Can “ugly” emotions be good?

If even Jimmy Carter admits that “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times,” how can the rest of us escape not only lust, but wrath, greed, sloth, pride, envy, and gluttony? Regardless of how you view traditional religion, you likely disapprove of them all. Add a bit of psychology, and the list lengthens: manipulation, sadism, passive aggression, lack of empathy. Who wants to be like that? Or know someone like that? Far fewer people than the number who’d love to read about it.

Tip: Ugly emotions keep readers turning pages.

Aside from the popularity of true crime, thrillers, and mystery, everyone enjoys a good bad guy. And most of us equally enjoy a good guy who’s at least a little bad. These characters mirror the sins in our hearts, and because we recognize ourselves in that mirror, the novel’s bad guys inspire us to improve, while the good guys reassure us that nobody’s perfect. Not even in fiction.

Take betrayal. Its underpinning is a smug self-righteousness. How could you do that to me when I was so generous/thoughtful/compassionate/supportive? Like anything about fiction that’s taken too far, betrayal can build such an unpalatable character that readers simply close the book.

Yet in healthy doses, betrayal can drive a novel fast and far enough to become a classic. Javert kills himself because Jean Valjean betrays the officer’s belief in absolute justice. Madame Bovary feels betrayed by the life that first her husband, then her lover promised. Gatsby betrays his moral center for the fool’s gold glitter of Daisy; vengeance drives Ahab to betray his crew’s trust in their captain. In The Art of Fielding, the sport that Henry loves betrays him: when the ball he wields so well injures his friend. Henry, in turn, betrays his skill—by resolutely and suddenly losing it.

Dark thoughts—like betrayal—fertilize both dilemma and causality.

 ~ Causality.

 In the best novels, every event except the last arises from the one preceding and spawns the one following. Pride goeth both before a fall and the next scene; the proud character will make mistakes, possibly horrifying, and definitely instigating whatever happens next.

 ~ Dilemma.

Most of us hope to bury or at least hide our dark thoughts. We know that greed is offensive, that envy is never classy, and so on. We struggle forward. But when a character’s dark thoughts clash with the sense of right and wrong—that’s an immovable object meeting an irresistible force. In other words, it’s fiction.

This doesn’t mean that your protagonist must act on every unpalatable thought. You could leave that to the antagonist. Or not. But while complicating the protagonist with some stifled but evil impulses, don’t neglect to complicate the antagonist. As Robert McKee observed, a worthy antagonist shapes a worthy protagonist.

Worth has much to do with credibility. Do we believe in the protagonist? That external forces pressure her into earning the ending? Credibility also demands exposing the secrets most humans vault away. This exposure is both credible and intriguing. We want to know what’s in the protagonist’s vault just as intensely as we want no one to guess what’s in our own.

The Art of Chad Harbach

On Tax Day at Lakeland College, the author of The Art of Fielding talked openly about what writing means to him.

Tip: “You become a writer because you need those books that seem delivered by gods.”

He wrote one of them. In many decades of one novel after another, his was the only time I reached page 512, started anew at page one, and read straight through. How did he do it? Well, yes, a ridiculous amount of talent. But also beliefs useful to every novelist.

~ Tradition offers a solid foundation.

His novel harnesses the archetypal to elevate college, winning, losing, and growing up to something much, much more. “What does a [baseball] team do when going off on a quest together?” The team’s star is “coming into consciousness. With The Fall come the complications and pains and joys of being a conscious human.” Mythological structure can support and augment nearly any novel. Are you using it to full advantage?

~ All the major characters matter—and are developed.

Harbach said that his “five central characters carry equal weight…I never felt more interested in Henry than in the other characters.” Do you give each major character enough attention for full complexity?

~ Readers want plot and characterization—not pre-digested themes.

“You’re in dangerous waters if you think a lot about thematics…Explication feels like a sort of defense.” Though his subject was explaining fiction, the observation applies elsewhere. Are your characters and images expressing whatever you want to say?

~ Nothing worthwhile comes cheap.

Harbach’s novel explains why “Writing is hard work”: “It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of those sentences needed to square with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight's mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. And yet that sentence was also beholden to the book’s very first one, and its last unwritten one, and every sentence in between.” Hmm. Are you working hard enough?

Harbach writes longhand, but you needn’t. Whatever it takes to achieve “a deeper state…surprise—a direction that the really intellectual mind isn’t going to go.”

That’s it. The formula for a book that “doesn’t even seem like it was written by a human being.” He was talking about Moby Dick. I’m talking about The Art of Fielding.

To Haunt: Novels that Last Forever

“Haunt” displays an intriguing variety of meanings, especially when applied to novels. It’s a “hangout”—a place where the minds of novelist, readers and characters meet. The word also means “preoccupy”—to take hold of you in a positive way. Other definitions include “revisit,” as in repeatedly reappearing or to “inhabit,” as in permanently entering your mind, even soul. In contrast, there’s to “plague,” making you notice, remember, or understand what you’d rather ignore. The really good novels stay with you both for what you love and what you reluctantly understand or accept that you didn’t before.

What makes a novel haunt? It’s not the plot. Those details quickly disappear. What lingers?

·         Characters more gripping, complex and poignant than anyone you know.

·         Emotions real and familiar, yet startling in their complexity.

·         Ideas that you always knew but didn’t know you did.

Most novelists keep a mental list of the novels that haunted them. My most recent addition is Andrew Winer’s “The Marriage Artist,” the most haunting novel I’ve read since Chad Harbach’s “The Art of Fielding.”

Why does Winer’s novel haunt?

Characters: Dysfunctional and deeply flawed, yet empathetic.

Plot Intertwining: The fate of Jews in 1928 Vienna and the contemporary N.Y. art scene.

Symbolism: The graphic imagery that gives the novel its title.

Insight: Big issues, like religion, terror, marriage, art, jealousy, compulsion. 

Secrets: Dispensed with exactly the right amount of detail at the exactly right moments.

Texture: As reviewer Betsey Van Horn put it, “Saul Bellow meets Stephen King.”

Your details will obviously differ completely. But whether or not you read this novel, you can use similar characterization, plot, and other techniques to make your own novel haunt.

Where do you start? Try visualizing three or four of your favorite novels. What do you remember? Why do you remember it? Decide what’s memorable about your own novel. Change, add, or enrich as needed.

Tip: Identify the aspect of your novel that readers will never forget. Remember not to forget it while writing and revising.

Thematic Plotting/Plot-Driven Theme

You’ve heard it before: Characters acting as mouthpieces for ideas read like stick figures. Yet character and theme interconnect at the deepest root. Use theme to understand characters better and you complicate plot. Use the fate of your characters to illustrate theme and you needn’t state it. You can build story from either direction.

Dilemma. Start with an event that closes off protagonist options and emphasizes theme. In Kim Edwards’ “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter,” a doctor hopes to protect his wife by institutionalizing their newborn daughter, who isn’t “normal.” This event instigates a journey revealing the themes of love, memory, selfishness, humanity, and forgiveness.

Tip: Your first event should force characters to cope with the difficulty of living out your theme (instead of just idealizing it).

Backstory. “The Art of Fielding” by Chad Harbach is less about baseball than the game of life. Pella plays this game poorly because her closeted dad unwittingly deprived her of the self-reliance a bright, talented, and beautiful teen would otherwise develop. Her bad choices arise from lessons she must unlearn and habits she must break.

Tip: Backstory adds if it clarifies character motivation and advances plot.

Climax. Ideally, the culmination of your plot dramatizes your theme. In Ian McEwan’s “Saturday,” the novel’s hero is literature itself, or Mathew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” to be specific. In a clever twist I won’t reveal, poetry rescues a family from theft, rape, and possibly murder. An ironic sort of hope saves or at least elevates everyone, including the “bad guys.”

Tip: Make the resolution of your plot signal your theme. This eliminates the temptation to insert a “And now, dear reader…” passage in your last few pages.

Intertwine plot and theme to build an organic novel: Better plot, deeper characters, more convincing themes.