Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (5 page)

Now, down by the river, his thoughts disturbed, perhaps, by the proximity of rotting moose, he began to doubt that building this new house was a good idea. The hacienda, with its adjacent artist's studio, was surely an invitation to his former self, the Charles Beaumont Whiting—Beau, his friends called him there— he'd abandoned in Mexico. Worse, it was for this younger, betrayed self that he was building the hacienda.

His inner conflict isn't over. C.B.'s conflicted spirit eventually seeks relief in an affair with a pretty young worker at his family's shirt factory—fragile Grace, the mother of the novel's protagonist, Miles Roby. This affair shadows Miles's childhood and leads C.B.'s iron-willed wife, Francine, the novel's antagonist, eventually to reel in and dominate not only Grace but Miles himself throughout his adult years.

Thus, the powerful inner conflict that Russo builds for C.B. Whiting spreads to affect generations beyond C.B's. Indeed, it nearly causes the destruction of Empire Falls itself.

Is there any character in contemporary fiction more conflicted than Laurell K. Hamilton's wildly successful series heroine Anita Blake? Anita is a St. Louis "animator," or raiser of the dead. (Why raise the dead, you ask? Among other reasons, to question them about the details of their wills.) She also works as a court-sanctioned vampire killer; vampires being, in Hamilton's alternate world, real and endowed with certain limited rights.

Anita Blake is tough, but in contrast has a soft spot for vampires and other were-creatures. Indeed, her series-long love interest is the French master vampire Jean-Claude. As the series progresses she becomes engaged, then unengaged, to a junior high school teacher and alpha werewolf of the local pack, Richard Zeeman. Indeed, it is Richard who draws Anita to Tennessee in
Blue Moon
, the novel that finally brought Hamilton to
The New York Times
paperback best-seller list. Richard has been arrested in the small town of Myerton, accused of rape. It is up to Anita to exonerate him before a rare "blue moon," only five days away, sends Richard on an uncontrollable feeding binge.

Anita's inner conflict—enforcing the law vs. sympathy (indeed, lust) for the creatures she is meant to hunt—would alone be enough, you would think, to energize this steamy and complex novel. But Hamilton does not stop there. Richard is her ex-fiance at this point, but she still has strong feelings for him even though she has firmly chosen Jean-Claude for reasons we learn at the beginning of the novel:

Richard was an alpha werewolf. He was head of the local pack. It was his only serious flaw. We'd broken up after I'd seen him eat somebody. What I'd seen had sent me running to Jean-Claude's arms. I'd run from the werewolf to the vampire. Jean-Claude was Master of the City of Saint Louis. He was definitely not the more human of the two. I know there isn't a lot to choose from between a bloodsucker and a flesh-eater, but at least after Jean-Claude finished feeding, there weren't chunks between his fangs. A small distinction but a real one.

There you go: another example of how flossing might have saved a relationship. As I said, Anita is torn between two lovers, so much so that she thinks of them all as a triumvirate: master vampire, Ulfric (wolf king), and necromancer. For Anita, being torn in two directions is not just a romantic dilemma but a condition of life in her (well, Hamilton's) universe:

But I wasn't riding to the rescue because Richard was our third. I could admit to myself, if to no one else, that I still loved Richard. Not the same way I loved Jean-Claude, but it was just as real. He was in trouble, and I would help him if I could. Simple. Complicated. Hurtful.

I wondered what Jean-Claude would think of me dropping everything to go rescue Richard. It didn't really matter. I was going, and that was that. But I did spare a thought for how that might make my vampire lover feel. His heart didn't always beat, but it would still break.

Love sucks. Sometimes it feels good. Sometimes it's just another way to bleed.

In addition to all that, Anita is conflicted about the very justice system that she serves, as Hamilton reminds us as Anita considers the news that idealistic Richard is relying on the truth alone to save him from the rape charge:

It sounded like something Richard would say. There was more than one reason why we'd broken up. He clung to ideals that hadn't even worked when they were in vogue. Truth, justice and the American way certainly didn't work within the legal system. Money, power, and luck were what worked. Or having someone on your side that was part of the system.

Do you think that Anita has enough inner conflict? Hamilton does not. On top of everything else, Anita is a committed Christian. Each new adventure deepens her conflict between her beliefs and her actions, and
Blue Moon
is no exception. Anita's many inner conflicts are a primary reason that she is so memorable. That Hamilton continually deepens those conflicts almost guarantees that her readers will come back book after book. And so they do.

The narrator of Alice Sebold's literary best seller,
The Lovely Bones,
Susie Salmon, has a conflict that can never be reconciled. As the novel opens, fourteen-year-old Susie takes a shortcut through a cornfield on her way home from school. She is lured by a neighbor into an underground room, raped, and murdered. From heaven she looks down upon her family, her friends, and her murderer, observing their lives in the aftermath of her death.

Susie's conflict? Sebold expresses it succinctly early in her novel as Susie describes her heaven (everyone has their own version), which is somewhat like her junior high school, but without teachers. Her textbooks are
Seventeen, Glamour,
and
Vogue.
She lives in a duplex with a roommate, but after a time the pleasures of paradise pall, as she explains to her intake counselor, Franny:

Eventually I began to desire more. What I found strange was how much I desired to know what I had not known on Earth. I wanted to be allowed to grow up.

"People grow up by living," I said to Franny. "I want to live."

Franny states, "That's out." Susie's desire to live despite being dead is a powerful inner conflict that infuses and informs the remainder of Sebold's luminous novel. Susie's hopeless yearning is felt again and again as she watches her father come apart with grief, her mother escape into an affair, her sister grow and eventually marry, and her baby brother struggle with the legacy of a sister whose absence is in itself an impossible-to-ignore presence. Susie misses her dog. She envies her younger sister's first kiss, her first sex, her first experiment with makeup.

Tasting the adolescence that for her was cut short only makes Susie restless in heaven:

I did begin to wonder what the word
heaven
meant. I thought, if this were heaven, truly heaven, it would be where my grandparents lived. Where my father's father, my favorite of them all, would lift me up and dance with me. I would feel only joy and have no memory, no cornfield and no grave.

"You can have that," Franny said to me. "Plenty of people do."

"How do you make the switch?" I asked.

"It's not as easy as you might think," she said. "You have to stop desiring certain answers."

"I don't get it."

"If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling," she said, "you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth."

This seemed impossible to me.

It would be easy for Sebold's novel to lose tension. Objectively speaking, little happens back on Earth. Her murderer is never caught. Her family comes apart, then back together, no more remarkably than any other family. Her father and the boy who loved her experience grief (see Turning Points in chapter eighteen), but how is that any different than most lives? Yet Sebold keeps Susie's longing powerful and ever-present. Susie's inner conflict is
the
central conflict of the novel: sweet, sad, and full of love of life and those lucky enough to live it out.

Sebold builds an entire story on nothing more than this simple yearning: to grow up and be alive.
The Lovely Bones
demonstrates the power of inner conflict not just to carry a novel, but to carry us deep into the sorrow and joy of human existence.

Is the protagonist of your current manuscript beset by an inner conflict? How clearly is that expressed? What actions does it result in? What about other characters in the novel? Use this exercise to help you develop this inner conflict, make it stronger, and give it expression—and to make your protagonist, and other characters, as memorable as they can be.

_EXERCISE

Creating Inner Conflict

Step 1:
Thinking about your protagonist in the novel as a whole, what it is that your protagonist
most
wants?
Write that down.

Step 2: Write down whatever is the opposite of that.

Step 3: How can your protagonist want both of those things simultaneously? What would cause your protagonist to want them both? What steps would he actively take to pursue those conflicting desires? Make notes, starting now.

Follow-up work: Work on sharpening the contrast between these opposing desires. Make them mutually exclusive. How can you ensure that if your protagonist gets one, he cannot get the other? Make notes.