lodovici Chapel assisting Dottor Postiglione (or Sandro) in applying solution-soaked bandages to four filmed-over frescoes of the life of Saint Francis. Sandro's practical artistry and his cheerful advice to the abbot to "pray without ceasing" put Margot at ease:

I've always felt intimidated in the presence of great art. I've always felt that my responses were inadequate. "Just sit quietly and look," was Mama's advice. But sitting quietly and looking always made me nervous. Like many people, I'd rather read about a painting than look at it. Or I'd rather hear someone talk about it. But working with Dottor Postiglione gave me a new perspective. The pressure was off. There was no need to work up an intense spiritual experience. No one was going to quiz me to make sure I'd appreciated them properly. The job wasn't to appreciate them but to keep preparing the compresses. I saw the frescoes as things, pieces of this world rather than venerable icons pointing the way to some remote metaphysical realm called Art, physical objects that could wear out, like a shirt, and then be mended, and as things I found them easier to like. Like old shirts. Saint Francis dancing before the pope, Innocent III, who has just given him permission to found a religious order. What a wonderful image. I'd seen it a dozen times before, but this was the first time it made me want to dance, too.

Margot's changed outlook on great art mirrors an inner change in her. Through her restoration of a rare book of erotic sonnets, her sexual self is coming alive. What formerly had been remotely passionate, elevated, and intimidating is now becoming a practical possibility. Soon after this Margot is intimately involved with Sandro. In a sense, he applies salve to her spirit. Margot comes to enjoy the physical object that is her body, a piece of this world under heaven. The turning described in the passage above is a small one, but in Hellenga's hands its effect is large.

Take the time to demark the inner turning points in your current novel. We want to know about your characters, particularly how they are changing. Show us. A sense of the rich inner lives unfolding is one of the hallmarks of a breakout novel.