Week 9 -- Focus on Fiction

Week 9 -- Focus on Fiction

The following info is shared via review of Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass, F + W Publishing, Inc, 2004, Your workshop facilitator highly recommends both the book and workbook.



Plot Development

Plot Layers

In understanding how breakout novels are built, it is crucial to grasp the difference between a subplot and a layer: Subplots are plot lines given to different characters; layers are plot lines given to the same character. Contemporary breakout fiction makes extensive use of plot layers, which reflect the multitiered complexity that most people feel is the condition of life today.

Let us reference Dennis Lehane’s mystery novel Mystic River. In the story, Boston detective Sean Devine’s two boyhood friends, Jimmy Marcus and Dave Boyle both have subplots: Jimmy struggles with the murder of his teenage daughter and his belief that Dave killed her; Dave struggles to suppress the homicidal urges of The Boy, an alter ego that surfaced in him following his abduction by child molesters years earlier.

What gives the novel its resonance, though, are Sean’s own three plot layers: (1) He is the lead detective in the investigation of the murder of Katie Marcus, and although he owes his childhood friend Jimmy his utmost efforts, he struggles against a debilitating emotional numbness. (2) His wife has left him, taking with her the baby daughter who may or may not be Sean’s, and he doesn’t know how to get her back.

Then there is a final layer: (3) Because the case reconnects him with Jimmy and Dave, Sean must with them face again what happened to them all one afternoon as they argued whether or not to steal a car. Another car with two men inside stopped, Dave got in, and his two friends did not. Guilt over this random event haunts Sean powerfully in the present.

“Like this Dave Boyle stuff,” his father said. “What does it matter what happened twenty-five years ago to Dave? You know what happened. He disappeared for four days with two child molesters. What happened was exactly what you’d think would happen. But here you come dredging it back up again because . . . “His father took a drink. “Hell, I don’t know why.”

His father gave him a befuddled smile and Sean matched it with his own.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Yeah.”

“You telling me that nothing ever happened in your past that you don’t think about, turn over in your head a lot?”

His father sighed. “That’s not the point.”

“Sure it is.”

“No, it isn’t. Bad shit happens to everyone, Sean. Everyone. You ain’t special.”


But Sean is special, and so is the case of the murder of Katie Marcus. It draws together all three of the layers that Lehane has given his hero. Because it is Sean’s job to investigate, he cannot avoid revisiting the past he shares with the victim’s father, Jimmy, and the prime suspect, Dave. Nor can he avoid the loss of his wife, whose spooky phone calls torment him as much as his survivor’s guilt. Sean is a man beset by multiple conflicts, outer and inner. Who cannot identify with that?

In his complex and erotic literary novel The Sixteen Pleasures, Robert Hellenga demonstrates a similar flair for laying down plot layers. The novel’s opening paragraph nicely reveals the two principle reasons that his heroine, American book conservator Margot Harrington, decides to travel to Florence in 1966:

I was twenty-nine years old when the Arno flooded its banks on Friday 4 November 1966. According to the Sunday New York Times, the damage wasn’t extensive, but by Monday it was clear that Florence was a disaster. Twenty feet of water in the cloisters of Santa Croce, the Cimabue crucifix ruined beyond hope of restoration, panels ripped from the Baptistery doors, the basement of the Biblioteca Nazionale completely underwater, hundreds of thousands of volumes waterlogged, the Archivio di Stato in total disarray. On Tuesday I decided to go to Italy, to offer my services as a humble book conservator, to help in any way I could, to save whatever could be saved, including myself.

Thus, Margo embarks on an outer journey (visit Italy, save rare books) and an inner journey, a search for the self that she could not find in America in the mid-sixties:

Instead of going to Harvard, I went to Edgar Lee Masters College, where Mama had taught art history for twenty years. Instead of going to graduate school, I spent two years at the Institute of Paper Technology on Green Bay Avenue; instead of becoming a research chemist I apprenticed myself to a book conservator in Hyde Park and then took a position in the conservation department of the Newberry Library. Instead of getting married and having a daughter of my own, I lived at home and looked after Mama, who was dying of lung cancer. A year went by, two years, three years, four. Mama died; Papa lost most of his money. My sister Meg got married and moved away; my sister Molly went to California with her boyfriend, and then Ann Arbor. The sixties were churning around me, and I couldn’t seem to get a footing.{/c:green}

Margot is clearly a woman in need of awakening, and where better to find it than in Italy? Margot’s two layers are strong; all that remains is for Hellenga to weave them together, which he does by a masterfully conceived device that becomes the node of conjunction between these two journeys.

The best selling novelist Nora Roberts cut her teeth writing short “category” romances, but has become expert at building the layers that turn romance stories into breakout-level fiction. Her best selling novel Carolina Moon is the story of a wounded young woman who returns home to face her past, and who finds herself in the process.

There is nothing new in that. That story has been told hundreds of times. Roberts does not allow her novel to remain that simple. She starts with a strong first layer: As a child, heroine Tory Bodeen was regularly and savagely beaten with a leather belt by her fanatic sharecropper father. Tory longs to face those memories in the town where they happened, open an upscale gift store there, and prove to herself that she can be happy.

Brutal childhood beatings would be plenty to load up on any backstory, but Roberts goes further. At age eight, Tory had a special friend in Hope Lavelle, whose family owned the land that Tory’s father farmed. One night the two girls planned to sneak out of their homes for a midnight adventure. Hope escapes to their rendezvous in the woods, but Tory is prevented by her father, who chooses that night to administer another beating.

Eight-year old Hope is raped and murdered. Even in the present day, the murderer remains at large. This second layer of guilt and mystery might be enough to heap on a heroine, but not for Roberts. To this burden she adds another; Tory has a gift of second sight. She can “see” the minds and memories of others, particularly those who have suffered extreme distress. On the night Hope was murdered, Tory saw the whole thing happen, sharing the horror of the incident—though not the knowledge of who murdered her best friend.

Okay, that makes three layers, but why stop there?

Tory’s gift of sight continues to plague her into the present. She would like to be free of this “gift,” but Roberts has other plans: Soon enough Tory’s sight reveals to her the horrific experiences of fresh victims of Hope’s long-ago killer. Tory must both cope with the psychological pain of what she witnesses and follow the imperfect trail opened by her visions—for not only is the identity of Hope’s killer within reach, that killer has now targeted Tory.

Enough layers yet? See how each layer builds an extra “cake level” of insight and suspense? Roberts has even more in mind.

Her heroine is staunchly uninterested in men, having been badly burned by an early love. “I don’t intend to be involved again. Once was enough.” Naturally, there is a fabulous and caring man waiting for her in her hometown of Progress, South Carolina. The identity of this love interest provides one of her powerful nodes of conjunction that connects up the now—Do I have this right?—five layers of Tory’s story.

Childhood memories to face down, an unsolved murder, painful but persistent visions of violence, a love that she does not want, yet cannot avoid . . . there’s a lot happening in the life of Tory Bodeen, don’t you agree? Is this plot overloaded? I would argue that it is effectively layered: it is the multiplicity of Tory’s problems that makes Carolina Moon engrossing—and Nora Roberts one of America’s best story tellers.

How many layers have you heaped on your protagonist in your current manuscript? Just one? Heck, get busy. As you can see, even two layers may be too few to build a breakout novel.

Building Plot Layers EXERCISE

Step 1: What is the name of your protagonist? Write that down.


Step 2: What is the overall problem he or she must solve? Write that down


Step 3: What additional problems can he/she face? Not complications to the main problem, but altogether different problems. Write those down






NOTE: A plot is layered when more than one thing is happening simultaneously to the hero. He has a murder to solve, and at the same time his father is dying of cancer. Why not add a further layer? He is searching for the soul of Mozart’s piano concerti. What is it that gives them their power, their drive? He has to know, so along the way he achieves that insight too. Thus, there are levels of problems to utilize: public problems, personal problems, and secondary problems. Small mysteries, nagging questions, dangling threads—those can also be woven into the plot

Follow up Work: For each plot layer (or at least for each two) that you have added, work out at least four steps or scenes that you will need to bring this narrative line to its climax and resolution. Make notes for additional scenes, or for these additional steps. Where is your best place for YOU to keep this information? Put it there.




Conclusion: Have you ever noticed how everything seems to happen all at once? Good things come in threes. When it rains, it pours Layers give novels the rich texture of real life. Building them into your story is extra work, and takes extra time, but the reward is a rich resonance and complexity.



Subplots


Plot Layers are the several narrative lines experienced by a novel’s protagonist;

subplots are the narrative lines experienced by other characters

What constitutes a narration line? Problems that require more than one step to resolve; in other words, that grow more complicated.


Now that we’ve got our terms straight (if you don’t---read it again), what is the best way to go: layers or subplots? Today, the term subplot has an almost old-fashioned ring to it. It makes us think of sprawling sagas of the type written by Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens. Subplots are found throughout twentieth-century-literature, and of course in contemporary novels too.

Yet what is striking about recent fiction is its intimacy. Authorial and objective third- person points of view have been almost entirely replaced by first-person, and close or intimate third-person points of view. The rich woven texture of breakout-scale novels comes more often from the tight weaving of plot layers than from the broad canvas sprawl of subplots.

But that is not to say that subplots have no place in breakout novels. Far from it. Examples of extensive use of subplots abound on the best-seller lists. Many of the novels discussed in this workshop employ subplots and plot layers.

Even Dickensian sprawl can be found. Michael Faber’s Victorian morality tale The Crimson Petal and the White was, in fact, compared by reviewers to Dickens, and it is true that Faber’s narrative voice is intrusive and authorial in the manner of nineteenth-century novelists. He frequently addresses his readers directly, as we see in this early passage in which Faber takes pity on the reader following a long section detailing the introspection of the novel’s main character.

So there you have it: the thoughts (somewhat pruned of repetition) of William Rackham as he sits on his bench in St. James Park. If you are bored beyond endurance, I can offer only my promise that there will be fucking in the very near future, not to mention, madness, abduction, and violent death.

Well, okay then! Faber goes on to spin out a number of subplots. Rackham is under pressure as his annual stipend is slowly reduced in order to coerce him into assuming directorship of his family’s business bottling perfumes and toiletries. Longing for artistic expression but burdened with an invalid wife, and child, he seeks relief with prostitutes, advised by his jolly friends, Bodley and Ashwell and their bible, a slim guidebook called More Sprees in London. It is this somewhat inaccurate booklet that brings Rackham to Sugar, a high-priced prostitute of unusual beauty, attentiveness, education, and sexual versatility. Sugar is all that he desires. She is even writing a novel; one, we discover, that is mostly about the mutilation of men.

Sugar herself carries a substantial part of the story. When we first meet her she is employed by the sour madam Mrs. Castaway, who may or may not be Sugar’s mother. Either because he is rich and easy or because she is won by his genuine affection for her, Sugar agrees to become Rackham’s exclusive mistress. She moves into a house that he provides for her.

Meanwhile, Rackham’s brother, Henry, a minister, haltingly pursues a charitable widow, Mrs. Emmeline Fox, who runs a Rescue Society for prostitutes. (You can already see that Faber will weave his many subplots together.) Henry’s courtship inches forward until consummation, after which, unfortunately, he perishes in a fire in his paper-cluttered cottage.

At the Rackham home, Rackham’s bedridden wife, Agnes, preoccupies their dwindling household staff with her hypochondria. She fears she is going mad (and in fact is). She longs for relief and begs Mrs. Fox to direct her to the “convent” where she may find eternal life. She buries her diaries in the backyard.

Unable to stand being apart from Sugar, Rackham (at Sugar’s suggestion) hires her as a nanny to his bed-wetting daughter, Sophie. Sugar enters the household, but as soon as she does Rackham begins to grow distant. It slowly emerges that Sugar appeals to him as a prostitute, not as a companion. Sugar, in contrast, is drawn in to the stability of domestic life. She befriends Sophia with kindness and cures her of her bed-wetting. She digs up Agnes’s diaries and reads them, gaining understanding of Agnes’s pain.

The climatic events of all these subplots take 200 pages or so to play out. What a saga! Faber’s novel in its US hardcover edition clocks in at 834 pages. It’s a novel to wander in, and one feels sorry when it’s over.

And yet to achieve the tapestry effect of multiple subplots, it is by no means necessary to write at that length. Cecily von Ziegesar’s zingy young adult novel Gossip Girl, has just as many subplots but delivers them in a breezy 199 pages. How does she do it?

Gossip Girl first introduces New York private school girl Blair Waldorf, a too-rich, too-busy, and under supervised seventeen-year old who wants to lose her virginity with her boyfriend, Nate Archibald. Her various setbacks away from that goal form the principle plotline in the novel.

The main obstacle to Blair’s ambition is her former friend the stunningly gorgeous but troubled Serena van der Woodsen. Serena’s return to New York, her abandonment by her former friends, her failure to fire Nate out of his ambivalence, her discovery of avant-garde art (a blurred picture of her eye—or maybe her belly button, or maybe a more intimate body part—appears in ads all over the city), and her discovery of filmmaking and a more interesting boy than Nate, occupies a significant portion of the remaining novel.

But there are other subplots too. Serena’s love interest, Dan Humphrey, finds Serena, loses her, and finds her again. Student filmmaker Vanessa Abrams has a crush on Dan, but finds a more interesting possibility in a Brooklyn bartender. Dan’s little sister, Jenny, worships Serena, volunteers to work on a film Serena never even scripts, and, to be near Serena, she even crashes a charity fundraiser called “Kiss on the Lips” that raises money for Central Park falcons. (Why do Central Park falcons need money, you ask? No one really knows.) Meanwhile, preppy lecher Chuck Bass hits on every girl in sight, including Serena, and winds up with Jenny, whom he molests in a ladies room stall at the “Kiss on the Lips” party.

All these doings are tightly woven together. What accounts for the 600 page difference between The Crimson Petal and the White, and Gossip Girl? Style.

Faber’s ambling narration minutely details every scene. Von Ziegesar’s Writing provides as much character detail but speeds through the action with frenetic video pacing. The racy world of privileged Manhattan private school girls feels no less vast than Faber’s tapestry of Victorian sexual politics, though, thanks to von Ziegesar’s generous use of subplots.

Are there subplots that can be developed in your novel? Some writers are afraid to add subplots, for fear that their story will run away with them. That fear is unfounded. Subplots may make a novel sprawl, but if carefully woven together with the main layers, the novel will not only hang together, but it will also have a rich tapestry feel of real life.

Adding Subplots Exercises

Step 1: Who are your novel’s most important secondary characters? Write down the names of one, two, or three.

Step 2: What is the main problem, conflict, or goal faced by each of these characters? Write them now.



Step 3: For each, what are three main steps leading to the solution to the problem, the resolution of that conflict, or the attainment of that goal? Another way to ask this is what are three actions, events, or developments—with respect to these secondary characters—that you could not possibly leave out?


Step 4: Outline each secondary character’s story. While your protagonist is at work on the main problem, what is each character trying to do to solve his own problem? Make notes starting now.


NOTE: What if your novel is not really about your hero, but another character? That is the point of the exercise: To make your secondary characters active, to give them lives and stories of their own. These are true subplots.