(This time, we talk about the other type of detail!)
Going on Autopilot: Summary Details
Now that I’ve explained how complex yet how beneficial using sensory details can be, let’s talk about summary details.
It may seem like there isn’t much reason to use summary details: they don’t create verisimilitude and they aren’t memorable.
However, they are important.
You can’t control the pace of a story without using summary details. We’ll talk more about pacing later, but for now, just know that summary details can help you control pacing.
A paragraph of rich sensory detail looks like this:
The golden, sun-drenched kitchen cabinets stood in a row, doors neatly closed above and below, the smooth black marble countertops stark with their contrast. A silvery, polished espresso machine and a solid wood knife block sat nestled in a corner. A copper-colored wire basket of oranges and red delicious apples hung at the end of the upper cabinets, above the sunken white farmhouse sink. The lemony scent of cleaner hung in the air, and the white tiles were sparkling clean and stuck to my bare feet. I loved the sense of orderliness, simplicity, and cleanliness.
It has lots of great detail…but it also takes up a lot of room. I’ll oversimplify her slightly and say that it is slow paced.
Here’s a description of the kitchen without sensory detail:
The kitchen was clean.
This description is very short! That means it is fast paced.
Let’s say you have an action scene in the kitchen. Do you want it to be fast paced or slow? Let’s say we want it fast!
The kitchen was clean. I grabbed a knife.
The character doesn’t need to notice all the details; they’re in a hurry. But writing with a fast pace can mean that the reader can’t create verisimilitude and probably won’t remember anything other than “it was tense.”
The trick here is to use rich sensory details to create verisimilitude at one point in the story, then use summary details to first “chunk” that sense of verisimilitude, then recall it later.
There are three parts to using summary details:
- Creating verisimilitude
- Identifying the summary detail
- Recalling the summary detail
First, create the verisimilitude by describing whatever it is with rich sensory details, laden with emotion and location and all the other good stuff we talked about in the Sensory Details section.
The golden, sun-drenched kitchen cabinets stood in a row, doors neatly closed above and below, the smooth black marble countertops stark with their contrast. A silvery, polished espresso machine and a solid wood knife block sat nestled in a corner. A copper-colored wire basket of oranges and red delicious apples hung at the end of the upper cabinets, above the sunken white farmhouse sink. The lemony scent of cleaner hung in the air, and the white tiles were sparkling clean and stuck to my bare feet. I loved the sense of orderliness, simplicity, and cleanliness.
Second, identify the summary detail. Here, we want the reader to identify all that information with the word “kitchen.” At the end of the description (where the reader will remember it), we will add the word “kitchen.”
The golden, sun-drenched kitchen cabinets stood in a row, doors neatly closed above and below, the smooth black marble countertops stark with their contrast. A silvery, polished espresso machine and a solid wood knife block with a row of identical steak knives sat nestled in a corner. A copper-colored wire basket of oranges and red delicious apples hung at the end of the upper cabinets, above the sunken white farmhouse sink. The lemony scent of cleaner hung in the air, and the white tiles were sparkling clean and stuck to my bare feet. I loved the sense of orderliness, simplicity, and cleanliness in that kitchen.
Third, recall the summary detail to invoke the sense memories you built earlier. This can be done by using the same exact word:
I grabbed a knife from the kitchen.
You can also emphasize anything important from the earlier setting, forcing the reader to remember it, by repeating the important detail, using an exact word that you used earlier:
I grabbed a steak knife from in the kitchen.
Even though the steak knives were not an important part of the kitchen description above (they were in the middle of the paragraph, and therefore not very memorable of themselves), by using the exact same words, you can force the reader to remember them.
It works kind of like a hyperlink on a webpage: once you set up a lot of sensory details about something, you can force the reader to recall it, even if it is not innately memorable.
If you don’t use the same, exact words, though, it doesn’t work:
I grabbed a blade from the utensil holder.
Wait, what?
Because the reader doesn’t have sensory details associated with the words “blade” or “utensil holder” (it was called a “knife block” in the description), the reader won’t recall the description you so carefully built!
They will, instead, imagine whatever comes to mind for them when they encounter the word “blade,” which could be a steak knife…or it could be an elaborate fantasy sword. You never know.
And “utensil holder,” while technically describing “knife block,” generally means something else entirely. I myself imagine myutensil holder, which is a straight-sided silver jar with holes in it, like you’d find in the back of the house at a restaurant.
When you use a summary detail but have not set up your “hyperlinks” properly by using the same exact terms, the reader can’t follow the link, even if logically you’re saying essentially the same thing.
This is the reason, by the way, that you should call the characters the same thing every time. Don’t say “Anne, the buxom physicist,” to introduce a character, then say “Anne” or “the physicist” interchangeably. It leads to hyperlink confusion! But you can have different characters use different names for a person, as long as that use is consistent: a child can call her mother “Mom” at the same time colleagues can call the same person “Anne” and strangers can say, “Doctor Reynolds, the physicist.”
(Russian novels tend to use different forms of names or nicknames for different characters—but please note how long Russian novels tend to be! They have to build characters up in extremely lengthy, complex ways in order to pull this off, as well as having a cultural tradition to indicate which name gets used when.)
You can also use summary details when you don’t care whatthe reader imagines, as long as they’re not confused about details that matter. I didn’t get into a lot of detail about the “steak knives,” because it didn’t matter to me what type of steak knife the reader imagined—round tipped or pointy, serrated or smooth, wood handle or plastic—as long as the idea of a short cutting utensil came across.
Beginning writers tend to use summary details for everything, whether it’s appropriate or not.
Just because the environment inside your head is rich and full of detail doesn’t mean the reader’s is. Readers want you to do the job of creating an imaginative world inside their heads. That’s literally your job.
Do not tell yourself it’s the reader’s job to handle your summary details correctly! That’s just lazy, unprofessional writing. It won’t create verisimilitude, and it won’t be remembered, either.
(Next time: summarizing!)