Learning to effectively manipulate time is one of the important skills novelists and memoirists must master. You can brush past centuries or linger for pages on a split second depending on what the story requires.
Crafting effective connective tissue and making sure you have the correct events dramatized on the page are super important elements to master.
There’s a danger here though. When I’m editing novels, I often see writers summarize across multiple scenes, such as abstractly describing how a relationship escalated or telling us what a character’s routine is every Monday, instead of focusing on one particular date that escalates or picking one particular Monday to build into a vivid scene.
This is totally made up, but I mean scenes like this:
Nathan settled into a routine that summer, riding his bike every morning to the local swimming hole. Sometimes his father would throw the bike into the back of his Ford pickup truck and spare him from the sweltering heat. He would swim in an over-chlorinated pool and rest on lounge chairs until the sun hung low and the mosquitos were too numerous to swat. He made friendships and had first crushes and came of age under that hot sun.
(And so on and so forth)
Here’s the problem.
Abstractly summarized scenes tend to be less vivid
By their nature, summarized scenes blur out what’s unique about a character’s life and instead focus on what’s routine. While they might have broad details, they don’t lend themselves to establishing sharp physical description that orients the reader visually within a scene on a particular day. And they flatten potentially interesting interactions with other characters.
The biggest problem, though, has to do with the crucial story elements that make novels effective to begin with. Usually, the best scenes and chapters flow from a character who wants something and is actively trying to get that thing, even if it’s just to figure something specific out or come to a decision.
When scenes are simply summarized to “catch up” the reader or to paint a generalized picture, it’s extremely difficult to make them feel active and engaging.
If you look at my example above, yes, you get some generalized atmospheric details like mosquitos and an over-chlorinated pool, but not the sense of being a fly on the wall for one very specific day. There’s nothing clear that Nathan wants beyond passing the time. Okay, his father gives him a ride sometimes, but what are their interactions like? Who are these friends? Who are these crushes and what are they like? What are Nathan’s hopes and dreams, what’s his specific manifestation of coming of age?
Imagine instead a scene that picks one important day that summer that flows from Nathan trying to do something specific that shows us how Nathan spent his summer with more vivid detail.
One representative, interesting day that pushes the story forward is almost always superior to vague, abstract summaries, particularly as a way of showing relationships escalating or a character’s personal growth.
When summarizing across scenes works
Of course, this is writing we’re talking about, so naturally there are exceptions.
One of my absolute favorite abstractly summarized scenes comes at the start of the workplace satire And Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, who crafts a very unique perspective using an entire collective office as the narrator:
We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. They happened all too infrequently. Our benefits were astonishing in comprehensiveness and quality of care. Sometimes we questioned whether they were worth it. We thought moving to India might be better, or going back to nursing school. Doing something with the handicapped or working with our hands. No one ever acted on these impulses, despite their daily, sometimes hourly contractions. Instead we met in conference rooms to discuss the issues of the day.
Aside from simply being ineffably funny and a memorable voice, do you see the crucial story element Ferris weaves into this abstractly summarized opening paragraph? He establishes a motivation and makes it vivid. Yes, he’s summarizing across an entire office and many days, but he homes in on the crucial tension he mines throughout the rest of the novel: Everyone wants to quit, but they think they can’t afford to. So they satisfy themselves with gossip, petty revenge, theft, and much more.
The opening scenes are summarized, but Ferris is able to make them work because the collective is active and trying to shape its destiny while any number of indignities (illnesses, layoffs, austerity measures) befall the office. He also zooms down to plenty of specifically articulated scenes on particular days that the collective witnesses and tries to shape.
This is the key: even if you choose to summarize across scenes, they will feel more vivid and urgent if the crucial story elements (motivation, active protagonist, obstacles, stakes) are still present. It helps if it feels like the story is still pushing forward, as opposed to an author simply “bringing us up to speed.”
Gut check summarizing across scenes
Even if you do decide to summarize across a period of time, I still think it’s worth a gut check:
- Do you really need it? Is anything really lost if we skip ahead to the next time the story advances? Are there better ways of establishing what happened in the meantime?
- Would it be better if it were one scene on one specific day instead of summarized across days? This is often a place where “show don’t tell” applies. Would a single scene be more vivid than one that’s averaged across multiple days?
- If you still want to summarize, are you weaving in crucial story elements? Okay, it must be summarized. Are you still weaving in motivation and obstacles in order to give the overall story momentum?
As always, there aren’t hard and fast rules here. But personally, I’d err on the side of crafting vivid scenes and keeping the story moving forward.
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Art: In the Orphanage at Katwijk-Binnen by Adolph Artz
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