The art and craft of summing-up
Talesmen can tell the same story in many ways. They can be terse and brief or they can stretch it out and take all the time in the world to reach the end. The master talesman knows where he is at each point in the tale, how far from the start and how long till the end. ‘Pace’ is the relative quickness or languor with which a talesman tells his tale all in all, and each part of the tale as its own piece. The way to quicken the pace is by good use of summing-up, but this is a lost art today, as talesmen have sought to engage their audience through the intimate details of each story-moment as it passes.
Elasticity of Tales
The Iliad tells of the War waged by the Achaeans against Priam’s Troy. This war was said to have lasted through ten years of siege and battle, but it had its roots going back to the childhood of Helen, the pact of Helen’s royal suitors, the rivalry of three goddesses that came years before King Agamemnon assembled the League to win Helen back for the Spartan King. And the last of the Achaean warrior-kings, Odysseus, did not reach his home again after Troy fell for another ten years. Later it was said that one of the princes of Troy, Aeneas, voyaged after the fall of his home city around the Mediterranean Sea, visited Carthage (or the site that would become Carthage), and founded a line that would come to build the city of Rome into greatness.
And Homer’s Iliad is a long poem that must have taken several evenings to recite in full. Even so Homer did not tell of the birth of Helen or the rivalry of the goddesses, nor of the pact of the suitors, Helen’s abduction, the assembling of the fleet, the sacrifice to appease the gods of the winds, landing below Troy, or the first years of battle. Nor did he tell of the fall of Troy, its sack, or the homecoming and fates of the warriors. Instead Homer told only of a few days in the ninth year (I think) of the war, when the two champions, Hector and Akilles, fought their final battles and Hector died and was dragged about the city from the back of Akilles’ chariot.
From these crucial days the tide of the war turned, and after Hector fell, it seemed that Troy was doomed. Though Akilles himself would soon fall after Hector, and many heroes and heroines would come bravely to Troy’s defense, it proved but a delaying of the final defeat, won by the stratagem of Odysseus.
From this it can be seen that a tale can be told at many lengths from short to long.
The Intimate Moment
It is the fashion now to tell tales in terms of subjective viewpoints of one or more of the characters, and to mask as much as possible the role the ‘narrator’ or talesman plays in relaying the tale. In short the tale of today masquerades as something other than a tale: it tries to be an experience the reader can live through as though he were one of the characters, feeling and thinking along with the character.
From this goal we get the common advice that the narrator should shut up, that the talesman should ‘show not tell,’ and that he is well advised to disdain ‘head-hopping’ or the practice of detailing the viewpoint of more than one character within a single scene.
This approach gains much in creating the ‘fictive dream’ or trancelike state under which the reader loses track of himself, loses track of time, and lives but in the tale itself. This is an artistic experience that movies and television, the main rivals with the printed word for the crown of talesmanship, cannot match. So I suppose that today’s talesmen (and their publishers) have moved in this direction in self-defense, as first movies and then television have stolen away the leisure hours of potential readers.
But it loses the grace of the summing-up, and makes for very-long-told tales that can exhaust the reader as much as engross him.
Pace and Flying High
Today’s talesman seems stuck at one level, or speed, or gear. He masters the art of creating the ‘fictive dream’ by identifying his readers with one character in the tale, and proceeding with them moment by moment. This is the highest art when those moments are the crucial and pivotal moments in the progress of the tale.
But not every moment is pivotal. Homer chose to tell of but a few days out of ten years of war on Ilium. So it seems the first way a talesman can shorten his tale lies in his choice of what moments to tell.
JK Rowling’s immensely entertaining Harry Potter volumes shows us how this way of telling moment by moment can prove a snare for the talesman. Each of her volumes tells of almost an entire year of Harry’s life (though the first covers time before as well) and thus it would seem that, told with the same number of moments, the volumes should all come to much the same length. However in the uniform Scholastic US hardcover editions…
- Volume 1 comes to 309 pages
- Volume 2 comes to 352 pages
- Volume 3 comes to 448 pages
- Volume 4 comes to 734 pages
- Volume 5 comes to 896 pages
- Volume 6 comes to 672 pages
- Volume 7 comes to 784 pages
It seems that Rowling lost her mastery over pace as the tale went on. Many readers and critics have complained about this, and the later volumes entertain me much less than the first three, the tightest (or at least shortest) of the tale.
Soaring Above It All
Talesmen can also rule over pace by the use of summing-up passages. They still tell us of the moments, but they tell us tersely, in a few brief words. It is as though they flew high above the scene of the action and only told us what they could see from a great height as they soared on to the next scenes.
A summing-up passage unmasks the narrator or talesman, since the words can only come from him. One way today’s talesmen get around this violation of their ‘show don’t tell’ laws is by ‘cutting ahead’ in time, and having the summing-up appear as though the current scene’s viewpoint character were remembering the events that took place between then and the last time we saw him. The simplest form of this work-around has the talesmen do no more than move the narrator’s summing-up paragraphs a bit later, after establishing a scene and a viewpoint character.
The problem I find in some of these ‘viewpoint summing-up’ passages is that they get stuck back in the moment-by-moment mire, and end up being not so much shorter than had the tale proceeded in ‘real time.’
The great art of summing-up is bound to the narrator, the unmasked talesman who frankly tells his tale. Until the narrator is delivered back from the exile current fashions have condemned him to, the art of summing-up will not return.
How Do We Get It Back?
I suppose the best way to learn to master this art of summing-up rests in telling the same tale many times over, at different lengths. From very-short to very-long, beginning with the very-long that current fashions condemn us talesmen to, detailing the scents, sights, thoughts, and touch of the character in every moment he lives through the tale, and going on from there to shorten the tale by half, then by half again, and by half again, until we tell the tale out in no more than three paragraphs or a single page.
The other way is called by its creator the ‘Snowflake Method of Novel Writing’ — he describes this online at:
This is a form of what is called in software design ‘top-down programming’ and begins by telling the tale in one sentence, then in three sentences, three paragraphs, three pages, and so on.
(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, February 13, 2008)
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