JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #46
April 1, 2021
I thought this week I ought to say something about summarizing within a story. The common advice is to show, don’t tell, but sometimes you’ve just got to tell the reader something, be it a brief description, a little character history, or some other information that is necessary for the reader to understand how the story is about to unfold. The key to any kind of summary is that it should arise as a consequence of what has just happened in a scene, and that it does not digress from the purpose of providing the necessary information demanded by that moment. A necessary summary is not the time to dump your 34-page character sketch.
I’m using the word "summary" to encompass any kind of "telling" that we might do where our purpose is to impart story-related information to the reader, information that the reader needs to know in order to fully apprehend the developing story. This can be as simple as using half a sentence to mention that the character dropped out of Harvard in the Spring Semester of her Junior year because you need to set up her retort to a date who belittled her lack of a college degree, or as complex as explaining the daily ritual a character enacts over the course of sixteen years because you need to move the reader from the day his mother died to the moment he met the man who would finally help him work through his trauma.
The best way to make a summary compelling in fiction is the same thing that makes any concrete scene compelling: specific, significant detail. Specific details are the kinds of things a reader can visualize, something that helps spark the imagination and compels the reader to really feel the character’s situation. Details engender empathy, which is always the key to compelling fiction, the kind of fiction that captures the hearts of its readers. So when you’re summarizing your character’s sixteen years of solitude, mention how he tracks the accumulation of dust on the top of the medicine cabinet, how he tries to convince himself that it needs to be cleaned, that he can see where it’s beginning to stain the metal, but he can’t bring himself to clean it because every time he contemplates it, all he can focus on is the last time he saw his mother she was up on her red step-stool and his brusque “bye” as she wiped down that same cabinet, likely moments before she collapsed, alone, and crumpled onto the bathroom floor when the blood vessel burst in her brain. Or whatever detail helps establish the character’s emotional state that we need to understand for the upcoming scene, whatever the purpose of the summary might be.
There is summary in all good fiction, and some stories are even written in a summary style, where most of it is summarized, but the specific details sprinkled throughout are what really capture us and carry us forward as we read.