Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (43 page)

I usually let the story itself do the work, in fact. If a story is solid, it doesn't take much pushing for savvy editors to see its potential. By way of example, let me show you a couple of pitches that I recently e-mailed to editors.

The first is a smallish but beautifully written literary novel set in contemporary Cuba, full of fine observation of late Castro era Havana and elsewhere. The main character is a dying revolutionary hero who worries that his grandson does not embrace the values that he fought for. Indeed, the grandson does not. He longs for change. In between is a son/father who feels hopeless and stuck in a menial job. There is rich detail and moving incident throughout this novel—far too much to convey in a pitch. So I did not try:

In Karen Campagna's debut literary novel,
Snowfall on Ha-bana,
three generations of Cuban men—Lazaro, Ruben, and Andres—journey in a beautiful vintage Packard across the length of Cuba with a very dangerous cargo in the trunk. Riding with them is Lazaro's beautiful nurse, Flores, whose presence changes them all in different ways as their journey becomes a metaphor for the past, present, and future of Cuba.

Category, setting, protagonist(s), and problem—the "dangerous cargo" in the trunk. The extra detail is the beautiful nurse who rides with them. As you can see this is a simple pitch, just sixty-seven words, but every editor to whom I sent it asked for the manuscript. I do not know whether or not the novel will sell. That is now up to the novel itself. The pitch, though, did its job: Getting the manuscript into editors' hands.

A more challenging pitch was for a World War II thriller of exceptionally high quality. In this story about the rescue of a train full of Dutch Jews on their way to the camps in Eastern Europe in 1942, the author weaves in many plot layers. The hero begins as an antihero, a hit man for New York Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky.

This amoral thug, nicknamed Mouse, is sent on the rescue mission to watch over Meyer Lansky's money, which is funding this desperate plan. Throughout the course of the story he transforms from amoral crook to proud Jew to true hero. He falls for a girl in the Dutch resistance who teaches him the meaning of love while he teaches her how to kill. A host of secondary characters is included, among them a hot-headed commando who hates Mouse, the commando's beautiful English girlfriend, a Dutch partisan who is desperate to rescue his wife in Amsterdam, the wife who is saved in a heart-stopping act of self-sacrifice, a German SS officer under pressure to round up Jews to meet impossible quotas, a Dutch police officer who is a double agent . . . you get the idea.

Big cast, big story. There is no way to get all that into a pitch, but it wasn't necessary. It was enough merely to suggest the novel's complexity:

In Gregg Keizer's WWII thriller
The Longest Day,
it is 1942. Jewish leaders, aware of the deportation of Western European Jews to the death camps, conceive a bold plan to call the deportations to the attention of Allied leaders. A commando team is ready. The problem? No money. For financing, they turn to New York gangster Meyer Lansky, who sends his cash in the company of an amoral hit man, "Mouse" Weis, who hates the whole idea. Mouse plans to kill the commando team and make off with Lan-sky's money, but it is not to be.

Through a brave Dutch resistance operative named Reka, Mouse discovers the transforming power of love and the courage to wear a yellow star. Hampered by a commando team wracked by conflict, racing against a German officer who knows in advance their every move, on the longest day of their lives Mouse and Reka together attempt what the SS has declared will be impossible: the diversion of a train full of Dutch Jews to the North Sea coast for rescue.

Even at 173 words, the above leaves out enormous chunks of Keizer's novel. Nevertheless, the above pitch propelled the manuscript into the hands of an editor at G.P. Putnam's Sons. After that, Keizer's superb first novel did the work. Putnam's pre-empted the competition with a six-figure advance.

An even more complex novel that I am currently pitching is an ancient Egyptian saga, a breakout-scale novel by mystery novelist Lynda S. Robinson. Robinson's prior series featured the Chief of State Security for the boy king Tutankhamen, Lord Meren. Robinson here brings Meren back for a gigantic thriller, pitting him against the most deadly adversary Egypt has ever known, his ex-lover and undercover operative Anath, whom Tut has had tortured and executed (so Meren thinks) for treason. With many points of view and a panoramic portrayal of the splendor that was ancient Egypt, Robinson orchestrates a sage of enormous richness and complexity.

How to boil it down? Here's how I did:

In
The Warrior King,
Tutankhamen's powerful empire is beset by outside enemies and torn from within by grasping factions. The son of a heretic, Tut's hold on power is precarious. Only the wise and canny Lord Meren, Tut's spy master, keeps the boy king on his throne. But their father-son relationship, once more important to Meren than life itself, has been ruined by Tut's decision to kill the only woman that Meren has ever truly loved, the traitorous spy Anath. Unknown to both Meren and Tut, Anath has survived her gristly execution and, with the help of the Hittite king Suppiluliumas, has conceived a vast plan to undermine Egypt and wreck hideous revenge on Tut and Meren. Only king and mentor working together can save the empire—yet how can they succeed when their respect and trust has been irrevocably shattered?

Again, tons of action and several huge subplots are left out of brief description. But so what? It is enough merely to suggest something of the sweep and grandeur of the whole.

Use the exercise that follows to hone down the essentials of your story, then trust your premise to excite the agents and editors whom you have targeted. After all, your story is original, isn't it? The world in which it is set is rife with conflict, right? You have invested your story with power and gut emotional appeal? Right, then. You have it all.

__________________EXERCISE

Constructing the Pitch

Step 1: Write down your novel's title, category, setting, protagonist, and central problem: the main conflict, goal, need, yearning, or hope.

Step 2: Write down one colorful detail that makes any one of the above elements different.

Step 4: Write down these five words: love, heart, dream, journey, fortune, destiny.

Step 5: Set a timer for five minutes.
Five minutes only!
In that time, write a one-paragraph pitch for your novel, incorporating the material you wrote down in steps one-three. In your last sentence, use one of the words you wrote down in step four.

Follow-up work: Put away your pitch for a week or more, then re-read it. Shorten it to one hundred words. Put it away for another week. Now shorten it to fifty words.

Conclusion:
In pitching, less is more. It is fear that makes us blather on and on about our stories, killing interest in them with every juicy detail that we pile on. Save those for the novel itself. In your pitch, keep it clean and simple. Say less than you want to. Interest in your novel will be that much greater for your restraint.

Outlines are an essential tool for working novelists, yet even full-time professionals can feel anxiety when faced with writing them. "I'm no good at outlines," many say to me. "How long does it have to be? Can you send me examples?"

This from long-published fiction writers! In a way their anxiety is understandable. There are no courses I know of in outline writing. I can find no books on the subject, no anthologies of successful outlines. It is an arcane art. Even so, every novelist sooner or later must practice it.