Dramatize the Necessary Experience

A draft that has taken “Show, don’t tell” as law turns every event into a scene. The day a protagonist changes her mind then gets the same attention as the three weeks she waited for a phone call, and a reader is likely to be exhausted by the middle and unable to tell what mattered. The opposite failure exists too: summarizing the scene that holds the whole question, because it is hard to write.

Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych makes the choice in both directions. It begins in a scene. A court official, Peter Ivanovich, goes to the dead man’s house for the funeral service, and when he sits with the widow on a low pouffe, its springs push back each time he rises to free her shawl from the table, and he sits down again, his emotions cooled by the struggle. The widow, we gradually see, has drawn him aside to learn whether she can squeeze more money out of the government.

Chapter II opens: “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” The next few pages carry him from law school to marriage to the post of prosecutor in summary, the tailor, the medallion on the watch-chain, an affair, all of it done, Tolstoy writes, “with clean hands, in clean linen, with French phrases.” A life lived without a moment of real attention is told in a manner that gives it none, and the reader is carried through it at what feels like the speed at which Ivan Ilych lived it. Then Tolstoy slows down. In the chapters of the illness we are in the room when the servant Gerasim holds the sick man’s legs up and the pain eases, and we stay for the talk that follows.

In “Time Passes,” the middle section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the choice runs the other way. Summary takes Mrs. Ramsay’s death, and the close attention goes to the empty house: light on a wall, wind in the rooms, a caretaker’s slow labor.

What the reader must feel the weight of depends on what the Work is for. A memoir of three years spent caring for a parent might hold most of those years in summary, a paragraph a season, and one night in full. A play usually has no narrator to condense time, so the gap between acts does the summarizing, and the playwright still chooses what to leave between the scenes.

Practice. On one page, list the twelve to twenty moments of a story, chapter, or essay you are working on, one line each, and mark each S (scene), T (traverse, in summary), E (explain), or O (omit). Give S to no more than a third of them, a rough ceiling for this exercise, chosen by asking where the reader must feel a decision being made, not where the events are most dramatic. Then rewrite one T moment as a scene and one S moment as three sentences of summary. The map and both rewrites take sixty minutes; you end with that one-page map and two rewrites, and for each rewrite you keep whichever version gives the reader more for the attention it costs.