Uhhh.
"Hey Siri, set a timer for three Minutes." She responds, "The suspense is killing me!"
Suspense.
We're supposed to write a suspenseful story today, but I have no idea how to begin. I mean...I got nothing. I'm not even sure how writers do that suspense thing. I know it when I feel it...but I don't know how to craft it.
I can just imagine the stares. "I don't have a suspenseful story." and "I don't know what to write." Some would probably make up crazy convoluted stuff that really didn't have a basis in logic, craft, or sense. I mean, how do you come up with something in your brain, birthed like Athena from Zeus's head, fully formed and coherent?
It made me ask: How do authors create suspense? I sat down at Abuelo's with a group of friends and copious amounts of hot sauce and chips to explore the question. We talked about word choice, details given and withheld, foreshadowing, delay of revelation, and point of view. I pulled out stapled copies of Lamb to the Slaughter and markers for everyone. Doesn't everyone use short stories as place-mats before the entree arrives? What we realized is that we had a way of reading that helped us figure this out. Using the Freitag pyramid, we plotted out the main points of the story.
The structure of the essay itself is one piece of the magic in Roald Dahl's approach to this text. Fortunately, Gretchen Bernabei taught us all about this in her kernel essay structure. We could use her idea as a TOOL to help us figure out how to write a suspenseful story!
Here's what we figured out: Dahl has TWO plots - dual rising actions going on here. And he ends each one with a particular kind of sentence to end them. "All right, she told herself. So I've killed him." and "And in the other room, Mary Maloney began to giggle."
Students can't really write good stuff about things they don't know. And I didn't really want to encourage horror and murder, even though they'd probably seen lots of movies about that. I wanted them to connect to their own experiences. I remembered the blueprinting activity we had students complete earlier in the year. I asked them to look at that page in their journals and to remember a time they (or someone else in that house) did something naughty and tried to hide it. Here's the gist of the lesson:
We created a quicklist about several experiences. Here's mine.
I jotted down ideas and thought aloud from my experiences: the time I drew a giant smiley face on the wall, when I hid my black cat in the closet, the time I spilled red nail polish on the new carpet, when I stole the silk flower centers at the Hobby House...I know, naughty.
Next, I read aloud from my sample essay. I wanted students to be clear about what they would be creating. "I'm going to show you something that I wrote using the skill I'm about to teach you. You'll be able to write something similar!"
Crayon Smiles
We must have just moved in. I don’t remember much furniture. Nothing on the white, bare walls. I’m not sure where mom was. But there I was, in my room, coloring.
I found myself in the hallway across from the bathrooms and between mom’s bedroom and mine...with the stub of a peeled black Crayola pinched between the fingers of my left hand.
I reached up as tall as 2 year old arms could reach and began the slow arc of a circle on the flat paint of the sheetrock. As the crayon met the texture, the wax Morse-coded long and short dotted lines in a huge circle on the wall. I scribbled two large eyes at the top and finished with a four foot grin at the bottom.
All right, I told myself. I drew a giant smiley face on the wall. (Smiley faces were big in the 70’s. It might have been the first meme.)
Thinking nothing of it, I took the crayon back to my room and continued coloring.
But then, mom came into the back of the house. I had forgotten about the new masterpiece.
She called me to the drawing scrawled into the paint. I knew something was wrong, but wasn’t really sure what it was.
Mom was mad. “Who drew this smiley face on the wall? And with a black crayon?”
Gulp. “My brother,” I lied.
Mom’s frown spread to her eyebrows and forehead. “Come here. I’m going to give your brother a spanking.”
And between the swats, I realized: I am an only child.
They laughed a little. I had the students talk about their experiences and then do the same. Once that was complete, we selected an idea to work through the kernels.
I modeled each one, using my topic as the guide, stopping briefly to let students discuss and jot their thoughts.
Students then met in feedback groups to read over their kernels. The listeners were to describe the parts they felt the most suspense and the part where they wanted to ask more questions to the writer. In every case, the students identified the climax in their own stories! And in each instance, students found ideas they could explore more deeply in their writing.
But my favorite part of the lesson came next. "Do you realize that you just wrote like a famous suspense author? Remember this?" And I placed a copy of Lamb to the Slaughter under the document camera. "How does he begin? And then what does he tell you?" Step by step, the students remembered the plot, naming each function and summarizing the story. I was no longer in control as the students turned to each other to continue the discussion at their own tables. We switched then to drafting: students began scribbling madly on the blank walls of their notebook paper. Because they had something to say, and a way to do so. Tomorrow, they'd be ready to layer in imagery and figurative language - again, using the master, Roald Dahl, as the mentor - using their own purpose and meaning to locate where such language and craft was needed.
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