Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (3 page)

and anxious is her mental state that the police suspect Catherine herself. However, thanks to the strength with which Gerritsen already has invested her, we never doubt her sanity.

What about a protagonist who is not demonstrating heroism as we first meet her, but instead necessarily displays unattractive qualities? That is the challenge faced by Ann Packer at the beginning of her delicately observed literary novel
The Dive From Clausen's Pier.
The beginning of this story finds Packer's heroine, Carrie Bell, a year out of college and discontent with her familiar life and friends in Madison, Wisconsin. She is weary of her boyfriend of eight-and-a-half years, Mike, and quickly alerts the reader that an "unraveling" is looming between them.

All of this is perfectly human, yet Carrie's sullen mood in the opening scene, a Memorial Day picnic at Clausen's Reservoir, easily could make her difficult to like. This is an especially dangerous opening moment for Packer because in the novel's inciting event, Mike soon will dive from a pier into water unexpectedly shallow, break his neck, and wind up in the hospital in a coma. This circumstance guiltily ties Carrie to Madison when she would rather leave, a powerful inner conflict that infuses the novel with its driving tension. And yet in the novel's opening scene Carrie plainly is in a sour mood about her boyfriend:

The parking lot was only half full, and we found a spot in the shade. From behind my seat I unloaded a grocery bag of chips and hamburger buns while he opened the hatch. He wore long madras shorts and a green polo shirt, and as I watched his movements, the quick, effortless way he lifted the beer-laden cooler, I thought about how that easy strength of his had thrilled me once, and how it didn't anymore.

Ouch! How are we to feel sympathy for this hard young woman? Especially later, after a tragedy incapacitates her, to all appearances, perfectly likeable and loving boyfriend? Packer is aware of this difficulty. She addresses it first by giving Carrie nothing bad to say about Mike. Theirs is just a relationship that has run its course. Carrie is a young woman yearning to spread her wings and fly away from her hometown. Who cannot understand that?

Next, Packer makes Carrie aware of her disaffection and its essential unfairness:

I could feel everyone looking at me: Rooster, Stu, Bill, Christine—even Jamie. Looking and thinking, Come
on, Carrie, give the guy a break.

Here is Packer's secret: It is Carrie's keen awareness that she is in an ill mood that rescues our opinion of her. She knows that her friends can see it. She has the honesty and grace to observe their looks of reproach and not to defend herself.

In the hands of a less careful novelist, Carrie would be bitter about Mike, sarcastic toward him, ignore her friends, and indulge her dark feelings. We would find it impossible to sympathize with her. Packer takes a more balanced approach and leaves us with the feeling that Carrie is not mean-spirited, just a young woman who is trapped by her circumstances. That is a situation with which anyone can sympathize.

A still more subtle demonstration of opening strength can be found in one of Alan Furst's gripping World War II espionage novels,
The Polish Officer.
Furst's handling point of view in this novel borders on objective. At first his hero, Captain Alexander de Milja, is seen as if through the lens of a camera: from the outside only. It is September, 1939. As Germans invade Warsaw, de Milja supervises the burning of documents at the headquarters of Military Intelligence. One by one, de Milja watches the immolation of maps, plans, surveys, etc:

Drawer 4088: Istanbul by street. Istanbul harbor with wharf warehouse numbers. Surveyor's elevations of Uskudar with shore batteries in scale. Bosphorus with depths indicated. Black Sea coast: coves, inlets, bridges, roads. Sea of Marmara coast: cloves, inlets, bridges, roads.

In the fire.

Drawer 4098: Timber company surveys, 1935-1938, streams, logging paths, old and new growth trees, drainage, road access, river access. For forests in Poland, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine.

"That series aside please," de Milja said.

The clerk, startled, whirled and stared, then did as he was ordered. The timber surveys were stacked neatly atop maps, drawn in fine detail, of the Polish railway system.

De Milja's sparing a set of forest surveys from the flames may not seem particularly notable, but there is something calm, deliberate, and purposeful in de Milja's order to set them aside. We suspect that something is at work under the surface—something strong. As the action unfolds in the following pages we realize what it is. De Milja has grasped his country's essential situation: The Germans will conquer Poland. Maps, surveys, and plans will be needed for the resistance into which he is later recruited.

De Milja's intelligence, deliberate care, and ability to face a dawning reality set him apart. He has unusual strength. Even though Furst has not yet taken us inside his hero's head and heart, we already admire him for his actions.

How do you hint at the heroism of your protagonist in the opening pages of your current manuscript? How do you make us care? What about this character will we find admirable and attractive? More to the point, what is it that
you
find likable about this character
at this precise moment?
Figure that out, and you will be most of the way toward making us, your readers, care as much about your protagonist as you do.

__EXERCISE

Adding Heroic Qualities

Step 1: Who are your personal heroes? Write down the name of one.

Step 2: What makes this person a hero or heroine to you? What is his or her greatest heroic quality? Write that down.

Step 3: What was the moment in time in which you first became aware of this quality in your hero/heroine? Write that down.

Step 4: Assign that quality to your protagonist. Find a way for he or she actively to demonstrate that quality, even in a small way, in his or her first scene. Make notes, starting now.

Follow-up work:
Prior to the climactic sequence of your novel, find six more points at which your protagonist can demonstrate, even in a small way, some heroic quality.

Conclusion:
So many protagonists who
I
meet in manuscripts start out as ordinary Joe's or Jane's. Most stories build toward enormous heroic actions at the end, which is fine, but what about the beginning? What is there to make me care? Often, not enough. Demonstrate special qualities right away, and you will immediately turn your protagonist into a hero or heroine, a character whose outcome matters.

Multidimensional Characters

O
ne-dimensional characters hold limited interest for us because they are limited as human beings. They lack the complexity that makes real-life people so fascinating. In well-constructed fiction, a multidimensional character will keep us guessing:
What is this person going to do, say, or think next?
Furthermore, we are more likely to identify with them—that is, to see ourselves in them. Why? Because there is more of them to see.

Eoin Colfer's young adult novel
Artremis Fowl
was billed as a "dark Harry Potter," a description that intrigued me. I grew even more interested when
Artemis Fowl
hit
The New York Times
best-seller list. The novel's twelve-year-old protagonist, I had read, was a criminal mastermind. How could a novel with such a dark protagonist be so popular?

Fatherless Artemis Fowl, the scion of a famous Irish criminal family, is indeed diabolically clever and bent on a wicked scheme: restoring the family fortunes by obtaining the gold that is set aside to ransom any fairy, should one ever fall into the hands of the Mud People; that is to say, humans.

If that was all there was to Artemis, he would indeed be difficult to like. But Colfer does not expect us to sympathize with a one-dimensional, amoral adolescent. Early in the novel Colfer begins dropping hints that there is more to Artemis than that; indeed, that he is a boy with a range of feelings like any other, as we are shown when Artemis visits his mentally frail and bedridden mother: