Craft time! Let’s talk about how to put together a story. I like a whole lot of scenes and a little bit of summary, but what does that actually mean?
Any fiction story you pick up will have a mixture of summary and scene.
Summary
Imagine you are camping. As you enjoy the campfire, people take turns telling stories. “This thing happened. Then another thing.”
The voice of the story tells the reader about the events. Summary tends to move quickly and fill the reader in on background or important bits of information they may have forgotten. Summary is often interwoven with scene.
Scene
Imagine the same campfire and a group of Girl Scouts put on a skit. “Hi. Let’s do this thing.” “Sure, don’t mind if I do”. [Kids pantomime doing a thing.]
The voice of the story fades away and the reader hears through dialogue and sees through the action what transpires. Ideally the reader will also infer the characters’ personality and attitudes, the mood of the setting, and themes, all through the scene details.
Example: Summary Within Scene
This short scene from The Resurrectionist also contains a bit of summary. It’s a hot summer day in 1923, and the point-of-view character, Sean Joye, has just arrived at the Missouri State Penitentiary with his boss, Judge Dolan. (That was summary, too!)
[scene] I motioned the guard over to our idling car. “This here’s Judge James Dolan. To see the warden.”
“Yeah, yeah, mac. We know. The scaffold and seats for spectators are taking up the front parking lot today. Y’all need to leave your car here and walk over to the administration building.” He pointed out a building I can only describe as a castle among the maze of thick, high walls and massive structures surrounding us.
[summary] The clear feeling of threat—and not from prisoners or guards or heatstroke—about swallowed me right then and there. The penitentiary’s stone walls radiated ill will, as if hate had been quarried from the river bluffs along with the limestone blocks to build the fortress.
[scene] I started to argue with the guard, but the Judge chimed in, “It’ll do me good to stretch my legs after the long ride. We mustn’t upset the prison routine.”
“Thank you, sir. We appreciate y’all cooperating. For everyone’s safety, of course.”
I sighed and crept the Model T toward the spaced the guard pointed out. The cat made no effort to move. I tapped the horn and he deemed to look up at me, then lay his head back down.
How Much Summary?
Scenes are generally more work than summary. They require enough character development to know what the characters might say in the story situation. A scene subtly builds story rather than simply telling the reader the points they are supposed to understand. But scenes are inherently more interesting to most of us because they are about people doing things.
Try to leave out the parts readers tend to skip.
Elmore Leonard
Summary can be engrossing but is often a bit tedious. How often have you thought as you read a novel, “Just get on with it”? Good summary is actually difficult to write. As Elmore Leonard, a writer known for his dialogue, points out, people skip the boring parts. And if you look at the changing tastes of modern readers, our attention spans are definitely shorter these days.
Good use of summary include: briefly setting up a situation or scene, describing a place or character, processing or reflection on events within the scene, quickly moving the story ahead in time, and de-emphasizing an event that isn’t central to the plot.
As a reader, what do you think of summary and scene in fiction? Does that experience affect how you make art? Drop me a comment! (Click this blog title, and a comment box will open at the end of the post.)
Check out my other craft blogs: Plot And Story, The Where: Setting Of A Story, Character Terms For Writers And Readers, Character Creation Tools, Character Creation, and Snowflake Plotting.
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