NaNoWriMo Tip #25: Quick and Dirty Guide to Scene vs Summary
Show Don’t Tell.
Show Don’t Tell. Show Don’t Tell. Yada, yada, yada…
If you’ve heard
that so often you want shove the words into a piñata and beat it with a stick,
I don’t blame you. Also, what the heck does it mean? I’ve seen it explained
poorly WAY too many times.
For instance, I’ve
seen the advice, that if you say, “John was furious,” that’s Telling. Whereas
if you write, “John clenched his fists,” that Showing. So you should always
talk about John’s fists and never say flat out, “John was furious.”
Er, not
necessarily.
Ok, yes,
technically, telling the reader that John was furious is telling, and showing
his clenched fists is showing, at the sentence level. If your writing is full
of simplistic sentences like this, then it’s worth looking into other ways to
show emotion through body language and action. Make each sentence as strong as
it can be. Strike cliché from your writing wherever you find it.
But don’t confuse
the old adage Show Don’t Tell for turning your characters into drama-queens who
are constantly stomping their feet, clenching their fists and flashing their
eyes. Sometimes, a little telling goes along way: “John was furious. He smiled
politely, gesturing his mother-in-law into the drawing room. ‘Yes, please stay
to dinner.’”
Context is
everything.
If you are writing
a rich outline / rough draft of your novel, particularly if you are trying to
finish it in a month—meaning you want to scratch out your ideas in the white
heat of inspiration and worry about refining the writing later, this level of
Show Don’t Tell doesn’t even matter. Later you can go back over the paragraph
and change, “John was furious,” to, “John clenched his fists,” easily enough if
you want to. Sentence level improvements are not that hard, and can be a real
pleasure.
What you cannot change so easily, and what you
should take the time to get right even in the draft (if you can) is choosing
when to write in Scene and when to write in Summary. Changing Scene to Summary
or vice versa can involve restructuring you whole novel, and it’s seldom a pleasure.
It usually feels like being stuffed into a piñata and hit with a stick.
Scene is another
way of saying, “Show,” and Summary is another way of saying, “Tell,” except at
a higher level of story, at the level of paragraphs, scenes and whole chapters.
Both are necessary. Newbie writers,
however, often write Summary when they should write Scene, and write Scene when
they should write Summary.
Analysis of Scene
vs Summary in a Sample Novel
As an example, I’ll
refer (with permission) to a manuscript I was looking at for a friend of mine.
She began her book with a terrific opening paragraph, but then, in a classic
newbie mistake, veered into First Person Summary. (I’m not going to quote
directly, but will indicate the style for each paragraph.) I’ll also label
which ones are Scene and which are Summary.
Paragraph 1: [Summary] A three day storm had swept over
the city like a jealous bitch, leaving debris to trip up the unwary all over
the streets. [More description]
Paragraph 2: [Summary] My name is Alice Munroe, and I’m
a 34 year old housewife. I’m not fat, though I could stand to lose ten pounds.
My shoulder length blonde hair is starting to show a few gray hairs. … [blah
blah blah]… [a couple paragraphs of self-description]
Paragraphs 3-5: [Summary] I grew up… [blah blah blah]… [a
couple paragraphs of backstory]
Paragraphs 6-7: [Summary] I married …[blah blah blah]…
[more paragraphs of backstory]
Paragraphs 8-9: [Summary] I’m pretty sure my husband is
cheating on me because …[blah blah blah]… [more paragraphs of backstory]
Paragraph 10: [Scene]
This afternoon, I waited outside my husband’s office. As soon as I saw
his red Chevy pull out, I peeled out of the parking lot and followed him all
the way to the Cheery Buster Motel…
Every paragraph
until 10 was Summary. Now, you might think I advised this writer to cut all of them, but no. I advised her to
cut all but one of them. The first
paragraph, although it was Summary, although it was Description and although
it didn’t introduce a character or a conflict directly, was a great paragraph.
It established us in a time and place, it was dynamic description, and importantly, it foreshadowed the conflict
to come (the jealous bitch was about to hit her husband like a storm and leave
their marriage in debris). Some Summary is worth keeping.
Paragraphs 2-9,
however, stopped the action cold to give us a boring and static description of
the woman, her past, her marriage, etc., and completely sucked any tension or
mystery out of the next scene (when the woman followed her husband’s car).
Basically, the author told us what the protaganist was going to do [Summary],
she did it [Scene], and then (in the second half of the chapter), the author
slipped back into Summary to recap what had just happened.
Repetition like this
is useful in business writing (this author had a long non-fiction resume),
where it’s safe to assume your readers are dolts with little interest in the
subject, but it’s deadly in fiction. Fiction readers are geniuses and should be
respected as such by authors.
 |
| Wally Reading vs. Reading Wally. |
Is it Scene or
Summary?
Unfortunately,
there are no Hard and Fast rules about when to use Scene vs Summary. But here’s
a Quick and Dirty guide to Scene vs Summary. Please don’t whine that you’ve
seen good writers break these conventions. Of course you have. Good writers are
like politicians. They know how to break rules and get away with it.
Summary:
Backstory
Short flashbacks
Summarized dialogue
(no quotes; He told us that…)
Habitual events
(Usually he would…)
Covers long periods
of time
Scene:
Immediate action
Long flashbacks
Dialogue (quotes;
he said, she said)
Unique events
Unfolds in “real”
time, beat by beat
Examples of Scene
vs Summary
Description
Summary: Over the
years, she had collected a dozen different pieces of diverse tea sets from
garage sales.
Scene: She sipped
from a white tea cup decorated with roses and set it down on a dark blue
Limoges plate fringed with gold loops.
Journey
Summary: Paragraph
or two describing the trip over the mountains
Scene: Two characters
have a dialogue as they pick their way over the trail
Confrontation
Summary: The boss
gave me the pink slip that morning, in the afternoon Jenny asked for a divorce
and told me I couldn’t sleep in ‘her’ house anymore, and by evening I’d ended
up punching some guy in a bar. At least I had a place to sleep that night after
all; the cot in the jail cell wasn’t as hard as it looked.
Scene: “We value
your contributions as an employee,” said Mr. Schmuck. “Don’t come back on
Monday.” [Etc., followed by individual scenes with Jenny, the bar brawl and the
arrest.]
As you can see,
these actually work best if you mix and match them. You can describe the woman
sipping from the tea cup and also mention how the pieces were collected over
the years. You can show the characters chatting on the trail and summarize the
rest of the journey over the mountains.
Final Quick and
Dirty Questions to Ask
Here’s a final
question to ask yourself if trying to decide to write Scene or Summary?
Is this a pivotal
turning point or important conflict in the story?
If yes, write
Scene. If no, write Summary.
Is this merely
something the characters have to do to get to the next part of the story or is
it tangential to the main plot?
If yes, write
Summary. If no, write Scene.
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