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Daily Writing Tip, Oct 1, 2026

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One of the frequent failings of novelists is the inclusion of material between scenes. This usually takes the form of a narrative summary of offstage happenings.

— Stein - "On Writing"

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📖 Notes & analysis

The reason this advice works is that scenes carry heat — specific people, in a specific place, wanting specific things right now — while summary carries only information. Readers forgive almost anything except boredom, and narrated catch-up between scenes is where attention quietly leaks away. Say a character spends a dull afternoon arguing with a landlord by phone, then arrives furious at dinner. Cut the phone call entirely. Open on the slammed door and let the dinner scene reveal, through behavior and a stray line, what happened. The caution: don't swing so hard against summary that you lose all compression. Some connective tissue — a sentence noting three months passed, a season turned — is necessary scaffolding. The goal isn't zero summary, it's summary that never substitutes for a scene that wants to be lived in.

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