Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook Read Online Free Page B

see Lillian's arms around the little bastard, his head against her white nylon uniform. He turned loose the grocery sack long enough to wipe the sleeve of one arm across his running nose, smearing his glasses even more. It was enough to turn your stomach.
    Later in the novel, after little Lloyd Jr., has been taken away by this tele-vangelist uncle, Rev. Vernon Pucket, to be reunited, Miss Julia is told, with his mother, who is going to a hairdressing school in Raleigh, Ross reveals another side of Miss Julia:
    Oh, there were a lot of things I could've done and should've done, and now I had to live with it all. I got up sometime in the middle of the night and walked across the hall to little Lloyd's room. The empty bed made me realize how empty my house was, and maybe my life, as well.
    I was just a selfish old woman with nothing but a few million dollars to her name. No husband, no children, nothing to look forward to but more of the same. Even the thought of writing checks and buying things couldn't lift my spirits.
    I cried. Sitting there in Little Lloyd's room, not a light on in the house, an old, slightly blue-haired woman who'd thought of nothing but herself all her life. Yes, I cried.
    Miss Julia's motivation changes from protecting herself to protecting little Lloyd Jr. Ross gives her a maternal side, after all.
    How many sides of your current protagonist do you reveal? I know what you are thinking: My hero is multidimensional. My hero is complex! But let me ask you: Is he complex and multidimensional only in your mind, or actually on the page?
    Take a careful look at your manuscript. On which pages, exactly, do you specifically unlock extra sides of your protagonist's personality? Can you highlight the passages? How many of them are there? List the pages numbers. No, really, don't just read this paragraph and congratulate yourself. Do it for real. Scroll through your manuscript, highlight, and count.
    Come on now, did you really count? Okay. Now, how many extra dimensions of your protagonist do you actively show? If you cheated and avoided counting, I promise you, there are not as many as you think. If you really counted, now is the time to increase the number of dimensions that your hero has. The more extra work you do, the more involving your novel will be.
    ____________EXERCISE
    Opening Extra Character Dimensions
    Step 1: What is your protagonist's defining quality, that is, how would anyone describe your protagonist? What trait is most prominent in his personality? What kind of person is she? Write that down.
Step 2: Objectively speaking, what is the opposite of that quality? Write that down.
    Step 3: Write a paragraph in which your protagonist actively demonstrates the opposite quality that you wrote down in step two. Start writing now.
Follow-up work: Define a secondary character quality ; write down its opposite; write a paragraph in which this character demonstrates the opposite secondary quality. In the same way, open third and fourth additional dimensions to your protagonist.
    Conclusion: As I mentioned in the introduction, the second most common reason agents reject manuscripts (after low tension) is poorly developed protagonists. Now that you have opened extra dimensions to your hero, you will have an easier time building into this character a fundamental and full-blown inner conflict.
    Inner Conflict
    A step beyond the technique of adding character dimensions is investing your protagonist with two goals, needs, wants, longings, yearnings, or desires that are in direct opposition to each other. Wanting two things that are mutually exclusive means having inner conflict, being torn in two directions, and that is what makes a character truly memorable.
    Inner conflict does not need to be limited to your protagonist. Any character can be conflicted. The prologue of Richard Russo's Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls tells the story of C.B. Whiting, scion of the industrial dynasty that rules over the central