Why it took my series protagonist three books to get a girlfriend

Elizabeth Zelvin

I’m a sucker for romance. While I don’t read straight romances, my favorite reads tend to include a satisfying love story along with great writing, smooth storytelling, and—a crucial element for me—endearing characters of depth and complexity. At the top of my list is Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga, started with a great love story (Cordelia and Aral Vorkosigan) and then took a leisurely arc of seven or eight books and more than a decade in fictional time to find Miles the perfect mate. Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series and Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond series are on the list: complex historicals brimming with excitement and a touch of magic, both with extraordinarily charismatic heroes who find (immediately or eventually) a larger-than-life Big Love. In the Dunnett books, the ultimate heroine is only ten years old when she and the hero first meet. In mysteries, I’m particularly fond of Julia Spencer-Fleming’s Rev. Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne and Margaret Maron’s Judge Deborah Knott and Dwight Bryant (both brilliant examples of the traditional amateur sleuth with a law enforcement partner). In the first case, it’s love at first sight and obstacles to overcome in book after book. In the other, Maron herself has said when she started the series, she had no idea that Deborah and Dwight would fall in love.

In the past, I’ve said that it’s ironic that though I love romantic stories, I didn’t write one. Now, reviewing my literary role models, I can see that I was instinctively falling into the pattern of allowing the protagonist’s love story to unfold slowly over the course of a series arc. In the case of my protagonist, recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler, it was not a matter of building the tension, peak after peak, in one evolving relationship, as Julia Spencer-Fleming does so brilliantly. Rather, like Miles Vorkosigan (if I dare to mention my own work and the dazzling Bujold’s in the same breath), Bruce has a lot of growing up to do before he can choose the right mate.

The theme of my mystery series, recovery from alcoholism, codependency, and other addictions and compulsions, gave Bruce some very good reasons not to have a girlfriend. The first book, Death Will Get You Sober, started with Bruce hitting bottom in a detox on the Bowery.

I’ve worked with a lot of homeless alcoholics, and believe me, most of them are not thinking about romance. Survival and getting the next drink takes all their attention. When Bruce gets to AA, he hears, along with “Don’t drink and go to meetings,” that he’s supposed to have “No relationships for the first year.” (I have had clients who had the illusion that meant that one-night stands were okay, as long as they didn’t get emotionally involved. But that’s another story.)

The secondary theme and subplot of the series, Bruce’s friendship with his two sleuthing sidekicks, his best friend Jimmy and Jimmy’s girlfriend Barbara, also supported Bruce’s lack of a love interest in the first book. Bruce has deeply disappointed Jimmy and Barbara, and a big part of his motivation for staying sober and solving the murders is to give the friendship a second chance. There’s a lot of love in this triumvirate, and some readers noticed a teeny bit of sexual tension between Bruce and Barbara, though it was essential to the story I wanted to tell that this would be resolved harmlessly at the end of the first book.

Bruce actually had a girlfriend in the manuscript I intended to be the second book of the series, which was rejected by my publisher at the time. Bruce is still fairly new in sobriety. Jimmy and Barbara are taking a weekend couples workshop, and Bruce tags along. The obnoxious relationship guru is murdered, and Bruce promptly falls for his widow. But this relationship has nowhere to go, and it’s apparent throughout the story.

This left Bruce free to get a crush on another murder suspect, the girlfriend of the drug dealer victim, in Death Will Help You Leave Him. He also had to break free from his crazy ex-wife, which meant dealing with the destructiveness of their relationship and his own codependency issues, love issues, rescue fantasies, or whatever you’d like to call them.

In the new book, Death Will Extend Your Vacation, Bruce and his friends take shares in a clean and sober group house in the Hamptons.

They’ve just arrived when they find the body of one of their housemates on the beach. It takes two more murders and the whole summer for them to figure out whodunit. In the meantime, Bruce is very much attracted to one of his housemates, the self-reliant and enigmatic Cindy. He’s ready now, but things keep getting in the way. It’s also a new experience to negotiate the landmines of an attraction in sobriety. In recovery, not drinking is just the beginning. After that, you have to change your whole life, and that includes refraining from doing anything you’ll be ashamed of in the morning. Do he and Cindy get to first base by Labor Day? Or home? I’m not telling—and don’t you dare read the last page first!

The Voice in the Author’s Head

Elizabeth Zelvin

In my alternate persona as a therapist, I was trained to ask, when a client claimed he (or she) kept hearing voices, “Do the voices come from inside or outside your head?” If the voices came from outside, chances were the client had a thought disorder, such as schizophrenia. (Obviously, I got my training well before the cell phone era began.) So I wasn’t too terribly freaked out when, having developed my series protagonist, recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler, I began to hear his voice at odd moments on the inside of my head. The more I wrote about Bruce (four novels and four short stories so far, though not all are published yet), the more distinctive his voice became.

I’ve just opened at random the notebook I keep on my night table, along with a self-illuminating pen, to write down those middle-of-the-night thoughts. Here’s the first entry that caught my eye.

Bruce: X’s supercilious expression would have looked good on a camel.

I don’t know who X is. I’ve never transcribed the line to a computer file or used it in a manuscript. But it sure is something I know that Bruce would say.

Now, here’s a passage that never made it into Death Will Help You Leave Him, the book that will come out in the fall. I forgot about it once I’d written it down in the middle of the night. Bruce and his ex-wife Laura are breaking into her boyfriend’s apartment. Bruce has been complaining that Laura has no sense of irony.

I hoped we weren’t going to end up in jail over this little expedition.

“What’s the sense of giving up jumping turnstiles if you have me breaking into apartments?”

“You pay the fare now? Oh, Bruce, that’s funny.” Laura’s deep laugh rang out.

Okay, so she did have a sense of irony.

Are you beginning to get the hang of Bruce? He sure doesn’t sound like me—and to me, that’s the miracle of “voice” in fiction. Here are some lines from that scene that did make it into the book. They’re climbing up the fire escape to get into the apartment.

I needed a smoke. A guy’s gotta do something with the anxiety. Prayers to my Higher Power for guidance in breaking and entering didn’t seem quite appropriate.

A little later on, he says, “I don’t recommend breaking and entering sober.”

Fellow author Susan Froetschel described the process very well in an interview on Poe's Deadly Daughters a while back. She said: “The conversation comes naturally, just spills out, and I often must use a heavy hand to cut the dialogue. And as the story unfolds, the characters can surprise even me with what they say and do. Once I get to know them, their reactions just pop into my head.”

That’s it precisely. Recently I revised a manuscript that I hope will become the third book in the series. Bruce and his friends Barbara and Jimmy are at an elegant party in the Hamptons. Barbara can get a little too earnest about recovery, and as a world-class codependent, she can always think of a way to fix or improve someone else. Jimmy has been in AA a long time and takes its principles and slogans very seriously. Bruce, on the other hand, tends to maintain a certain level of skepticism.

It had been a while since I’d read over the first draft of this manuscript. I couldn’t quite remember how the scene went, but, pen in hand, I read this passage at the bottom of a page.

“He couldn’t shake hands,” Barbara said, “because he had a bottle of Veuve Cliquot in one hand and a flute in the other. And now he’s moved on to whiskey. I don’t suppose you or Jimmy could twelve-step him?”

“The program is for those who want it, not for those who need it,” Jimmy said as he came up behind us. “Attraction, not promotion.”

I read those AA catch phrases (completely in character for Jimmy at that moment), and I thought, I know exactly what Bruce would say: “Yeah, yeah.”

I turned the page, and there was the next line, in Bruce’s narrative voice:

Yeah, yeah.

As Susan Froetschel puts it, his reaction popped into my head, as it had when I wrote the first draft. In this case, it wasn’t clever or complicated, but I’m absolutely sure it’s what Bruce would have said in the circumstances. And in revision, what she says about cutting the dialogue, heavily if necessary, is true for me too. In the first draft, I need to pour it all out without censoring myself. Not every writer works this way, but many do. In revision, I have to “kill my darlings.” It’s taken me a long time to learn not to cling to every well-turned phrase. But it’s become a lot easier since I learned to recognize Bruce’s voice. No matter how much I loved a line when I wrote it, if it’s Not Bruce, I cut it.