Tell Like Heck: Writing Summary

Have you ever been told that you need to SHOW NOT TELL?  Did you take that advice and as you converted your piece to showing, it became longer and longer as you added details and actions?  Until it became that sweater you knitted with arms far too long.  Ok, I am the one who knitted that sweater.  The knitting had become a rhythm it was easier to maintain than to stop.  Like writing with lots of showing.

The long-winded sweater with the sleeves conveniently covered up

When I convert “telling” into “showing,” there are times when I have to ask myself if that information was really necessary to show. Then I start to wonder what showing really means. To me, it’s easier to consider scene versus summary.  They are both tangible components of writing memoir or fiction.

In creative nonfiction courses, there were times I was misled about scene and summary.  In these workshop courses, I received feedback from various instructors and other readers.  Although the official word was that a variation of scene and summary is important–that sometimes scene is needed and at other times summary makes more sense–when I tried to write even two sentences back to back of summary, I was told to write it in scene.

I could be exaggerating, but you get the idea.  Maybe you’ve had this experience yourself.  The intention is often good—the idea being that writers need to practice their scenes and become adept at those.

Nevertheless, sometimes the advice is just a reflex.  I admit that I’ve given this advice plenty of times myself, but I try to only do so when I genuinely think that at that point the piece screams for a scene.

What’s come of the advice I’ve gotten to always “show” or create scene is that while I think I have an idea of how to transform summary into scene, I am pretty clueless about writing summary.  I got almost no practice at it in course work because nobody would let me do it.

It’s helpful to me to recognize that most writing which we enjoy reading (a novel, for instance) is written using both scene and summary.  Summary can be just as effective as scene, depending on the style, the voice, and the goals of a particular piece.  Look at this passage from Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club:

The night’s major consequences for me were internal. The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not-Rightness. Whenever I stepped into the road at Leechfield’s one traffic light, I usually expected to get plowed down by a Red Ball truck flying out of nowhere (unlikely, given the lack of traffic). I became both a flincher and a fighter. I was quick to burst into tears in the middle of a sandlot baseball game and equally quick to whack someone in the head without much provocation. Neighborhood myth has it that I once cold-cocked a five-year-old playmate with an army trench shovel, then calmly went back to digging. Some of this explosiveness just came from a naturally bad temperament, of course. But some stems from that night, when my mind simply erased everything up until Dr. Boudreaux began inviting me to show him marks that I now know weren’t even there.

All engaging writing.  All summary.  But if Karr had shown this information in scene it would have dragged the book down unnecessarily.  It follows a crucial and well-developed scene.  I love how Karr uses a varying pattern of scene and summary, a rhythm which adds to the reader’s enjoyment.

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Writing Prompt:  Select a topic about a bad habit you have, such as biting your nails.  Write a scene which shows you at your worst as you are practicing your habit.  Then write a paragraph, like Karr’s, which summarizes how engaging in this behavior makes you feel and what it’s done to your life, using a couple of concrete examples as she does with hitting the other child with the shovel and getting hit by not just any truck, but a Red Ball truck.  Where do you want to go from there?  You have an ending to write.