Week Seven: DAYS 43–49

WELCOME TO THE MIDDLE

What do the middle of a custard donut and the middle of a novel have in common? Both contain the best part, of course. As you know by now, the middle of your novel — Act Two — is what your novel is really about. When you tell someone what a book or a movie is “about,” you usually summarize for her the middle of the novel. For instance, The Count of Monte Cristo is about a man, falsely imprisoned for years, who exacts revenge on all those who have wronged him. The Great Gatsby is about a man who, obsessed with his former lover, buys a house in her wealthy neighborhood to win her back. Madame Bovary is about a woman who has several torrid affairs in an attempt to escape the sheer banality of her life. Beloved is about a former slave woman who is haunted by the daughter she killed in order to spare her from slavery. All of these brief recaps essentially summarize Act Two of their respective novels.

Middles are the most important part of your novel and are quite tricky to write. If your reader loses attention or feels the novel is crawling along at a snail’s pace or doesn’t connect with the protagonist, chances are the problem is located somewhere in the muddled middle. It’s particularly important to vary your scene type, pay attention to pacing, and keep an eye toward evolving your characters. Readers want to feel a sense of progression throughout a novel — a sense that things are moving forward.

In some ways, though, the middle is the best, most thought-provoking part to write. Act Two is where you really get the opportunity to explore your characters and their interactions, and your plot and its consequences. And in a novel, you’ve got plenty of wiggle room to mediate on, say, the history and uses of a pickax or the science behind a flushing toilet. Go ahead and have fun — so long as you stay in character. Moby-Dick had an entire chapter about whale facts, for example. People can skip it, but it’s the pre-rogative of the middle to open up a bit. Unlike in a short story, a novel provides more space for a modicum of diversion. (Though you want to be careful not to divert your reader too far from the core of your story, lest you risk losing their interest in it entirely. A subject that you find interesting, such as aquatic flora and fauna, might not be that interesting to someone else.)

The middle of your novel, in fact, is so important that we’ll be spending the next three consecutive weeks working on it. Act Two roughly extends from the first major plot point that ended Act One on through to your climax, or the key moment for your character in relation to the story. During this week, we may be writing scenes from our outline a bit out of order, in terms of linearity, but we’ll be focusing on drawing out your character through internal scenes. Next week we’ll focus on your action scenes, and, finally, the following week, we’ll be paying close attention to your novel’s climax.

WEEK 7, ASSIGNMENT 1: Attention: Minors Served Here

We’ve already spent a bit of time thinking about scene types and discussing the importance of balancing both internal and external scenes. This week, however, I want to focus a bit more on some of the “internal” scenes in Act Two of your novel. As you know, internal scenes are scenes that work to reveal the inner workings of your character’s mind, motivations, or emotions. Often, in internal scenes, your character finds herself alone or with a minor character who is used to draw out some sort of personality attribute of your protagonist. Think for a moment, again, of Pammy, a (very) minor character in The Great Gatsby. As you remember, Pammy, the daughter of Daisy and Tom Buchanan, is brought into the novel not for the sake of fully revealing her character, but in order to reveal something about Daisy Buchanan. When we see how Daisy treats Pammy — like a possession, modeling her for the dinner guests before shoving her off on the nurse, who carries her away — we understand Daisy’s underlying personality issues (or disorders).

Peruse your outline and find a scene where your POV character interacts with a minor character. If you have no scene that involves a minor character — or if you find several scenes in your outline where your protagonist is primarily alone — consider fashioning a minor character to both populate your novelistic world and to uncover a personality trait of your character that may not be uncovered if she were simply alone, gazing at the grand vista from a hilltop. Because think about it: How often do you find yourself completely alone, without interruption, be it the postman, a passing car, or a fellow jogger? (Remember, too, how boring empty landscapes can be.)

Like Pammy in The Great Gatsby, not all characters introduced in a novel are self-sufficient. In fact, many characters are flat and unchanging, used only at the service of your lead. Or, like Slugworth in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, some minor characters will fit into the plot later in the novel. If you recall, Slugworth appeared minimally in the first half of the story, tempting the golden-ticket winners to steal an everlasting gobstopper from poor Willy Wonka. However, later in the story, we learn that Slugworth worked for Mr. Wonka as a spy who tested the essential “goodness” of all those sweet-toothed kids. Slug-worth was a minor character who served the major ones and became integral to the plot, too, even though his stage time was miniscule.

Your first assignment is to write a long scene paying particular attention to what the interaction between your two characters, one major, one minor, brings to light in your story. Does your character treat the minor character well? Does she barely notice him? Does she cuss at him like a drunken sailor? Does she inwardly think racist or sexist things about him? How do they converse? What is their body language like? Remember, you should always aim to write with the senses. Refer to your character bios as you write in order to make sure you understand the motiva-tions and complexities of each character. And make sure, too, that this scene has a beginning, a middle, and an end. (I’ll never tire of reminding you.)

WEEK 7, ASSIGNMENT 2: Set the Mood Lighting

Way back on Day 5, you were asked to practice the ways in which setting could be used to reveal character. I’d like you to take out your work from this day and skim it. As you come across any descriptions of physical detail that describes the setting and also depicts some aspect of your character, circle it. Hopefully this will remind you of what setting can do — what setting should do in a novel.

Setting is not an arbitrary aspect of your novel. You can’t simply close your eyes, spin your globe, and decide to set your novel in (spinning my globe now …) Djibouti near the Gulf of Aden. Heck, you’ve never even heard of Djibouti before, so you don’t know what a Djiboutian would look or act like. Instead be intentional in your choice of setting and use it as a tool to help render character, mood, or tone.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say something that not many fiction writers are supposed to say, and that is, quite bluntly, that long descriptions of setting are boring, even when written by the best of writers. There, I said it. I’ve been dying to get that off my chest for years. What a relief. Yeah, yeah, I’m sure the vista from the hill overlooking the city is stunning — in real life. The hours you spent by the lake, just looking up at that beautiful starry sky, were amazing and vast and profound. All those two-hun-dred photos you e-mailed me from your hike at Clingmans Dome in the Smokies were (yawn) really great, and I swear I looked at them all in detail. But I don’t want to read about an empty landscape with no characters involved. How did the setting make you feel? I want to know. What does it say about you when you remark that you think a plastic grocery bag, swirling slowly in the air in an empty parking lot, is (to borrow from American Beauty) the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen? In a recent course I taught, the view from the classroom window featured a plastic bag stuck in a tree — a bag that remained there the remainder of the term, irritating me every time I looked at it. Why didn’t the maintenance crew every pluck it out? I wanted to know. These are the details that will make your setting interesting. And these are the things that will help your setting become an integral part of your novel and not simply a pretty backdrop. Pretty, on its own, is boring. I’d rather save pretty, empty, sweeping views for my hiking, not my reading, thank you very much.

Consider this moment from late in Willa Cather’s nostalgic novel My Ántonia. In this moment, the novel’s protagonist, Jim Burden, has just revisited his beloved (now married, wearied, worn) childhood friend Ántonia after years spent apart. Jim has just confessed to Ántonia that he thinks of her “more than anyone else in the world.” Jim longs for a connection to his past on the Nebraska plain. Jim narrates:

As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the work.

In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the odd pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end here.

This setting description parallels Jim’s mind-set at this singular moment after revisiting his childhood flame. He’s romanticized his notions of Nebraska, just as he’s romanticized Ántonia herself, and his longing for the land and his wistful description of it parallel his interiority. Job well done, Ms. Cather. Not only is the description of the setting specific — a moon as big as a cartwheel is quite precise — but the setting also accomplishes something much more important within the context of the novel: character development.

Take a look at your outline and find an internal scene, perhaps one where your character is alone, or nearly alone. Write this scene using, in part, setting as a primary method for revealing your character’s interiority or emotions. You may wish to use the setting, like Cather did above, to mirror the inner workings of your character. Does the sunny day reflect the disposition of your character? Does your character choose to see the positive aspects of the setting: green grass, blooming flowers, chirping birds? Or does he instead only notice the negatives: dirty cobwebs, wet wadded-up newspapers, and dog droppings your snooty neighbor left as a gift in the yard?

WEEK 7, ASSIGNMENT 3: I Second That Emotion

Let me back up and say something quite important: Internal and external scenes are not totally rigid distinctions. In fact, they are really fluid categories. For instance, you can use setting to parallel the interiority of your character in the middle of a bit of dialogue, which is more external. However, to clarify, if the goal of a scene is to reveal some internal or emotional aspect of your character, that scene is a primarily internal one. If the goal of your scene is to forward the plot or action, that scene is primarily external. Seems pretty simple, right?

This is important to keep in mind as you think about scenes that involve a decent amount of emotional intensity. If you want your novel to have heart — and if you want your reader to connect with your characters — you are going to have to inject an emotional core into your novel. Have you ever read a novel that you, plain and simple, just didn’t care about? Perhaps you just didn’t care if the big, brawny, muscle-bound man won the petite, green-eyed beauty in the end. The problem for you was that you simply didn’t connect with them. Oscar Wilde once said, “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.” This is an excellent rule of thumb for using emotion in your novel. Too little, and you risk ostracizing your reader. Too much, and you risk your reader getting eye strain from rolling her eyes so much (right before putting down the book, that is). However, in order for your readers to relate to your characters — to care about your characters — the emotions of your characters must be apparent.

When I use the term emotion I don’t mean the simple-level, touchy-feely kind of emotions you initially connote from the word. Emotions like love, hate, jealousy, fear — these are the basic emotions that form the human experience, yes. But emotions can also be thought of as values. For example, how we feel at a given time, e.g. delighted at seeing someone famous fail as opposed to being sympathetic to them, might signal our own values. How can you connect the values and belief systems of your characters to those of your readers and vice versa? Perhaps your reader has never had to fight tooth and nail for the woman he loves — but he can certainly empathize with your character who does if he can experience these emotions with him.

Take out the exercise you worked on for the assignment in Day 6. Here, you were asked to explore the emotions of your characters and describe these emotions without naming the emotions. Read through what you’ve written. Where were you able to convey emotions without explicitly stating what the character was feeling? What kind of physical impulses and sensations convey emotions? Assessing your own work with a critical eye is the best way to learn from your mistakes and avoid making them again in the future.

Here’s a quick quiz.

DIRECTIONS: Next to each of these lines of physical description, write down what kind of emotion you think the character was experiencing.

1. He gritted his teeth until his jaw ached.

2. She felt her heart rise into her throat, making it difficult to breathe.

3. Her palms were so sweaty, she was afraid to take his hand for fear that he would notice.

4. His bottom lip began to quiver as the doctor told him the news.

HERE IS THE ANSWER KEY:

1. He was angry.

2. She was upset.

3. She was nervous.

4. He was sad.

Now, can’t you see how describing the physical sensation brought on by the emotion is more rhetorically effective than describing the emotion itself? As readers, we connect with emotion only through a shared experience of knowing how it feels. If you make your readers feel what your characters feel by making them experience what your characters are experiencing, you’ll have created a scene that resonates.

Write a minimum of two internal scenes from Act Two of your outline, scenes that stand out particularly for the range of emotions your character experiences. Perhaps your character wants something but can’t have it. Or perhaps he’s just learned some devastating news. Or perhaps he’s in love with his brother’s wife. Write both of these scenes, paying particular attention to conveying your character’s emotions through physical description. If this scene includes dialogue, you may want to pay particular attention to what is being said versus what is being thought. Can you give your reader access to the indirect thoughts of your character? Consider, too, how setting can contribute to the mood of your character.

A final reminder à la Oscar Wilde’s advice: While it’s important to include emotion in your work, don’t be totally humorless. Readers can instinctively tell the difference between earned emotion and sentimental drivel. It’s healthy for a creative writer to cultivate a certain amount of humor in his work — even if you are writing dramas.

WEEK 7 ASSIGNMENT 4: A Meditation on Theme

For this final assignment of the week, I want you to think about something we haven’t discussed much up to this point: Theme. The theme of your novel is basically the broad-sweeping, universal idea(s) you want to get across to your reader. For example, in The Great Gatsby some possible themes might be the emptiness of material wealth, or the “real” definition of the American dream, or the awful repercussions of obsessive love and/or marital infidelity. A single novel can have more than one theme, of course, but it shouldn’t be limitless.

But a theme is just what a reader takes away from her own reading of the novel, you say. Cue the buzzer. Bzzzzzz. Wrong. You must have an idea of your novel’s theme in the back of your mind as you write; this will help you come up with specific imagery, metaphors, or motivations that forward your plot. Is your theme the vileness of greed spawned from desperation? Perhaps your protagonist’s conflict comes from a landlord, a scrawny old man from Texas, nickel-and-diming him out of his final deposit, accusing him of not dusting above the window frames. While this may not be a major scene in your novel, it could help underscore, in a subtle way, the major themes of your work.

On a piece of paper right now, I want you to write down the theme or themes of your novel. Spend some time reading through your outline and/or skimming the scenes you’ve already written. It’s important that you actually take the time to write your themes down — don’t simply do the work in your head. Again, while you may think you can take a shortcut and save some time by simply thinking through this task, remember the way we process information in our heads is often different from how we process the information on paper. And the reader — fortunately? unfortunately? — is never granted an all-access pass into our minds.

After you’ve brainstormed the major or developing themes of your novel, take out your outline again. From your outline, select one scene that could be used to reveal a bit of your theme. Write this scene, paying particular attention to the details, imagery, figurative language, actions, dialogue, and so forth that can help further or deepen one of your major themes. Remember, though, you don’t want to be too obvious. So if that landlord is trying to nickel-and-dime your protagonist, don’t have your character think: “Oh, that vile landlord. Greed, spawned from desperation, is a scourge on humanity!” Themes are best when treated in a subtle manner and not shoved down the throats of your dear readers. You should trust your readers to be smart enough to get it. Convey theme, instead, through a symbolic setting, a sharp or unique character trait, a minor character, or a bit of physical description. As an author you should never, ever, ever explicitly state your theme. (Remember the show-don’t-tell rule.) Instead have your readers experience themes firsthand.