Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (27 page)

Follow-up work: Find four places in your novel, ones that fall between plot developments or scenes, in which the problem does not immediately arrive. Add bridging conflict.

Conclusion:
To maintain high tension it isn't necessary to keep your novel's central conflict squarely front and center. Bridging conflicts adds contrast and variety, and makes even peripheral action matter. It is what keeps your readers' eyes glued always to the page, even when your main plot is taking a break.

Low Tension Part I: The Problem With Tea

T
he most controversial part of my Writing the Breakout Novel workshop is this exercise, in which I direct authors to cut scenes set in kitchens or living rooms or cars driving from one place to another, or that involve drinking tea or coffee or taking showers or baths, particularly in a novel's first fifty pages. Participants looked dismayed when they hear this directive, and in writer's chat rooms on the Web it is debated in tones of alarm. No one wants to cut such material.

Best-selling author Jennifer Crusie even tracked me down at a writers retreat in Kentucky to debate the point about kitchens. She argued that kitchens are the hearth and heart of family, the anchoring point where what is normal is demonstrated and what is abnormal is discussed. Without kitchen scenes, she argued, how can you tell a family story?

Indeed. It's hard to find a novel, even a novel discussed in this workbook, that does not have scenes set in kitchens, cars, showers, or what have you. Tea and coffee frequently are served. And they work. So how do these breakout authors get away with it when in 99.9 percent of manuscripts that I read such scenes invite me to skim (which I do)?

The reason is that in careless hands such scenes lack tension. They do not add new information. They do not subtract allies, deepen conflict, or open new dimensions of character.

Typically, scenes like these relax tension, review what already has happened, and in general take a breather. They are a pause, a marking of time, if not a waste of time. They do not
do
anything. They do not
take
us anywhere. They do not raise questions or make us tense or worried. No wonder they do not hold my attention. Am I being harsh? If you go by the novels I have cited as examples in this workbook, it might seem so. Hey, these novels are best sellers, critical successes, and award winners.

But these are breakout novels. Yes, they work, even when tea is being served.

The manuscripts that I am complaining about. . . well, frankly, most of them never see print. And for good reasons. Let's take a look at some breakout novels and see how their authors make potentially low-tension scenes work.

Is there anything necessary about driving a hero across Paris from his hotel to a murder scene? No, not really. Suppose that scene tells us nothing new about the murder? Worse, suppose it involves a catalog of Paris monuments and sights? Worse still, suppose the author takes up an entire chapter with this drive. Does that sound dynamic? Certainly not.

However, in the hands of Dan Brown in his massive best-seller
The Da Vinci Code,
which I discussed earlier, that is exactly what occupies the third chapter. Brown's protagonist, American symbologist Robert Langdon, is driven from the Hotel Ritz to the Paris Louvre museum in a police car. He is not driven at top speed. No one's life is at stake. Langdon takes in the sights as they go. But Brown takes this mundane act of traveling from here to there and invests it with subtle tension:

Outside, the city was just now winding down—street vendors wheeling cars of candied amandes, waiters carrying bags of garbage to the curb, a pair of late night lovers cuddling to stay warm in a breeze scented with jasmine blossom. The Citroen navigated the chaos with authority, it's dissonant two-tone siren parting the traffic like a knife.

"Le capitaine
was pleased to discover you were still in Paris tonight," the agent said, speaking for the first time since they'd left the hotel. "A fortunate coincidence."

Langdon was feeling anything but fortunate, and coincidence was a concept he did not entirely trust. As someone who had spent his life exploring the hidden interconnectivity of disparate emblems and ideologies, Langdon viewed the world as a web of profoundly intertwined histories and events.
The connections may be invisible,
he often preached to his symbology classes at Harvard,
but they are always there, buried just beneath the surface.

Notice how Brown uses the contrast of the late-night city winding down with the car's siren cutting traffic "like a knife" to create a mood of unease. The driver's casual, offhand comments are too studied. They feel menacing, somehow. Langdon himself is uneasy. Nothing is an accident, he believes; everything is connected. He is in this police car for a reason he cannot yet see, and is connected to events and mysteries that have not yet been revealed.

That is indeed the case, as we soon learn, but even in this preliminary moment Brown is working to create a sense of foreboding. He keeps Langdon, and us, off balance. And what of the sights? Brown uses even these, working from Langdon's unique point of view, to show us that things are not always what they seem:

When they reached the intersection of Rue de Rivoli, the traffic light was red, but the Citroen didn't slow. The agent gunned the sedan across the junction and sped onto a wooded section of Rue Castiglione, which served as the northern entrance to the famed Tuileries Gardens—Paris's own version of Central Park. Most tourists mistranslated Jardins des Tuileries as relating to the thousands of tulips that bloomed here, but
Tuileries
was actually a literal reference to something far less romantic. This park had once been an enormous, polluted excavation pit from which Parisian contractors mined clay to manufacture the city's famous red roofing tiles—or
tuiles.

The Jardins des Tuileries was once a polluted pit? Yikes! But that's nothing. The Paris Louvre is shortly to be revealed as anything but a serene temple to art; rather, in Brown's novel, it is a cesspool of suspicion, secrets, codes, and murder. There is tension on every page of Brown's novel. Even when nothing big appears to be happening, small anxieties keep us on edge. This thriller thrills all the way.

Karen Joy Fowler's literary novel
Sister Noon,
which I also discussed earlier, tells the story of a conventional, turn-of-the-twentieth-century San Francisco spinster, Lizzie Hayes, who falls under the influence of the colorful and questionable Mrs. Pleasant, a woman who is nominally a housekeeper for Thomas and Teresa Bell, but whose actual occupation is somewhere between society benefactress and voodoo queen. Lizzie has questions for Mrs. Pleasant and visits the Bell's "House of Mystery" where Mrs. Pleasant holds sway. Lizzie hopes to get Mrs. Pleasant alone, but the social ritual of serving tea gets in the way:

Mrs. Pleasant entered the room. "Teresa," she said. She spoke quickly as she moved. "You've met Miss Hayes, then. I'm delighted. She's a woman of good works." She didn't look delighted. She didn't look surprised. Her face was gracious, but this could have been an illusion created by age, the texture of her skin, like a crumpled handkerchief. Her hair was white about her face, but still, even now, when she was in her seventies, mostly black. She's gathered it into a knot with bits curled tightly around her temples. Her eyes were sharp; they seemed to take much in while giving nothing away.

"Really?" said Mrs. Bell. "Now, she didn't say. I'm rather a creature of ideals, myself."

"Would you like a cup of tea?" [Mrs. Pleasant asks.]

Lizzie did not want to stay long enough to drink a cup of tea. She didn't wish to make a social call. She didn't wish to conduct her business in front of the peculiar Mrs. Bell. She couldn't think of a courteous way to send Mrs. Bell from her own drawing room. "Tea would be lovely," she said. "Aren't you kind."

She took a seat on the couch. Mrs. Pleasant vanished. . . .

"Don't eat or drink nothing," Mrs. Bell warned Lizzie.

Is the tea poisoned? Oh, dear. Do you see how Fowler creates strong undercurrents of tension in this outwardly gracious social situation? Read the passage again. Notice the ambivalence in Mrs. Pleasant, and in Lizzie. Notice Mrs. Pleasant's eyes, which are "sharp" and "take much in while giving nothing away." Then there is that warning from Mrs. Bell. Is anybody in this scene relaxed? No. Tension in this scene is as thick as clotted cream on a scone.

Consequently, we can't wait to see how it comes out. This is in striking contrast to most tea scenes I see in manuscripts, which generally are an excuse to slack
off
tension, rather than build it. Coffee scenes aren't much better, by and large, despite the bigger caffeine jolt. Cigarettes are disappearing from novels, just as they are disappearing from offices and restaurants, but they, too, have big tension killing potential. They should come with a warning from the Editor General: Can Be Hazardous to Your Scene.

As I noted in chapter three, Alice Sebold's literary novel
The Lovely Bones
is a story that, objectively speaking, has no outward tension. The tension that infuses the novel is the inner conflict experienced by Susie Salmon, the murdered fourteen-year-old who narrates the novel from heaven, who is dead but wishes to be alive so that she can grow up.

But that is not to say that Sebold ignores the need for plot developments or tension within a scene. Early in the novel, Susie's father goes to visit the boy who had a crush on Susie, Ray Singh; however, when Susie's father arrives at the Singh home he encounters Ray's beautiful, icy, and hostile mother. She is outwardly cordial, but her protectiveness of her son is readily apparent:

A little while later, as my father was thinking of how tired he was and how he had promised my mother to pick up some long-held dry cleaning, Mrs. Singh returned with tea on a tray and put it down on the carpet in front of him.

"We don't have much furniture, I'm afraid. Dr. Singh is still looking for tenure."

She went into an adjoining room and brought back a purpose floor pillow for herself, which she placed on the floor to face him.

"Dr. Singh is a professor?" my father asked, though he knew this already, knew more than he was comfortable with about this beautiful woman and her sparsely furnished home.

"Yes," she said, and poured the tea. It was quiet. She held out a cup to him, and as he took it she said, "Ray was with him the day your daughter was killed."

He wanted to fall over into her.

"That must be why you've come," she continued.

"Yes," he said. "I want to talk to him."

"He's at school right now," she said. "You know that." Her legs in the gold pants were tucked to her side. The nails on her

toes were long and unpolished, their surface gnarled from years of dancing.

"I wanted to come by and assure you I mean him no harm," my father said. I watched him. I had never seen him like this before. The words fell out of him like burdens he was delivering, back-logged verbs and nouns, but he was watching her feet curl against the dun-colored rug and the way the small pool of numbered light from the curtains touched her right cheek.

"He did nothing wrong and loved your little girl. A schoolboy crush, but still."

Here is another scene involving tea, and set in a living room to boot, but do you notice much cream-or-sugar-no-thank-you-isn't-it-lovely-weather dialogue going on here? No. The tension between Susie's father and Ray's mother is under the surface, but not far and not for long. It makes this scene matter.

Put your tension meter on its most sensitive setting. When your fingers begin to type any scene set in a kitchen, living room, or car going from one place to another, or that involves tea, coffee, cigarettes, a bath, or reviewing prior action, I hope your tension meter will sink into the red zone and set off a screaming alarm in your brain.
Low tension alert!

If that doesn't work, take another look at your novel the next time it comes back from an agent or editor. Does it have enough tension to make every scene, even every paragraph, matter? Have a cup of tea and think it over. Maybe not.