Novel breakthrough

I’ve been stuck, but now found a way through. The novel got to 60,000 words with lots of complications since it’s a thriller, after all. But a few issues were getting in the way.

First of all, it was hard to see why the protagonist was chasing the leads he was chasing. He didn’t seem to care enough.

Second, there was mystification where there could have just been plain lying. It’s nice to give your characters permission to lie.

Third and finally, too many people were randomly connected. They’d just bumped into each other in Paris. Having spent more than a year in Paris, I know that can happen in real life. I enjoyed that random bumping into people a lot. But in a book, you get plot holes when you do that. Especially when you’re trying to tie Paris, New York, Libya, and Rome together. So I simplified. It’s fine if some people went to high school or university together.

All of which is to say that the book was stuck, and now it’s unstuck. I owe it all to Dostoevsky. I’m teaching Crime and Punishment to a class of non-literature majors, and we’re having a lot of fun with it. Characters get emotional. Irrational things happen. My book’s very plot-driven, but now I see ways in which my plot-serving characters need to be people, or at least characters, rather than devices. I didn’t turn my thriller hero into Raskolnikov. But I made him get pissed off and drunk, for very good reasons.