Whenever I rewatch Seinfeld, I’m struck by how many classic moments in the show involve the core characters recapping events that have already happened. Elaine talking about running into John F. Kennedy Jr. at the gym, Kramer recounting seeing the pig man, George’s “the sea was angry that day, my friends” monologue, or “He took it out.”
It’s a very common sitcom approach in general, whether it’s brunch in Sex and the City or Tim and Wilson talking over the fence in Home Improvement.
But recapping something that’s already happened very rarely works in a novel. Put a great deal of thought into what you choose to dramatize and what you leave off the page.
What’s really happening here?
I’ve written previously about the dangers of screenplay-izing or teleplay-izing your novel. Some writers inevitably default to movies and TV shows when they’re imagining their novels. The problem is that this often results in plodding, dialogue-centric novels where characters are just standing around endlessly chitchatting.
When we watch TV or movies there’s far, far more that we’re absorbing than the dialogue. There’s a setting, facial expressions, gestures, inflection, sound effects, physical presence, movement… If all you’re providing is dialogue and you’re neglecting physical description and gestures, you’re not even replicating the information we’re receiving when we watch a TV show.
You’re also missing the interiority that makes novels such a unique and powerful medium. We don’t have the chance to see and feel a moment in a TV show from inside a character’s head like we can in a novel.
There are a whole lot of reasons a recap works in a sitcom. Actors can be funny, and it’s enjoyable to see characters’ reactions to what’s being said as a proxy for our reactions (something Japanese TV understands extremely well). Not to mention practical considerations like not having the budget to show George Costanza saving a whale.
But most importantly: recaps leave more to the viewer’s imagination. Imagining George atop a whale is a whole lot funnier than actually seeing some bad CGI approximation.
In novels, everything is the reader’s imagination. Recapping doesn’t create a gap for more imagination, it just means we’re another step removed from experiencing a dramatic moment ourselves.
Put your dramatic moments on the page
In short: build your novel so that your reader experiences the most dramatic moments for themselves. There’s a great deal of power in experiencing events along with the protagonist(s) and seeing and feeling their reactions in the moment.
If all we’re getting is recaps of dramatic scenes after the fact, we’re distanced from what happened. It gets confusing about why we’re seeing what we’re seeing and what the narrative voice is choosing to show us. It can feel like the author is playing “keep away” with the good stuff.
Put a great deal of thought into what you keep on and off the page. Err on the side of including the dramatic moments and brushing past mere movement from Point A to Point B.
There are, of course, exceptions to this. There are novels like Absalom, Absalom! that involve recapping and some unspoken moments that happen off the page, and we mainly see them refracted in the aftermath.
But that was a very conscious choice for very specific reasons. The unspeakableness of some of the events was the point. It was not because William Faulkner just found it easier to write scenes centered around dialogue than he did describing action.
Dramatize your most important events, and better yet, build your novel around them.
Leave the boring stuff off the page
On the flip side, if you put tedium on the page, the reader is going to be tempted to skim forward to get to the good bits, or put down your book entirely. As Elmore Leonard famously said, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”
Remember: your goal when writing a novel is not to replicate real life, it’s to tell a good story.
Readers are capable of filling in gaps in everyday chores. They’ll assume characters are eating, breathing, and going to the bathroom without needing those realities spelled out on the page. They’ll assume all necessary pleasantries have been exchanged when characters meet each other.
They can infer that when a character moves from Point A to Point B they did, well, whatever they needed to do to get there. While it’s good to provide the broad strokes of how characters move around so it doesn’t feel like they pop out of nowhere, we don’t need every single uneventful step filled in.
In real life, people get aimless, bored, and stuck, but in a novel, it’s usually better to brush past the aimlessness to get to the parts that push the story forward. Remember: if your protagonist is bored, chances are your reader will be too.
Manipulating time is a crucial skill
In novels, you can speed up and slow down time at will. You can brush over a thousand years, or dwell on a split second for dozens of pages. Readers will largely roll with it, as long as you’re pushing the story forward.
One crucial way of doing that is to keep the protagonist active. Err on the side of constructing scenes after a character who’s doing or trying to figure out something, and brush past the parts where they’re stalled out or waiting for something to happen.
Be judicious and thoughtful about what you dramatize. Utilize the unique properties of novels as an art form rather than trying to imitate Sex and the City brunches.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: July 11, 2022
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Art: Miyamoto Musashi Attacking Giant Whale by Utagawa Kuniyoshi
I just wanted to say I’ve followed you since 2009, and your posts are gold. I share links to your place regularly. Thanks for the fabulous content year after year after year.
Thank you!
This is such wise advice about the dangers of emulating modes of storytelling that work well on television but not in novels. When I see writers recounting lots of big moments that happened offstage, I often ask them to rethink where they are starting the story and/or whether they might really want to tell the story through the eyes of a different narrator/protagonist.
Thanks!
Great point—crafting a novel so that the reader experiences the drama of the story is a lot more effective, memorable and satisfying (to the writer, too) than draining those moments through overwriting or underwriting. Donald Maass’s The Emotional Craft of Fiction is a good reference work with exercises on how to write the story beneath the surface.
This post hits that sweet spot of smart and helpful. Highlighting how sitcoms rely on recaps like in Seinfeld makes total sense on screen but in novels? Not so much. You remind writers why it pays to show dramatic moments rather than summarize them. That visceral, immersive power of experiencing events alongside characters that’s what keeps readers hooked. Thanks for the storytelling wake-up call!