Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (4 page)

He knocked gently on the arched double doors.

"Mother? Are you awake?"

Something smashed against the other side of the door. It sounded expensive.

"Of course I'm awake! How can I sleep in this blinding glare?"

Artemis ventured inside. An antique four-poster bed threw shadowy spires in the darkness, and a pale sliver of light poked through a gap in the velvet curtains. Angeline Fowl sat hunched on the bed, her pale limbs glowing white in the gloom.

"Artemis, darling. Where have you been?"

Artemis sighed. She recognized him. That was a good sign.

"School trip, Mother. Skiing in Austria."

"Ah, skiing," crooned Angeline. "How I miss it. Maybe when your father returns."

Artemis felt a lump in his throat. Most uncharacteristic.

Artemis is trying to deny his longing for his father and his grief over his mother's condition, but Colfer makes sure that his readers do not miss them. Later on, Artemis succeeds in capturing a fairy, Holly Short, a high tech-equipped officer in LEPrecon, the elite branch of the Lower Elements Police. Artemis lays a deadly trap for Holly's superior officer, Commander Root, aboard a whaling boat, which blows up. Root is nearly killed; meanwhile, Holly suffers (or appears to) in captivity. Artemis gloats over his success, but mixed with his glee are other emotions:

Artemis leaned back in the study's leather swivel chair, smiling over steepled fingers. Perfect. That little explosion should cure those fairies of their cavalier attitude. Plus there was one less whaler in the world. Artemis Fowl did not like whalers. There were less objectionable ways to produce oil by-products. . . .

Artemis consulted the basement surveillance monitor. His captive was sitting on her cot now, head in hands. Artemis frowned. He hadn't expected the fairy to appear so . . . human. Until now, they had merely been quarry. Animals to be hunted. But now, seeing one like this, in obvious discomfort—it changed things.

Artemis Fowl believes himself to be single-mindedly focused on his goal of extorting fairy gold, but again and again his author shows us that Artemis has other, more human sides. These added dimensions make Colfer's hero a complex criminal mastermind—and one for whom we can feel sympathy.

Plot events themselves can provoke the emergence of a new side of a character. Ann B. Ross's fourth novel,
Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind
, scores a hit with its portrait of Julia Springer, a wealthy, sixty-ish lady in a small North Carolina town. Miss Julia is a proud, frugal, orderly banker's widow. She is well acquainted with the ways of a small town. When her dead husband's nine-year-old bastard son is dumped on her doorstep one day, Miss Julia is mortified— and knows that gossip about this development will ruin her life. She is terrified. What to do? After considering her options, Miss Julia makes a surprising choice:

"Here's what I'm going to do," I went on, feeling my way as I talked. "The first thing I'm
not
going to do is call any of those child welfare agencies. Keeping this child is my cross the bear, even thought I don't deserve it, and it's the only way to get back at Wesley Lloyd. He hid this child for a decade, but I'm not hiding him. And I'm not going to hide my face, either. None of this is my fault, so why should I act like it is? There's not a reason in the world. They're going to talk no matter what I do, so I'm going to give them something to talk about. I'm going to hold my head up if it kills me, and I'm not going to protect Wesley Lloyd Springer from the consequences. This is his son, and everybody's going to know it, without any guessing. I'm going to flaunt this child before the whole town, so let the cookies crumble!"

Miss Julia's suddenly stiff backbone becomes not only a reason for reader sympathy, but a plot spine as well. With a sharp eye, and sharper tongue, Miss Julia sets about transcending the town gossips and inheritance grabbers—mostly.

This new character dimension is not the first that Ross reveals. Although Miss Julia claims to be tenderhearted when it comes to children, there is little maternal warmth in evidence as she regards her husband's illegitimate son:

Not hearing any movement behind me, I turned to see Lillian's arms around the little bastard, his head against her white nylon uniform. He turned loose the grocery sack long enough to wipe the sleeve of one arm across his running nose, smearing his glasses even more. It was enough to turn your stomach.

Later in the novel, after little Lloyd Jr., has been taken away by this tele-vangelist uncle, Rev. Vernon Pucket, to be reunited, Miss Julia is told, with his mother, who is going to a hairdressing school in Raleigh, Ross reveals another side of Miss Julia:

Oh, there were a lot of things I could've done and should've done, and now I had to live with it all. I got up sometime in the middle of the night and walked across the hall to little Lloyd's room. The empty bed made me realize how empty my house was, and maybe my life, as well.

I was just a selfish old woman with nothing but a few million dollars to her name. No husband, no children, nothing to look forward to but more of the same. Even the thought of writing checks and buying things couldn't lift my spirits.

I cried. Sitting there in Little Lloyd's room, not a light on in the house, an old, slightly blue-haired woman who'd thought of nothing but herself all her life. Yes, I cried.

Miss Julia's motivation changes from protecting herself to protecting little Lloyd Jr. Ross gives her a maternal side, after all.

How many sides of your current protagonist do you reveal? I know what you are thinking:
My hero is multidimensional. My hero is
complex! But let me ask you: Is he complex and multidimensional only in your mind, or actually on the page?

Take a careful look at your manuscript. On which pages, exactly, do you specifically unlock extra sides of your protagonist's personality? Can you highlight the passages? How many of them are there? List the pages numbers. No, really, don't just read this paragraph and congratulate yourself. Do it for real. Scroll through your manuscript, highlight, and count.

Come on now, did you really count? Okay. Now, how many extra dimensions of your protagonist do you actively show? If you cheated and avoided counting, I promise you, there are not as many as you think. If you really counted, now is the time to increase the number of dimensions that your hero has. The more extra work you do, the more involving your novel will be.

____________EXERCISE

Opening Extra Character Dimensions

Step 1:
What is your protagonist's
defining quality,
that is, how would anyone describe your protagonist? What trait is most prominent in his personality? What kind of person is she?
Write that down.

Step 2: Objectively speaking, what is the opposite of that quality? Write that down.

Step 3:
Write a paragraph in which your protagonist actively demonstrates the
opposite
quality that you wrote down in step two.
Start writing now.

Follow-up work: Define a secondary character quality ; write down its opposite; write a paragraph in which this character demonstrates the opposite secondary quality. In the same way, open third and fourth additional dimensions to your protagonist.

Conclusion:
As I mentioned in the introduction, the second most common reason agents reject manuscripts (after low tension) is poorly developed protagonists. Now that you have opened extra dimensions to your hero, you will have an easier time building into this character a fundamental and full-blown
inner conflict.

Inner Conflict

A
step beyond the technique of adding character dimensions is investing your protagonist with two goals, needs, wants, longings, yearnings, or desires that are in direct opposition to each other. Wanting two things that are mutually exclusive means having inner conflict, being torn in two directions, and that is what makes a character truly memorable.

Inner conflict does not need to be limited to your protagonist. Any character can be conflicted. The prologue of Richard Russo's Pulitzer Prize-winning
Empire Falls
tells the story of C.B. Whiting, scion of the industrial dynasty that rules over the central Maine town of Empire Falls. As a young man, Charles longs to escape and indeed manages to linger in Mexico for almost a decade, but in the end a more powerful destiny tugs him back to Maine:

For his part, Charles Beaumont Whiting, sent away from home as a boy when he would have preferred to stay, now had no more desire to return from Mexico than his mother had to return from Europe, but when summoned he sighed and did as he was told, much as he had always done. It wasn't as if he hadn't known that the end of his youth would arrive, taking with it his travels, his painting, and his poetry. There was never any question that Whiting and Sons Enterprises would one day devolve to him, and while it occurred to him that returning to Empire Falls and taking over the family business might be a violation of his personal destiny as an artist, there didn't seem to be any help for it.

In other words, C.B. is torn between bohemian freedom in Mexico and financial security at home in Maine, and he chooses the latter. But that is not the end of his inner conflict. Although he appears to accept this destiny, C.B. begins to build himself a hacienda (in Maine?) across the river from Empire Falls. Later, the arrival of a decomposed moose among the river trash that regularly washes ashore by his hacienda-in-progress provokes in C.B. a personal crisis: