Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (7 page)

How do you build a larger-than-life character in your current manuscript? What does your protagonist say, do, and think that he, or we, would never, ever venture? The following exercise will help you develop these qualities, but do not rely on that alone. Look for opportunities throughout your story to heighten these qualities.

___EXERCISE

Creating Larger-Than-life Qualities

Step 1:
Write down the following:

What is the one thing that your protagonist would never, ever say?

What is the one thing that your protagonist would never, ever do?

What is the one thing that your protagonist would never, ever think?

Step 2:
Find places in your story in which your protagonist must say, do, and think those very things. What are the circumstances? What are the consequences?
Make notes, starting now.

Follow-up work 1:
Find twelve more points in the story in which your protagonist can break through his boundaries.

Follow-up work 2:
Find a single point in the story in which your protagonist pointedly
lets go
an opportunity for a larger-than-life gesture.

Conclusion:
A larger-than-life character is one who says, does, and thinks things that we would like to but never dare. This does not mean necessarily mean turning your characters into wise-crackers or pulp cliches. It does mean pushing them out of their own bounds, whatever those might be.

Heightening Larger-Than-Life Qualities

S
harpen larger-than-life qualities throughout your story. Fine advice, you may be thinking, but how do I know where to start? Larger-than-life opportunities can crop up anywhere; it only takes being alert to the possibility of sending your protagonist or point-of-view character beyond what is usual.

For instance, it is not uncommon in novels to find a character remembering a lost loved one, such as a wife who has died. Nothing special in that. Happens all the time. Does it require big treatment? Not necessarily. But it is an opportunity.

In Barbara Freethy's
Summer Secrets,
Duncan McKenna is a sailor who eight years before the action of the novel won a round-the-world race with his three teenaged daughters as his crew. Fifteen minutes of fame resulted, but even that fame and Duncan's fanatic love of sailboat racing cannot compete with his memory of his dead wife, Nora, as we discover when a reporter, Tyler Jamison, asks him about her:

"What was she like?" he asked. "Your wife, Nora."

Duncan lifted his face to the sun. "Close your eyes," he said.

"What?"

"Close your eyes," Duncan repeated.

Tyler hesitated, then closed his eyes, wondering what was supposed to happen.

"Feel that heat on your face?" Duncan asked.

Now that he mentioned it, yes. "Sure." There was a warmth on his skin, a light behind his lids, the scent of summer in his nostrils. His senses were heightened with his eyes closed.

"That's what she did for me," Duncan murmured. "She made me feel everything more intensely than I'd ever felt it before."

Where a lesser writer would simply use words to convey a nostalgic feeling, Freethy uses an active demonstration; one that is big, surprising, and larger than life—yet a perfectly natural way for a seafaring man to look at it. By heightening this moment, Freethy makes Duncan McKenna a larger-than-life figure—though not always an admirable one, as we later discover.

The second step in this chapter's exercise directs you to take a moment and make it smaller; that is, underplay it. In Dan Brown's best-selling thriller
The Da Vinci Code,
American symbologist Robert Langdon is asked to consult on the murder of an elderly curator, Jacques Sauniere, who was shot in the Louvre after closing and, before he died, left behind highly cryptic clues.

What Langdon doesn't know is that the captain of Paris's homicide detectives, Bezu Fache, nicknamed "The Bull," thinks he is the killer. Langdon is warned by a beautiful young police cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, who is the murdered curator's niece. Sophie helps Langdon escape the Louvre—but not before they dispose of a GPS tracking chip planted in Langdon's pocket, misdirect the entire police force, solve several puzzling anagrams, and find two new clues.

All that in twenty minutes or so. Free of the Louvre, they zoom away in Sophie's miniature car, and a chase across the nighttime streets of Paris begins. As they careen onto the broad Champs-Elysees, Langdon looks out the rear window at the police cars massing behind them at the museum. His comment at this moment?

Let me ask you, what would you have Langdon say at a time like this? Something like,
Holy Sh
—/, perhaps? Maybe just,
Step on it!
Anything like that would certainly serve the purposes of the scene. Here is how Brown chooses to handle it:

His heartbeat finally slowing, Langdon turned back around.

"That was interesting."

Langdon's
sangfroid
at this tense moment is far more effective than an excited outburst. James Bond would be proud.

As you comb through your manuscript looking for ways to heighten anything your protagonist says, does, or thinks, look for ways to take things up in temperature, but also down. Play against the prevailing mood of a scene. A larger-than-life protagonist talks, acts, and reasons independently. Let your hero's speech, actions, and thoughts follow their own course, regardless of what is going on. Surprise us. That sounds hard, but it really is only a technique.

Adjusting the Volume

Step 1:
At random in the middle of your manuscript, pick anything at all that your protagonist thinks, says, or does. Heighten it. Make it bigger, funnier, more shocking, more vulgar, more out of bounds, more over the top, more violent, more insightful, more wildly romantic, more active, more
anything. Make the change in your manuscript.

Step 2: Take that same action, thought, or line of dialogue, and make it smaller. Tone it down; understate it; make it quieter, more internal, more personal, more ironic, more offhand, less impassioned, barely noticeable. Make the change in your manuscript.