Shape your story by managing the interplay between Scene, Summary, and Reflection.
Are you gradually falling out of love with your story? Is your plot line running low on gas? Are your once beloved characters flat-lining in the literary ICU? Don't give up on those pages yet. Look back at the last few passages or chapters and review the work for nothing but narrative variety. Are you mixing up the narrative modes to give the story texture?
Three Modes of Narration
Scene
Summary
Reflection
If your story gets stuck in one of these narrative modes for too long, it might start to feel murky, heavy, lethargic. I enjoy writing scenes, and sometimes I lay them on so thick that the writing suffers from "death by reportage." The flow feels episodic and the scenes transactional—and with no subtext whatsoever, I'm no longer spinning a page-turning yarn but writing a dull survey of lifeless characters as seen from a distance on close-captioned TV.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the story may be passing by far too quickly, blazing through entire swaths of history and summarizing potentially exciting twists and turns, leaving scenery, detail, and bodily movement on the side of the freeway like roadkill. Stories that spend too much time in summary often read like a fifth-grader's summer-vacation essay. Your protagonist spent his entire summer at the lake, swimming with his best friend's girlfriend. Great. But I want to know: What did the water feel like when he first jumped in? Did she walk barefoot to the lake, did they hold hands? What was the quality of pain, in the pit of his stomach, when she ended their romance at last?
In either case, the story is compromised by a lack of texture. A story works best* when it's weaving through time and space and utilizing all three narrative modes and all three temporal modes to paint a vivid picture—not emotionless reportage or dull summary—but a three-dimensional world full of pasts, presents, futures, and narrative complications.
Let's take a closer look at the narrative modes.
Narrative Mode #1: Scene
In scene, there are characters, a setting, and stuff happens. Sometimes the characters talk, too. The story can be told in the present or past storyline (not to be confused with present or past tense).
They decided to go to the lake one final time, as a sort of elegy to summer. Lydia brought her Walkman with all their favorite love songs, and a single headset to share; Michael brought a magnum of Barefoot Bubbly and two red Solo cups. But when they got there, the place was full of Boy Scouts, miniature men in beige Land's End camping gear, shoving off in cheap canoes and singing "Boom Chicka Boom" at the top of their lungs. At the edge of the tree line, Lydia dropped her backpack to the ground, where it fell with a thump onto a bed of dead grass and acorn caps."You've got to be shitting me," she said."Today, of all days, they have to bus in the future frat boys of America."
Narrative Mode #2: Summary
In summary mode, we move away from blow-by-blow storytelling. An author may decide to summarize for a number of reasons. Maybe she wants to show the passage of time, but not in-scene, because it would require too many scenes—none of which serve the point of the story. Maybe she wants to demonstrate the normalcy of the time in question—that the days themselves were similar in character but the summer taken as a whole was extraordinary. Maybe she summarizes because she wants to relay a chain of events that leads up to the present, when the real action begins. If activities occur consistently throughout the relevant timeframe of the summary, the passage uses habitual tense.
They spent the entire summer at the lake; Michael picked Lydia up every morning, and she made fun of his turquoise Vespa without fail. It was "something right out of an Italian movie," she would say. In truth, it made her weak in the knees. They had the place to themselves on most days, although the scouts from Troop Number 72 made the trip the second Tuesday of every month, running like wild things over the rocks and into the trees, scraping their knees and singing songs. Those days, they'd hide in the abandoned cabin near the oak grove, whispering to each other like children in the failing light. Lydia told Michael she loved him at the end of summer, but the truth was, she loved him all along. Summer just had a way of cementing things. Maybe it was the humidity. Maybe it was hormones. Maybe it was that damned decade. The eighties. Everybody fell in love with everybody back then.
Narrative Mode #3: Reflection
This last mode is exactly as it sounds. Reflection is a bit like summary, but it's delivered as a flashback. Most importantly, the author's voice—through the protagonist's point of view—inserts itself deliberately here. She's not just recounting what happened—she's commenting on why it's important.
That summer was a turning point for Michael. He'd always been a by-the-book kind of guy, a tee-totaler and churchgoer who'd not once said an unkind word to another human being. But Lydia changed all that. Being close to a girl does that to you; you take on what's hers until it's part of you. Halfway into summer she taught him how to drink. Not the heavy stuff—wine, spritzers, champagne. Then, aw hell, they got into a fight with that Boy Scout in early August. Lydia started it, but Michael had to step in. He had to—she was his girl, wasn't she? Anyway, it wasn't all bad, is what he came to understand. Even when they broke up he knew the truth—that Lydia had given him a gift. The gift of knowing who he was, the gift of standing tall no matter who he was standing up to. On that last day , Michael drove Lydia home, dropped her off, shook her dad's hand, called him "Sir." On the ride back home he shouted into the wind until his throat hurt. "Shit!" he yelled. "Fuck!" He wiped his face down before walking into the house. It felt like autumn already, and the ice in the air made your eyes tear up. "Hey," his mom said at the door. "Hey back," he said. They stared at each other until it got awkward. "Sausages on the stove," she finally said, pulling the belt around her robe. "Better eat your share before your dad gets home."
Note there is a tiny bit of scene in the "summary" example and even more in the "reflection" example—these little scenes wrap up the habitual summaries and also serve as outros that send a signal to the reader that you're getting ready to shift modes again.
*All rules are made to be broken, and there are many brilliant authors who write almost exclusively in a story's present, with little interiority or exposition. Cormac McCarthy's The Border Trilogy comes to mind. But for our purposes...why not try mixing it up?
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