Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Similarities in scenes and summaries
The collective book of essays/stories
Long-form genres

What becomes germane in terms of collections is how they correspond across different stories or essays. As in a single piece, you really don’t want too much of one or the other throughout an entire book. So I’ll provide some examples from my memoir to show how they can play off one another in different parts of your book.

Summary

Let’s start with the easier of the two: summary. Most people use it in every story because it takes a large event or series of events and condenses it to a short description of what happened. For example:

“B— died alone one spring mid-morning in a single vehicle highway wreck two weeks after I kissed her, running off the road without any cause or reason anyone could determine. Several months later, A— dove head first through an upper floor dormitory window, was withdrawn from school by her parents, and sent away, circumstances equally unfathomable, causes unknown.”

In two sentences, you’ve been given the basic particulars of two peoples’ deaths. It glosses over what happened, giving you the bare minimum of details to understand what’s been happening. It’s telling, not showing. You know these young women died, but you don’t know what caused their deaths or the activities they engaged in during the days and hours before their respective demises. You know exactly what happened but none of the sensory details that fill in the gaps of the events or even any dialogue.

Here’s an even vaguer example from later in the memoir:

“I had sex for the first time not long after the events at Sweet Briar. It was with a girl who would never have any opportunity to attend an exclusive private woman’s institution, or any other college for that matter. Perhaps she never even finished high school. I can’t remember; I don’t know what happened to her. Guilt rises in me on those rare occasions I recall her—guilt at not wondering about her more than I do.”

In this summary, you learn about the narrator’s relation to the young woman at hand but also of his ignorance regarding the rest of her life. She filled an important function in his development, and you know what that function is, albeit very little else. Too many of these kinds of passages would have ruined the memoir, but as it happens, you learn later what this young woman looked like, hear her speak, and even receive part of a sex scene.

Scene

You might think of scene as the complete opposite of summary. Scene takes a relatively short occurrence and expands it, filling it with details. Everyone uses scenes in their work, of course, but not everyone realizes that’s what they’re doing.

The concept is a little hard to completely understand for some people, so I’ll provide an example involving the young woman I summarized in the “Summary” section:

“Her face, childlike and round, had a certain immobile quality to it regardless of what happened to be going on around her, yet this dynamic was offset by her highly attentive, almost astonished, blue eyes which usually looked as though they had just witnessed something highly unexpected. Her full little mouth not only never smiled, but seemed altogether incapable of forming that expression. Lusterless mousy hair hung in clusters on either side of her head as if its intention was to appear as lifeless and flaccid as the expression on her face. Her shapely bosom breathed calmly like that of a wild animal lying at rest yet alert. Most any girl would have been something of an enigma to me in those inexperienced teenage years, but this one came across especially so. My initial response to her was neither one of attraction nor disinterest, but rather a kind of inquisitiveness I did not understand. Many girls might have possessed such qualities as hers without being remembered for them, but I remember on account of the part she played in my life.”

See the difference? Just telling you what she looked like takes several sentences—there are concrete details (the girl’s mousy hair, etc.), internal monologue, and sensory perceptions. I chose to take the duration of a glance—a few seconds—and cover it in an entire paragraph. I saw both her description and function in the memoir as important, so I tried to make my presentation of her detailed and unique, increasing the chances that the reader might remember it and her. Hence, a short, significant event and a long description.

I would urge you, as a beginning writer, to find the intuitive balance between summary and scene that will allow your collection to move forward in the way you believe it will best hold your readers’ attention.

WATCH OUT!

The main drawback of scenes and their details in books is the effect they have on overall pacing. Henry James, in many of his novels, is a famous example of bogged-down pacing, even though his scenes and descriptions are technically very good. In long, flowing sentences, he often will tell you many of the things something is not before finally delivering its key details and significance. However, much of this kind of writing occurred in his mid- and late-career works, when he had already established a sizeable readership. Most writers cannot afford the risk of slowing their pacing to a snail’s pace.