Suspense: Hitchcock for Readers, Writers, Creators

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At about time-mark 11:23,  this short interview with Alfred Hitchcock, "A Talk with Alfred Hitchcock," gives you clues to the director's greatest suspense scenes.  He discusses three techniques:

• montage - juxtaposition of images of various "sizes"  - little shots grouped impressionistically to create a cumulative effect (e.g. focus on body parts, focus on objects in a room, focus on one specific action) - illustrated with Psycho shower scene, but I also think of the gathering crows in The Birds (safer to show to students)
• orchestration - audience has partial knowledge of what to expect but does not know when or where it will happen - partial elements of the narrative are arranged sequentially to create shock - this is shifting point of view that film can make literal (illustrated with Psycho stairway murder, which uses multiple shot perspectives and angles)
• pure cinematics - the assembly of film elements (specifically shots) and how they can be changed to create a different idea in manipulation of the viewer's response (illustrated by two sequences featuring Hitchcock himself)

What is the Literacy/ELA Parallel?  As we strive to give students a language for creative analysis,  we can peak their curiosity by applying the vocabulary and skills of the masters.  So here is a quick think about Hitchcock's terms above as applied to YA suspense lit:

Montage - In good suspense, language and images create an impressionistic scene as well.  This is often in a flight scene, a scene of approaching evil, or a climactic moment.  Some specific techniques to look for are repetition (incremental), strings of repeated descriptors (overwriting, often), phrases where sentences often do, polysyndenton (images and phrases strung together with a repeated conjunction), asyndenton (images and phrases strung together without conjunctions),  and terse dialogue without benefit of dialogue tags.  The overall effect is to heighten threat and chill.  Here is an example of montage used by Poe in "The Black Cat":

No sooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence, than I was answered by a voice from within the tomb! -- by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman -- a howl -- a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the dammed in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation.

Orchestration - In part, this is the equivalent of foreshadowing in fiction.  The slow build of the expectation of an event is the result of knowledge introduced gradually, previous to an event.  The reader has a fully developed certainty - a sense of what I like to call vague dread - the is climaxed by the event itself.  Poe uses this technique brilliantly, staging his scenes with a terrific sense of pace and literary eye.  Here are three parts of this orchestration from "Three Skeleton Key":

No, these were ships’ rats, huge, wise creatures, born on the sea, sailing all over the world on ships, transferring to other, larger ships as they multiply. There is as much difference between the rats of the land and these maritime rats as between a fishing smack and an armored cruiser.

The rats of the sea were fierce, bold animals. Large, strong and intelligent, clannish and sea-wise, able to put the best of mariners of shame with their knowledge of the sea, their uncanny ability to foretell the weather.

And they are brave, the rats, and vengeful. If you so much as harm one, his sharp cry will bring hordes of his fellows to swarm over you, tear you, and not cease until your flesh has been stripped from your bones.

The ones on this ship, the rats of Holland, are the worst, superior to other rats of the sea as their brethren are to the land rats. ....  [and later]

Over her bridge, on her deck, in the rigging, on every visible spot, the ship was a writhing mass – a starving army coming toward us on a vessel gone mad!

Our island was a small spot in that immense stretch of sea. The ship could have grazed us, passed to port or starboard with its ravening cargo – but no, she came for us at full speed, as if she were leading the regatta at a race, and impaled herself on a sharp point of rock.

 ....  [and later]

Thousands of heads rose, felt the wind and we were scented, seen! To them, we were fresh meat, after possible weeks of starving. There came a scream, composed of innumerable screams, sharper than the howl of a saw attacking a bar of iron, and in the one motion, every rat leaped to attack the tower!

For the reader, the ending seems inevitable - it is just a matter of time.  On the other hand, the narrator seems to have survived to tell the story; so dreadful as his tale is, there is an escape.  The urgency of the prose, the frenetic sentencing, are the contributions of the writer's montage.  The gradual introduction of knowledge is his orchestration.  The setting is his cimematics.

Cinematics - In a novel or story, the author uses point of view, narration (word choice, sentence pace and length), and dialogue to create the equivalent of a cinematic effect.  By zooming in and zooming out, by panning, by alternating pace and voices, the author can control the build of suspense.  Here is a short example from "Three Skeleton Key":

There was nothing we could do but watch. A ship sailing with all sail spread, creaming the sea with her forefoot as she runs before the wind, is one of the most beautiful sights in the world – but this time I could feel the tears stinging in my eyes as I saw this fine ship headed for her doom.

All this time our glasses were riveted on her and we suddenly cried out together:

“The rats!”

Would the last sentence be as powerful if it were: "The fuzzy caterpillars!"  I think that difference encapsulates much of the concept of cinematics.  Authors make multiple decisions simply to generate effect. Choice of setting (all aspects), character types, borrowed plot lines...  These all come into play when the purpose is to directly affect the reader's response. 

Literary analysis can be fun when this is the lens.

Beginnings:  It is always valuable to cement literary concepts by having students (any age) employ them in analysis of very simple works, and great picture books are best for this. These books send chills down the spine of even adult readers.  Ask: How are montage, orchestration, and cinematics important in this simple book?  How is the monster defeated? Making short screencast analyses on iPhones or iPads is a great activity for this. Students may notice repetition as important to building suspense. This is a form of verbal montage and cinematics. Some suggestions: 

• Another Monster at the End of This Book - Stone (also and iPad app)
• The Barenstain Bears and the Spooky Old Tree - (Barenstains) 
• Chalk - Thomson
• The Monster at the End of This Book - Stone (also and iPad app)
• There's a Monster Under My Bed - Howe
• There's a Nightmare in My Closet - Mayer
• Woolves in the Walls - Gaiman
• Woolvs in the Sitee - Wild and Spudvilas
• read-aloud:  Grimm's and Anderson "Blackbeard," "Three Little Pigs," and "Three Billy Goats" and "Red Riding Hood"

Film:  One of the few times I recommend viewing before reading is to cement the concepts in this genre:

• If students are not getting the analysis concepts, I strongly recommend, strange as it seems, Bambi, Land Before Time, Sleeping Beauty (beginning), Walking With Dinosaurs (BBC Video), and the other nature series that make kids cringe
• Open Culture links to 22 Free Hitchcock Films to find online
• It's hard to top classics like Jaws, It, Snakes on a Plane (R), the Bourne movies, Witness, 2001, Aliens - most teachers and students will have titles to share.  Several scenes illustrating the concepts above should be shown.

Novels & Stories:  Most of these are not appropriate below grade 8, so teachers need to read them first. Remember to also ask your students for suggestions.  Many of today's big tween and YA genres are suspenseful in nature, but many of them do not do it very well.  Most zombie and alien novels are suspenseful as well.  This is a great chance for students to use analysis and evaluation skills, so pick the best.  Your students do NOT have read the entire book - remember, you are reading for author's techniques with proof from the text (quotes).   Ask: What techniques have change as characters, plots, narratives get more complex in novels and stories?  What is added by these changes?  What techniques are most effective?  Why?  What other elements (characters, setting, plot, etc) are necessary to create memorable suspense?

• Fakie - Tony Varrato
• Found (1st in new series) - Margaret Peterson Haddix
• Jasper Jones - Criag Silvey
• The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
• Miss Peregrin's Home for Peculiar Children - Ransom Riggs
• The Shattering - Karen Healey
• Skeleton Man - Bruchac - a very good suspense novel for 5-7 grades
• Tantalize series - Cynthia Leitich Smith
• The Vanishing Game - Kate Kae Meyers 
• Stephen King: just about any one of his horror genre
• "The Most Dangerous Game" - Connell - read online or download audio
• "The Black Cat" or "The Tell-Tale Heart" - Poe - widely available online in text and audio
• "Three Skeleton Key" - Toudouze - download .pdf or read online - also free in radio drama version (quite good)
• "The Landlady" - Dahl (good audio version also available from Audible.com) - in The Best of Roald Dahl 
• "Night Drive" - Jenkins (aka Murray Leinster) - also available here in audio (the story actually begins about 1/3 of the way into the .mp3 file)
• "The Lottery" - Jackson - read it online

Follow-up:

• A later segment in the Hitchcock interview talks about what music adds to a suspenseful scene (again Psycho).  I have never played music while students read a suspenseful story, but it would be an interesting exercise to have them, after reading through a suspenseful piece, read it themselves with music they selected or (better yet) composed in the background.
• Students love to use available technologies to create their own suspense shorts.  I think it is important to set a gruesomeness limit so that the focus is on the techniques, not the blood.
• Ask:  What is the next step in building 21st Century suspense?  Visuals, music, and text have been widely explored. What other technologies or mixes will be used in the future? 

How to Teach to the Test: Stone Soup

[update 11/2012: Maine has adapted the CCSS, The Hunger Games is a has-been, both of which may bring about a change in ELA reading curricula. But that still remains to be seen. I stand by this post.]

I spent Saturday morning in room 403, Bonney Hall, USM, Portland, where I took the Praxis II, Middle School English Language Arts. For just over an hour I answered multiple choice questions (90), the majority of which required knowledge of "the classics" I read in college, high school and middle school. In some questions, I was asked for authors; in some questions, I was asked for titles; in many questions I was required to place a text in its literary movement. One of the two short essays challenged me to write about the development of mood through detail and imagery - the passage was by D.H. Lawrence (Sons and Lovers?).

Every teacher wishing to earn Maine's 6-8 Language Arts endorsement has to take this test. I was well prepared, due almost entirely to high school, college, and adult independent reading of classic and contemporary classic (Morrison) texts. There was nothing "current or contemporary" on the entire test, save a mention of Harry Potter in an expository passage.

Two things occurred to me on the drive home. First - The test was interesting, challenging and fun, due almost entirely to the fact that it asked me to access and process information and learning that I have gathered over time. Second - Teachers without my age and 35 years of middle school ELA experience may well have floundered, in part because they do not have deep knowledge of YA novels popular 30 years ago, in part because the teaching of grammar has been out of fashion for almost 20 years now (they may not know what the simple predicate or the past perfect tense is), and in part because they may be too young to have read and studied Lawrence, Melville, Hawthorne, Austen, Wordsworth, Twain, Dickens, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Poe and other "blue hairs" of literature. Time brings change in the English classroom, as it does everywhere else. Over the last 10 years alone there have been significant changes in the content of Language Arts/English curricula. Differentiation, student reluctance to read required novels, the rising importance of "informational texts," literature circles, the current fascination with realistic and fantasy YA fiction, the decline in reading scores, technological revolutions, time-pressed teachers who can't make room for grammar - all of these and more are driving change.

As a test, the Praxis II is out of synch with what is happening in the public school English/LA classroom. One particular "change in the making" is worth a close look.

What do I think about the "everyone reads a novel of choice" approach to English? It seems clear to me that future LA teachers who learn and study in this environment will not cover all the bases necessary to do well on the Praxis II. Unless, of course, the test undergoes a drastic revision over the next few years, which I doubt ETS will or would do (for one, it would be expensive to purchase copyright permissions from an equivalent number of living authors). Given a library of choice, it is the rare student who will select from the "blue hairs." In a "literature of choice" curriculum, scope and classics will be sacrificed. Over time, it would make sense for these titles to disappear from middle and high school courses of study, replaced by an ebb and flow of popular and just-past-popular novels. Students might actually read more and read more often, which in itself will have a positive impact on reading scores. For this to happen definitely, the LA classroom will become a place where students read (fewer than half of my students this year willingly read at home, even though I require it - a growing trend all over the country). What might be additional impacts of this pardigm shift in ELA curricula?

Good impacts would include a ramping up of teacher reading. Although many claim to do so, only masterful teachers can truly meet ELA standards of literary text study when there are 20 or more (in today's classrooms, alas) different novels being read in the classroom. The ability to teach or guide learning is largely dependent on the teacher's familiarity with the titles. In sum, the LA teacher who wants to teach well needs to have read every text the students are reading.  Of course, someone will have to pay for this reading.  I purchased over $2000 worth of books yearly, many of which went home with student readers.  If every district were to fund classroom libraries to this degree, students would read more and better.  That would be an impact!

A second impact would include student exposure to "reader response" critical theory. I learned about this theory through the Praxis II study materials; it was too new to be part of my high school and college coursework. Focusing student discussion on "shared responses" rather than on close study of text ("new criticism") creates a common ground for students, fertile in terms of writing options and activating multiple intelligences, and an ideal match for blogging, wikis, and online discussion boards. That it might be vapid in terms of standardized testing is beside the point if the goal is for students to enjoy reading and achieve a personal learning gain. The teacher's role is to create opportunities for learning by working 1-1 with students to set goals and by closely following and consistently responding to their oral and written responses to the reading. This is very hard to do.

On the other hand, standardized reading tests (3rd grade - Praxis II) all assume that students are well schooled in "new criticism" - that they can apply a common vocabulary for a close understanding and analysis of a text. They also assume that students have been exposed to a core of "recognized quality texts" either appropriate to their grade level or "classical" (depending upon the test). It is sad but true that most of these "recognized quality texts" are significantly more challenging in vocabulary, sentence structure, and imagery than today's jvenile and YA fiction. Additionally, when a group (or all) students read the same text, direct instruction relating to literature forms, language, and tools can occur. Without this focus, students do not get the necessary practice with critical analysis. We come to the crux of the issue: if students read only contemporary fiction of choice, they will develop a habit - perhaps even a love - for reading, but they will not develop as critical readers (who can do well on standardized tests).

Open choice and guided choice and no choice are all required in the English/LA classroom. The goal is a stone soup, the stone being the essential questions and skills that are driving the unit. The LA teacher, instead of embracing one strategy or the other, instead of despairing over what has been lost, needs to become the Julia Child of the LA curriculum: choosing the best ingredients, chopping and mixing them as necessary, and timing the cooking perfectly. Like a great cook, the teacher must rely on knowledge and instinct to make the right choices in the classroom. At times open choice will be best, at times limited choice will be best, at times no choice will result in the desired learning outcomes.

I am currently using open choice (or random choice) for the purpose of exposing students to as many fairy tale stories, characters, settings, and remakes as possible. I am using "reader response" to generate dialogue about the common emotional underpinings of these stories and to drive the development of discussion and questioning skills. With one or a limited number of texts, this would be impossible.

Next, we will work in a limited choice situation, where students work in groups to focus deeply on one of six Grimm's stories, each of which retold in at least five ways. This will develop "new criticism" skills, as students compare/contrast characterization, language, illustration and voice in the various books and media versions. I will be giving direct instruction on literary analysis terms (figures of speech) daily. The Grimm's version, by the way, will be the most difficult of all to read - and everyone in the group will read it (some will also hear it read).

We will all be reading the same expository texts about fairy tales and other stories. We will all be reading the same biographies of the Grimm brothers. These are guided reading exercises, complete with questions to answer and notes to take.

Then we will spice up the class by reading from a limited choice (choice directed by me) of novels that transform fairy tales. I have selected largely 20th century YA novels, but I have been tough, and yes, I have read them all - some several times. These are quality novels, rich in vocabulary and language, selected for students at different ability levels.

Quite a classroom stew to make from such a simple literature genre! A bit of a stone soup.

Last note: Yes, I do intend to include some "blue hair" writers in this year's literature study. There will be Poe, Bradbury, Thurber, Kipling, Jackson, nameless balladeers, and many others. I want my students to be prepared to do battle with standardized tests, whatever my personal feelings about those tests might be.