Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (6 page)

Conclusion:
In creating genuine inner conflict, it is not enough simply to create inner turmoil. True inner conflict involves wanting two things that are mutually exclusive. It is most effective when it tears your protagonist, or any character, in two opposite directions.

Larger-Than-Life Character Qualities

Z
ingers: Oh, how I wish I could snap them off as needed! Unfortunately, they tend to pop into my mind about an hour after I need them. Happily, one of the pleasures of novel writing is that an hour later is not too late. Until the manuscript is turned in, there's plenty of time to slot those zingers in.

In Jodi Picoult's morality tale
Salem Falls,
Addie Peabody owns a diner in the small New Hampshire town that gives the novel its name. Addie is unwillingly wooed by the town sheriff, Wes Courtemanche. One evening Wes is pressing his attentions on her. He asks why she stays at the diner and if she could be anything in the world, what would she be? Addie answers: (1) She stays at the diner because she likes it; and (2) if she could be anything, she would be a mother. The last answer pleases Wes, and so he moves in for the kill:

Wes slid his free arm around her waist and grinned, his teeth as white as the claw of moon above them. "You must be reading my mind, honey, since that brings me right to my third question." He pressed his lips over her ear, his words vibrating against her skin. "How do you like your eggs in the morning?"

He's too close.
Addie's breath knotted at the back of her throat and every inch of her skin broke out in a cold sweat. "Unfertilized!" she answered. . . .

Zing! Addie's barb does not entirely discourage Wes, but it does endow Addie with quick-wittedness and pluck. Addie says on short notice the kinds of things we wish we could say. Whether her author invents these darts with equal dispatch or after long mulling I cannot say. Whatever her method, Pi-coult uses the power of the out-of-bounds speech to build larger-than-life characters whom we cannot help but admire.

Another example—actually many examples—of verbal zingers revealing the pain and conflict in relationships can be found in Susan Wiggs's multi-layered contemporary romance
The You I Never Knew.
The novel's backstory reveals that Seattle graphic artist Michelle Turner left Crystal City, Montana, as well as her movie star father, Gavin Slade, under strained circumstances, as we see when she returns to Montana sixteen years later with her sixteen-year-old son:

Her stomach constricted nervously as they walked along the front of the bleacher in search of Gavin Slade. She'd see him soon. Good grief, what would they say to each other?

Their last face-to-face conversation had not been pleasant.

"I'm pregnant, Daddy."

Gavin had gone all stony-eyed. Then he'd said, "I'm not surprised. Your mother was careless, too."

"My
father
was careless," she'd shot back.

Did you ever hold a grudge against a member of the opposite sex? You know, the creep who spent the night and never called again? The girl in high school who went all the way with some handsome bad boy but wouldn't let you, Mr. Nice Guy, lay a hand on her? (Nothing like that ever happened to me, nooooo.)

Did you ever wish that you could get back at the object of your grudge in some unforgettable way? Janet Evanovich's series protagonist, bounty hunter Stephanie Plum, does just that in the opening pages of her debut novel,
One for the Money.
The bad boy in this case is Joe Morelli, who took advantage of young Stephanie (who willingly accepted his advances, it must be said) on several occasions in their hometown of Trenton, New Jersey. As a sixteen-year-old, Stephanie, a virgin, is warned to stay away from Joe by her best friend, Mary Lou Molnar:

"He specializes in virgins! The brush of his fingertips turns virgins into slobbering mush."

Two weeks later, Joe Morelli came into the bakery where I worked every day after school, Tasty Pastry, on Hamilton. He bought a chocolate-chip cannoli, told me he'd joined the navy, and charmed the pants off me four minutes after closing, on the floor of Tasty Pastry, behind the case filled with chocolate eclairs.

The next time I saw him, I was three years older. I was on my way to the mall, driving my father's Buick, when I spotted Morelli standing in front of Giovichinni's Meat Market. I gunned the big V-8 engine, jumped the curb, and clipped Morelli from behind, bouncing him off the front right fender. I stopped the car and got out to assess the damage. "Anything broken?"

He was sprawled on the pavement, looking up my skirt. "My leg."

"Good," I said. Then I turned on my heel, got into the Buick, and drove to the mall.

How many times have
you
run over an ex-lover with your car? None? I thought so. How many times have you
wanted
to? Plenty? Yeah, I knew that too. What makes Stephanie Plum a larger-than-life character is that she does what the rest of us would never do.

A larger-than-life action can be even more effective when it is something that the character involved does not
want
to do. In the last chapter, I discussed Laurell K. Hamilton's series heroine, vampire hunter Anita Blake. Anita hunts and kills law-breaking vampires; despite that, her long-term lover is the Master vampire Jean-Claude. Anita has steamy sex with Jean-Claude, yet does not fulfill Jean-Claude's desire to truly go "all the way," as we see early in
Blue Moon:

He tried to turn my head to one side, nuzzling at my neck. I turned my face into his, blocking him. "No blood, Jean-Claude."

He went almost limp on top of me, face buried in the rumpled sheets. "Please,
ma petite."

I pushed at his shoulder. "Get off of me."

He rolled onto his back, staring at the ceiling, carefully not looking at me. "I can enter every orifice of your body with every part of me, but you refuse me the last bit of yourself."

I got off the bed carefully, not sure my knees were steady. "I am not food," I said.

"It is so much more than feeding,
ma petite.
If only you would allow me to show you how very much more."

I grabbed the pile of blouses and started taking them off the hanger and folding them in the suitcase. "No blood; that is the rule."

No means no to Anita Blake, obviously, particularly where it involves further blurring the lines between her mortal self and the vampires she both hates and loves. As Hamilton's series progresses Anita gains magical powers and authority over other creatures, but a girl has to have some limits, right?

But limits are made to be exceeded, and that is what happens toward the end of
Blue Moon
when one of Anita's vampire helpers, Jean-Claude's old friend and facially scarred second-in-command, Asher, is fatally wounded. There is only one thing that will save him: blood. Anita has vowed never to let a vampire feed on her, but Asher is near death. And so . . .

I put my right wrist, encased in white bandages, in front of his mouth. "Take my blood."

"To drink from you is to give you power over any of us. I do not want to be your slave any more than I already am."

I was crying, tears so hot they burned. "Don't let Colin kill

you. Please, please!" I held him against me and whispered, "Don't leave us, Asher." I felt Jean-Claude all those miles away. I felt his panic at the thought of losing Asher. "Don't leave us, not now that we've found you again.
Tu es beau, mon amour. Tu me fais craquer."

He actually smiled. "I shatter your heart, eh?" I kissed his cheek, kissed his face, and cried, hot tears against the harsh scars of his face.
"Je t'embrasse partout. Je t'embrasse partout.
I kiss you all over,
mon amour."
He stared up at me.
"Je te bois des yeux."
"Don't drink me with your eyes, damn it, drink me with your mouth." I tore the bandages away from my right wrist with my teeth and put my bare, warm flesh against his cold lips. He whispered,
"Je t'adore."
Fangs sank into my wrist.

Thus, in an act of self-sacrifice (see High Moments in chapter twenty), Anita does something that previously she would never, ever have done. Larger-than-life actions like these make Hamilton's Anita Blake the kind of heroine that readers return to again and again. She exceeds her boundaries in ever bigger ways.

Harshest of limits are those we impose upon ourselves in our heads. Our inner censors probably are more powerful than any censorship board any dictatorship could devise. Breaking through to new ways of thinking, however, is the foundation of growth. To change, we must first change our minds.

Karen Joy Fowler's short stories, teaching at the Clarion workshop, and general association with the science fiction community leaves many thinking that she is a writer only of speculative fiction. Fowler's subtle, finely-crafted novels are far more than that, however, as she proved with her third novel,
Sister Noon,
a study of character transformation set in turn-of-the-century San Francisco. A critical success, the book also was a finalist for the PEN/ Faulkner Award.

Sister Noon's
heroine is conventional and colorless Lizzie Hayes, a forty-year-old spinster who is the treasurer of the Ladies Relief and Protection Society Home, an orphanage. With tiny, careful strokes, Fowler paints a picture of a woman whose world and personality constrain her as tightly as a Victorian corset. Passive and biddable as a child, Lizzie was prone to over-stimulation from books and sermons. Childish romanticism gave way to adolescent melancholia, expressed through diets and music. Even so, Lizzie abided by her mother's strictures, down to the last hated pea. A self-conscious adult, she gains strength from her religious faith and unswerving adherence to her chosen course.

Lizzie's life begins to change when an odd orphan girl, Jenny Ijub, is delivered to the Brown Arc (as the orphanage is nicknamed) by a colorful and scandalous San Francisco denizen named Mary Ellen Pleasant. Through Mrs. Pleasant, Lizzie is drawn into the orbit of the "House of Mystery" of Thomas and Teresa Bell, who puzzlingly "employ" Mrs. Pleasant as housekeeper, even though she clearly is wealthier than they are. Lizzie's first visit to the house hints at her inner longing for change:

Sometime after Lizzie finished her tea [
See Low Tension Fixes Part I: The Problem With Tea in chapter twenty-two
], Mrs. Pleasant asked if she was happy with her life. She should have said yes. She rarely felt unhappy. Daily association with the downtrodden kept her keenly aware of her advantages. She knew the pleasure of doing good. She knew moments of great joy, often in church during the high notes of particular hymns. She would open her mouth to sing them, and her heart would leap with her voice up to where the sunlight filtered through the colored glass, igniting the motes of dust above her head. So many pleasures. The sight of red tulips. The little buzz of life in the grass. A letter with her name and foreign stamps. The smell of rain. The taste of pomegranate jelly. Reading novels in the afternoon, with no corset and her shoes off and her feet on a chair. . . . And yet she answered that she was not.

Through seances, drink, and exposure to the confusing mysteries of the Bell household, with its unnumbered brood of ill-matched children, of which Jenny Ijub apparently was one, Lizzie's granite foundation begins to shake. She begins to walk outdoors at unsafe hours, imbibe rose-hip wine, and care less for appearances. The news that Jenny was purchased (and may in fact be another child of Lizzie's own father), along with the effects of a diphtheria outbreak that quarantines the Brown Arc and takes six young lives, further shifts Lizzie's perception of herself. Lizzie notes the change:

Are you happy with your life? Mrs. Pleasant had asked her on that first afternoon in the House of Mystery, and ever since the question, and only since the question, the answer had become no. How did she used to do it, take such pleasure in small things? How would she ever be able to do so again?

Looking backward, Lizzie reviews her limited experiences of sexual stimulation, and wonders at her resolution that she could do without. One evening she loses her way and finds herself on notorious Morton Street. As she walks past the houses where prostitutes display themselves in bay windows, she contemplates the small pleasures of the flesh with which she has satisfied herself, realizes that they are from God, and carries her thinking further:

None of this belonged on Morton Street. Lizzie tried to imagine a looking-glass alley where men sat in windows and waited for women with money. She pretended she was entering a door, making a selection, demanding who and what she wanted. Money on the dressing table. The man like a puppet in her arms.

The fantasy was ludicrous. And upsetting. She didn't have a word for the combination of horror and thrill and buffoonery and sadness it gave her.

These are thoughts that the Lizzie Hayes of the novel's opening would never, ever have had. The change in Lizzie's thinking finally leads her to uncover the secrets of the House of Mystery.