Free Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass

uniform and sent as crowd control on a bank robbery gone bad, the guy inside gradually growing stronger for a two-hour period, feeling the power of the gun in his hand and the effect it had, Sean watching
    him rant and rave over the monitor hooked up to the bank cameras. At the start, the guy had been terrified, but he'd gotten over that. Fell in love with that gun.
    And for one moment, Sean saw Lauren looking over at him from the pillow, one hand pressed to the side of her head. He saw his dream daughter, smelled her, and thought what a shitty thing it would be to die without meeting her or seeing Lauren again.
    A minute later Sean talks the gun out of the kid's hand. It turns out that Sean cares for the same reasons that all of us get up, fight the traffic and all the rest: Because he loves his family. It is a simple discovery, really, a fundamental commitment that is obvious to almost everyone.
    Yet the unfolding of this primary motivation and its revelation to Sean himself at the moment of his ultimate testing gives it a force that not only carries Dave to the finish, but also resolves the conflicts at the heart of the novel's two secondary plot layers. Lehane deftly fuses the layers together and brings Sean's inner journey to a climax all at once. Sean has to live not only to enact justice, but also to put to rest the past and truly love in the present. He searches for, and finds, his irrevocable commitment.
    Is there such a moment of ultimate stakes in your current manuscript? If not, fix it on the page. Your hero's testing and eventual commitment will be fixed in your readers' minds for a long time to come.
    _______________________EXERCISE
    Capturing the Irrevocable Commitment
Step 1: Identify the moment in your story when your protagonist's stakes hit home—when she realizes that there is no turning back. This is the moment of irrevocable commitment.
Step 2: Write out that moment in one paragraph. Start writing now.
Step 3: Look at the paragraph you have written. Notice its shape, feel its effect. Now imagine that this is the first paragraph of your novel.
    Follow-up work: The moment of commitment that you just created has an opposite: a moment of irresolution, a healthy aversion, a justified selfishness, or a similar reaction. Write that down. Now find a place earlier in your manuscript to slot this in. Make the change in your manuscript now.
    Conclusion: You may not wind up directly using the paragraphs you create with this exercise; however, let your hero's inner commitment infuse and underlie all his actions. Let him be driven. When resolve weakens, reinforce it. Strong commitment on the part of your protagonist will generate strong commitment on the part of your reader. The same is true, not surprisingly, when you create strong commitment on the part of your antagonist.
    Exposition
    W e all star in our own movie. No one else's life has, for each of us, the immediacy and importance of our own. Nothing is more significant than what is happening to us right now. We are our own most intimate friends. This may sound self-absorbed, but it is a measure of the intensity with which we experience our lives and the importance we attach to what we think, feel, and experience at any given moment of the day.
    The protagonist of a novel is no different from us in that respect, or needn't be. Indeed, characters with poorly developed inner lives cannot long sustain reader interest. I am not suggesting writing endless passages of gushy exposition (sometimes called interior monologue), like one finds in low-grade romance novels. Rather, I suggest bringing forward on the page a protagonist's self-regard: that reflection and self-examination that shows us that a character has a compass-true sense of themselves and a grasp of the meaning of what is happening to them at any given moment in the story.
    An example of this can be found in Richard Russo's Empire Falls, which I discussed earlier. In the book, Miles Roby is the humble