On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [59]
The single sentence "Sara hadn't seen Max in years" is a summary—it simply and efficiently states a fact that readers need to know. This simple sentence is much clearer than a paragraph or two giving the details of Sara's confusion and happiness and memories at the encounter. And especially if Max isn't critically important in Sara's life or her story, the space you save by summarizing could be better used for other things.
Exposition is a little more problematic. If your heroine is chatting with an old friend and you break off the conversation to say, "Sally met Jane when they were in kindergarten and Jane had been her best friend ever since," you're using exposition—you're telling readers rather than letting them discover for themselves.
Whether readers need or want to know that these two characters have been friends for twenty years is another question altogether, and that's where the use of exposition becomes clouded. Is it better to tell, or is it better to show Sally and Jane reminiscing about their school days? The answer will depend on the story. If what happened in kindergarten is important in Sally's current story, perhaps you need to show it through dialogue or even flashback. If it isn't, the single line of exposition is preferable—if you need to explain anything at all.
In Tanya Michaels's romantic comedy The Maid of Dishonor, the heroine is attending a cocktail party, but the conversation isn't important to the story—so Michaels wisely opts for two paragraphs of summary instead of giving all the details:
Wide French doors opened onto a well-manicured lawn, and Sam hurried through them, anxious to escape the cloying, suffocating atmosphere of the room. Each conversation opener she'd heard tonight had been a blatant status announcement. Why didn't the guests just lay their bank statements and family trees out on the enormous mahogany dining table and give up the pretense of small talk?
Thank God this is not the life I lead. Despite the condescending gazes she'd drawn when she told people she was a piano teacher, she'd never trade her job to be one of the wealthy elite inside...
By summing up the unimportant talk, Michaels quickly moves her heroine out to the terrace where the next important event will take place.
When Not to Use Summary and Exposition
If you introduce your main character by saying "Sally Jones, who was the personal assistant to a powerful businessman, answered the phone," you're telling the readers about Sally, her boss, and the office, rather than letting the readers find out for themselves. You're cheating the readers out of a chance to see Sally in action.
If you stop in the middle of your main characters' quarrel to explain why they've never been able to get along, you're taking away from the readers the joy of figuring that out for themselves.
Sometimes, especially when a passage of this sort goes on for a while, it's referred to as an information dump—as if the author has upended a basketful of facts over the reader's head.
When to Use Summary and Exposition
As we saw in the storytelling and story-showing examples at the beginning of the chapter, giving all the details so readers can make up their own minds takes a great deal more space. If the action isn't concise and fast moving, or if it isn't par-ticularly important, summary may be the best way to handle it. If all you're doing is moving your heroine across country, you probably don't need to detail every
stop sign and road change. It's better to write, "The journey seemed to take forever, and the endless parade of gas stations meshed into a blur in her memory," and let it go at that.
Summary and exposition can be very useful to set the stage, giving the details necessary for readers to create a picture in their minds. "In matching fireplaces at each end of the room, gas logs flickered, banishing the gloom of a rainy afternoon," gives the information succinctly. You could have the main characters chat about the fires and the weather instead, but it would take up half a page and not add much