If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it.
Anything that can be put in a nut shell should remain there.
I find the idea of the recap page to be something of a waste. It's the page nobody ever reads and it's even worse because it doesn't tell you who anybody really is.
I can't count how many times I've heard a wrestling fan say they don't have enough time to watch 'Raw.' Maybe it's less about not having the time to watch a three-hour show, but it's more about the time and the patience. You can usually sum up your three-hour 'Monday Night Raw' in a five-minute conversation.
I do wish that reviews were less like book reports. There was an era when reviewers had something to say about a book: when they painted context and drew conclusions. Many reviews these days are little more than plot summary.
Finally, in conclusion, let me say just this.
I have barely time to give you a brief statement of facts as I find them.
What is the short meaning of the long speech?
It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it.
Final thoughts are so, you know, final. Let's call them closing words.
What we have to do is put this in a coherent form for them at the end of the day, and on the big events, give them the kind of context that they deserve.
I dream of summing everything up in the greatest sentence ever written.
The best way to make a long story short is to stop listening.
Exposition has legitimate uses. It's the most efficient way to summarize background information, including necessary information about a character's history. It can set the stage well for a major dramatized event.
The Universe in a Nutshell
If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves.
I don't like reading scripts very much. I like it better for someone to just explain to me what it is about this story.
Now you know the rest of the story.
Education, this is the great word which sums up our whole doctrine
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author.
Paraphrase, in the sense of summary, is as indispensable to the novel-critic as close analysis is to the critic of lyric poetry. The natural deduction is that novels are paraphrasable whereas poems are not. But this is a false deduction because close analysis is itself a disguised form of paraphrase.
This is the short and the long of it.
I take a whole life story and compress it into three minutes.
