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.
The Universe in a Nutshell
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.
If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves.
Now you know the rest of the story.
Education, this is the great word which sums up our whole doctrine
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.
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.
