Back to Bach
By Dave King | September 19, 2017 |
The 1884 two manual, 14-rank Hook and Hastings, Trinity Church, Shelburne Falls, MA.
Once again, a look at what J. S. Bach, and particularly the Fantasia and Fugue in A minor, has to say about writing. If you’ll remember, last time we looked at suspense. This time, we’re looking at surprise.
After I made this video, I discovered that playing a nine-minute piece at a professional level required a bit more practice than a full-time editor has time for. So here is Ton Koopman, one of the foremost performers of Bach’s organ music, playing the piece. The organ he’s using, by the way, is one of the great surviving historic organs — the instrument in the Martinikerk in Groningen, the Netherlands. It was modernized by the builder Arp Schnitger, probably in the 1690’s, but some of the pipework dates back to 1450.
Again, how do your favorite writers manage surprise? I could actually have done another five minutes on how Agatha Christie does it by confounding expectations of the genre. Feel free to elaborate in the comments.
Dave King has been editing for nearly 40 years now. He is co-author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, a former contributing editor to Writer’s Digest, and has contributed more than 100 articles over the last 12 years to Writer Unboxed. He lives on 25 acres in rural Massachusetts with his business partner and wife, Ruth Julian, who also edits his work. His other day job, at least on Sundays, is as the organist at a Lutheran church in Greenfield, Mass.
Yes, I blanked on Douglas Adam’s name for a moment and came up with Richard Adams, of Watership Down.
Dave-
In one way, surprise is nothing more than what you, the author, know will happen that the reader doesn’t. Don’t tell. Lead the reader to expect something else.
In another way, surprise is something that you, the author, know about a character that the reader doesn’t. The surprise is the reveal.
In yet another way, surprise is dots that connect. Put in the dots. Don’t connect them…until you do.
In still another way, surprise is an escalation of plot beyond what the reader can imagine. We think we know what’s really going on, but then…oh no!…it’s much bigger than we were told.
Surprise might also be the discovery of a character’s second, hitherto unrevealed role. A reversal of fortune. A shock. A dark secret. What renders a task impossible.
Most of all, ask me, surprise comes from the author’s intention to surprise. What feels to readers unplanned is what the author has planned all along.
Love the Bach!
What a terrific summary of the different flavors of surprise. Thanks, Don.
Don: Your comment just got copied and taped to my computer screen.
Don really said it all, above. My comment is less about the mechanics of creating surprise and more about my own response to it, not just in novels, but listening to certain singers. A song being a story, both in the lyrics and in structure, I’m always delighted when a singer slips from the pattern to create a new dimension. Not sure if I’m making sense here, but it seems to me that this new dimension is only available because said structure exists. But some vocalist have a gift for punching a hole in the structure and making it bigger. Patti Griffin does this, taking a melody and upending it or turning it inside out. It makes my heart soar when I hear it, as does a wonderful unexpected twist in a story. Or a Bach fugue. Thank you Dave.
Yes, I know what your talking about. The sudden modulation, the rapid shift in tempo or character (“Bohemian Raphsody” comes to mind, for some reason), the shift that makes the song more than it was.
I think this is the musical equivalent of Don’s point four — the escalation of the plot.
One difference between suspense and surprise is that the reader knows when he is in suspense, but not when he is just about to be surprised (think of first-time listeners to Hayden’s “Surprise Symphony”). Surprise disrupts expectations. And it can increase the suspense, because now the reader wonders when the next surprise will happen.
As a writer, I try to pay attention to those times when I am surprised as I am writing; for example, when I’ve been startled by a revelation about my character’s actions or thoughts or backstory that I didn’t know before, or when I’ve “learned” about other people and events who are influencing my characters. If a writer is surprised about an essential feature of her story, then there is a high likelihood the reader will be surprised as well.
Maugham’s short story “Winter Cruise” handles the suspense/surprise tension in an interesting way. When the first major surprise is revealed (several pages into the story), the reader’s expectations change. Now the story is not just a narrative of some woman’s travel adventures aboard a freighter, it is a bittersweet comedy about the way those around her secretly view her, and whether they’ll actually succeed in getting her off the ship or in changing her defining feature (namely, the fact that she is an excruciating bore who talks too much). The story constantly threatens to go from comedy to tragedy, and the reader does not know whether there is a surprise lurking that will push the story off its present course into a dark, sad place. That adds to the suspense.
Dave:
I’m planning on addressing something of the sort in my next post. Rather than lofty Bach, however, I intend to discuss some writing lessons I’ve learned from the picture books and wordless TV shows my friends’ kids find fascinating. Not surprisingly, many of the same techniques are involved.
I could listen to you talk about music all day, incidentally, and I’m not sure you need to be quite so self-deprecating about your playing. :-)
Coincidentally, I just picked up a CD of Ton Koopman playing Bach for my in-laws. (Also thanks to you, my TBR pile just got two books deeper.) Thanks all around.
I’m looking forward to seeing that, David.
And the self-deprecation would be better justified if I’d actually played the full piece. There are a couple of passages in the fugue I’m still stumbling over.
Though . . . I thought Koopman took the piece at warp speed and was a bit too metronomic. I see something different in the piece than he did.
Love the Bach, your lessons and Don’s summary. Happy sigh!
Picture books hold the most delightful surprises–Max’s supper is still hot; Kitten gets her bowl of milk; Farfallina and Marcel are still friends.
First, I’m sorry for not jumping into the discussion earlier — I had a personal errand yesterday.
The discussion so far has focused on what surprise is — again, excellent points, Don. But I’d like to swing the focus back to how surprise is accomplished. All the different flavors of surprise still require you to set them up — to insert the dots that will later be connected, to create a character who won’t be transformed completely when the reveal comes or who can plausibly play the new role.
One of the things fiction is for is to draw readers into a made-up world without breaking the spell that the world is real. And one of the great delights of reading is when the fictional world you’re living in surprises you (in a good way). For that matter, one of the great delights of life is when the real world surprises you in a good way. How do you set up a surprise so that it grows out of the world you’ve created and still . . . well, surprises?
Before you reveal the hidden depths of your character, they have to be hidden, but they cannot be absent. You’ve got to sprinkle the dots in your story without telegraphing that you’re going to connect them. How do you suddenly make your plot bigger without making your readers feel you’ve just started a new plot?
Don has spelled out what we’re trying to do with clarity and insight. I’d like to look more deeply at how to do it.
I’ll start. [Spoilers!] As I mentioned Agatha Christe’s most memorable work uses the unconscious assumptions about the genre itself to obscure what she’s doing. She can openly plant clues toward the eventual reveal because readers unconsciously assume that the truth she reveals isn’t possible. It simply never occurs to them. In Murder on the Orient Express, everybody did it. In Ten Little Indians, nobody did it. In Mousetrap, the detective did it. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the narrator did it. She uses her readers’ expectations of the genre itself to surprise them.
So, Christine, how exactly does Maughm do it? How does his story shift gears without leaving readers behind?
Oh, and just as a complete aside, last year, at the annual music appreciation service, the church I play at was foolish enough to give me the pulpit. I talked a bit about who Bach was and what he means to me. Some members who were absent asked for a copy of the talk, so I threw together a pretty basic web page to make it easily accessible. If you’re interested, you can find it here.
Thank you for sharing these notes. So many lovely tidbits I didn’t know. And SDG!!!
Thank you for the question, Dave. You pointed out that Agatha Christie uses the readers’ expectations about the genre to surprise them. Maugham also uses readers’ expectations. But unlike Agatha Christie, he is not focused on the genre, but rather on the narrator’s stance. The reader assumes for the first several pages that the narrator is describing the main character, Miss Reid, objectively and accurately. She is a woman who “always had the reputation of being a good talker . . . Her friend Miss Prince had often said to her: ‘You know, Venetia, you have a mind like a man. You’re never at a loss for something to say.’” The reader assumes that Ms. Reid’s loquacity is one of her best traits – or at the very least, it is not a problem — and that everyone in the story is as charmed by her conversational style as Miss Prince is.
That’s why it is a surprise when, after a dinner in which Ms. Reid monopolizes the conversation, the German captain of the ship struts up and down the deck, singing to a tune from Tannenhauser: “Oh, what a bore that woman is, I shall certainly kill her if she goes on much longer. . . I shall throw her into the sea.” (He was exaggerating about the violence, but his annoyance was real.) Later, the captain and his crew hold a “council of war” to figure out what to do. They know she is a good person, so their solution has to be one that doesn’t hurt her feelings.
Maugham crafts the initial portrait of Ms. Reid in such a way that it appears to be neutral and objective, not a character’s point-of-view. The reader expects that the portrait will continue in the same vein. But this expectation is disrupted pages into the story when the reader learns that the opinions of the other characters are the opposite. The very thing we readers thought was her strength – her loquacity – is actually her biggest weakness. Once you know this, you can go back to the beginning and see that the narrator’s initial portrait of Miss Reid is in fact not objective. It is actually a reflection of Miss Reid’s image of herself, but it is worded in such a way that you cannot see this bias unless you have more information. Maugham sets up the reader’s expectations about the narrator’s stance, and then disrupts those expectations. That, in turn, hooks the reader into the central conflict of the story, and moves it forward into a comedy that could very well disintegrate into tragedy if Miss Reid discovers what the other characters really think about her.
You’re right, that is very neatly done. Thanks for an insightful analysis.