Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (28 page)

______________EXERCISE

Brewing Tension

Step 1:
Find a scene that involves your hero taking a shower or bath, drinking tea or coffee, smoking a cigarette or reviewing prior action.
Look especially in the first fifty pages.

Step 4: Find a scene set in a kitchen, living room, office, or in a car that your hero is driving from one place to another. Look especially in the first fifty pages.

Step 5: Cut the scene.

Step 2: Cut the scene.

Step 3: If you cannot cut the scene, add tension.

Step 6: If you cannot cut the scene, add tension.

Follow-up work: Find ten more low-tension scenes to cut or to juice up with more tension.

Conclusion:
Ninety-nine percent of scenes involving tea, coffee, showers, baths, and cigarettes are by nature inactive. Same thing goes for kitchen, living room, office, and driving scenes. Cut them. They usually are filler. You think you need them, but probably you don't.

Low Tension Part II: Burdensome Backstory

O
ne of the most common ways that inexperienced and even practiced novelists bog down their openings is with unnecessary backstory.
Now hold on,
you may be thinking,
what do you mean "unnecessary"? Backstory tells us who a character is, where he came from, how he got to be the way he is. How can his actions make sense unless we know that stuff?

I do not dispute that backstory can deepen our understanding of a character. That still does not make it necessary. Perhaps it is desirable to learn about a protagonist's past, at times, but when? That is where most novelists run into trouble: They presume that we, the readers, need to learn that history right away. But that is not so.

Again and again in manuscripts I find my eyes skimming over backstory passages in chapters one, two, and even three. Backstory doesn't engage me, because it doesn't
tell
a story. It does not have tension to it, usually, or complicate problems. However, once problems have been introduced, backstory can be artfully deployed to deepen them. It can be particularly useful in developing inner conflicts.

In Dennis Lehane's
Mystic River,
Boston detective Sean Devine is in a bad state. As we know from earlier excerpts, he feels empty, devoid of care, unable even to summon interest in the murder of the teenage daughter of a long-ago childhood friend:

He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.

Katie Marcus was dead, yes. A tragedy. He understood that intellectually, but he couldn't feel it. She was just another body, just another broken light.

The case itself is a public sensation and a profound puzzle. As the investigation twists and turns, we begin to wonder why Sean is so distant from it.

Lehane withholds an explanation for nearly half the book, building Sean's inner mystery until one evening, alone in his apartment, when Sean can no longer avoid himself and the truth of what is bugging him:

And his marriage, too, what was that if not shattered glass? Jesus Christ, he loved her, but they were as opposite as two people could get and still be considered part of the same species. Lauren was into theater and books and films Sean couldn't understand whether they had subtitles or not. She was chatty and emotional and loved to string words together in dizzying tiers that climbed and climbed toward some tower of language that lost Sean somewhere on the third floor.

Lehane recounts the course of Sean's marriage and his wife Lauren's progression from college actress to black box director to stage manager for touring shows. But it isn't her travel that wears their marriage down:

. . . Hell, Sean still wasn't sure what had done it, though he suspected it had something to do with him and his silences, the gradual dawn of contempt every cop grew into—a contempt for people, really, and inability to believe in higher motives and altruism.

Her friends, who had once seemed fascinating to him, began to seem childish, covered in a real-world retardant of artistic theory and impractical philosophies. Sean would be spending his nights out in the blue concrete arenas where people raped and stole and killed for no other reason but the itch to do so, and then he'd suffer through some weekend cocktail party in which ponytailed heads argued through the night (his wife included) over the motivations behind human sin. The motivation was easy—people were stupid. Chimps. But worse, because chimps didn't kill one another over scratch tickets.

She told him he was becoming hard, intractable, reductive in his thinking. And he didn't respond because there was nothing else to argue. The question wasn't whether he'd become those things, but whether the becoming was a positive or a negative.

I don't know about you, but I ache for this weary young cop and his power-lessness to bridge the widening gulf between him and his vibrant wife. This sympathy is evoked by this sad backstory, however, only because we already are deep into the investigation. The facts of the case mean that Sean should care. He
knows
he should care. He wants to care, but he can't. Over time, his disaffection itself becomes a strong inner conflict that demands a solution. Sean knows that, without genuine zeal, he will be unable to investigate effectively.