First, identify what the summary contributes to your story. Is it concerned with the past or what is happening now? Does it help the reader understand what is happening at this point in the novel?
Next, identify what comes right before and right after the passage of summary. In other words, describe your structure. Is it nested in a scene, or does it come between scenes? When you read into and out of the summary, do you think the reader will follow the flow without being confused?
Exposition
Exposition presents information such as history, setting, family structure, and so on. It describes a farmhouse, a brother’s envy, a war’s progression, the great blizzard of 1967. It may be what happened in the past, or the way things are now, but it is information necessary to fully understand the events of the novel or the context in which events occurred, while it is not narratively necessary to “show” it in dramatic text.
Everything I said about inserting scene summaries applies to exposition, too: It can enrich your narrative, if it adds to what it is interrupting, and if you give clear cues to the reader as you go in and out of the foreground scene.
Interiority: Response, reflection, interrogation, and commentary
The next three elements of narrative structure center on what we can call the character’s “interiority,” that is, internal thoughts.
Response is the emotional reaction of a character, and sometimes the character’s urge to action. It might be a sudden swell of tears or a march across the room. It might be a stiffening wave of humiliation that makes her refuse to look at anyone. It follows action.
Apprentice writers often have a default sense of response that consists of alternating a character’s remarks, or some other expression of her feelings, with sentences that describe what is going on in the scene. It gets tedious very fast.
Reflection is the more studied response, a time of considering and weighing aspects of one’s experience. It may result in a new resolve, or an impulse toward forgiveness. It may mire the character in hopeless anguish, or cause her to see things in a way that interprets the behavior of others. It isn’t “in the moment” the way response is. It’s not holy or necessarily intellectual; it can be as wrongheaded as any other aspect of character behavior, but it does involve a little time spent thinking.
Reflection could interrupt a flow of action, but usually this isn’t a good idea; we are more likely to see it work at the close of a scene, or at a later time when the character has time alone.
Interrogation is that part of reflection that asks questions about what has happened: the whys that nettle a person. Sometimes it means looking deeply into oneself, taking or shirking responsibility for life’s turns. It might be focused on what lies ahead and what one should do about it, resulting in resolution. It may raise the question What is the right thing to do? and thus introduce conflicted thinking. It creates tension. This is the kind of interiority that lets the reader understand who a character really is, what she cares about, what is driving her.
I will talk about interiority more later, but I want to make the point that the three types just described can each be used in three different time-sensitive reactions to ongoing events in the story.
Something happens and the character thinks about it from one of these three perspectives:
Something that happened before.
Something that is going on right now.
Something that might happen in the future.
Here is an example of interiority from my novel Plain Seeing. The protagonist, Lucy, marries a young man she meets in graduate school. The first chapter to introduce their relationship has several passages of narrative summary, to get them from their first meeting toward the heart of their story—the dissolution of their marriage fifteen years later. Essentially, the chapter comprises chunks of time in their early relationship.
In the passage below, there is an implied scene, but the function of the passage is to show Lucy’s changes in consciousness across time. Thus the interiority is response and reflection, based on what has happened up to the implied scene. The scene in this case is secondary to the interiority! Notice the scene fragments, which pick up the thread introduced by the first sentence of the passage. I have underlined the fragments. The scene conveys Lucy’s emotional leap from self-pity to guarded optimism about her life. It has a “sweep” to it that is larger than a single scene. It has the sound of something in the past looked at from a later, wiser perspective. Note, too, that the text is an observation of Lucy’s thinking, rather than the sound of her voice.
The first time Lucy slept with Gordon, she cried. It was surprising and embarrassing and wonderful to discover so much feeling. She had thought there was only pain, that it lasted forever, that she couldn’t give in or show it to anyone. Sex and lacrimation had never occurred together before. She had thought of herself as brave and sporty, picking partners who thought they had picked her. Her tears had been childhood tears, hot and sullen and secretive. She had cried out of resentment and impatience, but never for joy. Then she lay beneath him and tears washed out of her eyes, down her temples into her hair and onto the pillow. Her chest heaved.
There were things she wanted to tell him—to tell someone—but she swallowed the words, to be the woman he might love. She was twenty-one years old. She thought she was very grown up. She had put herself through college. This was in 1964, in Austin, Texas. Jackie was a widow. (At least those children had a mother!) Lyndon was President. She was in her first semester of graduate school, not looking very far ahead.
He smoothed her hair back and shushed her again and again.
He thought it was something he had done. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said. She put her fingers to his lips. She couldn’t stop crying. There were many tears inside, capped, like a well. He had opened a valve in her with his courtly, gentle manner, his sweet shyness that turned ardent, then encompassing.
She knew nothing of the manners of his class. She had never been with a man before who didn’t forget all about her at his climax. Gordon was a scholar. By day, he was all decorum. She believed that something about her had ignited him, and the thought thrilled her, then made her cry.
When she could talk, she whispered, “I come with nothing, a motherless child.” She assumed fatherless was implied. She knew as soon as she said it that she was breaking his heart—he carried photographs of his parents in his wallet—that he would marry her, that she would never have to be alone again. Her sorrow, her burden, her empty heart were suddenly of value, the coin of a new kingdom. She needed him, and her need was her gift to him, her dowry. She felt powerful, as if she were beautiful. She understood, for the moment, the pleasure of power and beauty. She felt like her mother, only luckier.
Commentary, as I use the word, means the ways that the author finds to “say something about life”: about psychology and philosophy, faith, fate, and doubt; about what has happened; about God and country, race and sex and love and grief—all those good things.
It is very tricky to do this well, because it requires deft handling of point of view (POV). American fiction has been dominated by the close-third-person voice for decades, which little allows the long view of commentary, but sometimes a clever author will skirt the limitations of third person by having the character think the things the writer wants said. Adroit handling of point of view is essential to commentary. It is usually easier to write a “novel of commentary” with a first-person narrator, but third-person POV can allow a kind of immediacy in commentary very much like first person.
Again, the best way to understand this is to read a chapter in a novel and look for it. Some novels are full of commentary—there should be a name for the type. Done well, such books are marvels of story and thought. Think of Doris Lessing, J. M. Coetzee, Julian Barnes, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Kate Atkinson, Francine Prose. Think of Middlemarch!
And there are lively contemporar
y novels like Meg Mitchell Moore’s The Arrivals, in which family members—grown kids come home, with their kids—endlessly consider their own lives and relationships. The interiority is a mix of all types: memories, resentments, hopes for change, observations about marriage and motherhood, and most of all, about how life doesn’t turn out the way you think it is going to. Here is a snippet. Lillian is sitting on a bench with her little girl, Olivia.
Lillian patted the spot beside her on the bench. She closed her eyes. Perhaps Olivia could be persuaded to fall asleep in the sun with her. She was trying to convince herself—and the Popsicles were part of this ploy—that this was merely a vacation, just a little jaunt to visit the family, and that at some point soon they would return home and resume their normal existence. She had found that by keeping her marital wound tightly covered, indeed, by refusing to acknowledge it at all, and by refusing to acknowledge the now rudderless state that accompanied it, it hurt much less.
In Nancy Clark’s comedy of manners, The Hills at Home, again an extended family is packed into a single house. Point of view and opinions bounce around on every page like Ping-Pong balls: Everyone is commenting on everyone’s behavior all the time! Both books accomplish their multivocal soul-searching by throwing rules of point of view out the window; everyone has a voice. It makes me think maybe literary advice is just a cozy form of passing down old rules, right when dozens of writers are breaking them. You can, too, if you can make your novel work. More on this in the section on point of view.
You may have read The Stranger by Albert Camus in college. I recommend reading it again, attending to the way Camus deftly threads the protagonist Meursault’s observations into the actions. (The POV is first person.) We think of the book being about a man disengaged from life, but in fact he is constantly commenting on life and his experience; it is in the moment when the sun strikes his eyes and he shoots the Arab that his consciousness fails him. Otherwise, the whole novel is a brilliant, beautifully paced accrual of awareness until Meursault’s recognition of his fate, in the light of what life is, leads him to accept his impending death.
Here is an excerpt late in the book, after Meursault’s trial:
I’d realized that the most important thing was to give the condemned man a chance. Even one in a thousand was good enough to set things right. So it seemed to me that you could come up with a mixture of chemicals that if ingested by the patient (that’s the word I’d use: “patient”) would kill him nine times out of ten. But he would know this—that would be the one condition. For by giving it some hard thought, by considering the whole thing calmly, I could see that the trouble with the guillotine was that you had no chance at all, absolutely none. The fact was that it had been decided once and for all that the patient was to die. It was an open-and-shut case, a fixed arrangement, a tacit agreement that there was no question of going back on. If by some extraordinary chance the blade failed, they would just start over. So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time. And I say that’s wrong. And in a way I was right. But in another way I was forced to admit that that was the whole secret of good organization. In other words, the condemned man was forced into a kind of moral collaboration. It was in his interest that everything go off without a hitch.
In The Great Gatsby we have another first-person narrator, Nick Carraway, but he is more an observer of others, especially Gatsby, and at the book’s close he functions as the voice of the story, that is, the author Fitzgerald, when he comments on the society he has been watching.
And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
One of the most interesting things about Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is the commentary of the narrator, the boy Christopher, who is autistic. He breaks the flow of action—usually going into a separate chapter—to explain his way of seeing things: why he doesn’t “get” what other people are feeling, and why he doesn’t much care, but also how he tries to understand people who are important to him; how he sees life as a set of puzzles to be solved, and how he is very good at math, where things are clearly puzzles and there’s no overlay of sentiment and no one expects you to feel something. It was a daring thing to write, this novel, because the author had to make a character incapable of empathy sympathetic to the reader!
Exposition versus interiority
Exposition should be interesting in its own right, even as it amplifies prior or later action. It is always clarifying, never obfuscating. Its appearance should never so interrupt action that dramatic engagement is lost.
Interiority should deepen the engagement of reader with character. Its purpose is not primarily expository; it should not be necessary to the action, though it is usually triggered by action. It is enriching and emotional. When it explores a character’s emotional conflict, it adds to dramatic tension. And it brings the reader into deep empathy.
The chapter about the teenage David cited earlier illustrated the narrative components we think of as “information” and “interiority.” Exposition tells the reader about character or setting or past events in summary form, rather than trying to illustrate those things in scenes. In his rich saga Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh tells about the voyage of a vast ship, the Ibis, just before the outbreak of the Opium Wars in China. He opens his novel with a long scene, but he soon shifts to exposition and conveys the history of the ship. This is necessary to the story, and it is fascinating. He doesn’t plop it in the middle of a scene, breaking up a line of action and confusing the reader. He deftly treats his narrative components as building blocks, so that each kind of narrative accomplishes its purpose and then a shift occurs. As a reader, you don’t think: Oh, that’s exposition, that’s summary, that’s scene. But as a writer, you do, and when you analyze a novel and see how neatly the pieces fit together, you recognize the importance of pattern and plan. (Thus: Get out the colored pens. Turn a novel, or a section of one, into a visual lesson.)
One of the most common problems apprentice novelists have is the urgent impulse to explain everything to the reader. I think a lot of this is because the writer is figuring things out as he goes along, thinking on the page; it is perfectly understandable. In a first draft, this might be necessary, and being self-conscious about it could hamstring the story’s development. In revision, though, the writer should be analytical and surgical. For example, a chapter may be centered on an important event, presented in scene, but the scene is interrupted with bits of information that make the scene feel disjointed and that disengage the reader. The revising writer has to ask: Does the reader need this information to understand this scene? If so, should I present it earlier? Should I follow the scene with summary or response, rather than inserting so much information within the scene?
Certainly it is possible to squeeze exposition into a scene deftly, but I suggest that you closely study writers you like, and specifically identify which parts of a long passage are scenic (dramatic) and which are expository. Use two colors of pen to underline the passages. Ask yourself: Why does the writer put this information here? Does the reader need it? How does the writer slip in and out of scene? How is the reader kept oriented and involved in the action? Consider, too, that a novelist will sometimes use a scene—say a man is chopping wood and stacking it—as a placeholder for extended interiority—say he is having an affair and he doesn’t know how to break it off. The “scene” is more like a se
tting; it keeps the reader in touch with the character without really developing the tension and turn of a classic scene.
Ann Patchett is very good at writing novels full of intriguing information—and well-paced scenes. (See State of Wonder.) Lots of old novels employ this strategy: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Little Women. “Big” novels like Hawaii and Exodus. Marge Piercy’s robust multivoiced Gone to Soldiers. More recently, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. (Lots of Indian writers come out of the sweeping-canvas style of nineteenth-century Britain; their books are clotted with description and information. They write books you get lost in, books that take you weeks to read.) Exposition can be woven in quite economically, too, as in Kurt Palka’s The Piano Maker, which teaches the reader a lot about the business and craft of making pianos, without ever slowing down the almost hypnotic engagement of the story.
You want to be deliberate about the way character thought is conveyed and where it is placed. Having a character think about and comment on every aspect of action in rotation is usually amateurish. To break the habit of alternating action with comment in a repetitive pattern, I encourage apprentice writers to practice writing scenes with no interiority at all. What people say and do ought to convey story in a scene. Yes, you want your characters to express emotions, too, but save the gnawing of the soul for the places where you are ready for the story to slow down, where the character is struggling with a decision, for example. Let your characters chew over something about which they are conflicted. Let them tussle with fear, jealousy, grief, ambition—emotions big enough to warrant space on the page. Let your interiority raise and wrestle with questions.
The Swedish mystery writer Mari Jungstedt (Unspoken) usually sticks to action in her scenes and then follows with an extended passage of response and resolve by the protagonist. I’m not suggesting that this is the best or only way to balance action and interiority, but it is instructive to try the pattern. It keeps the pace of the scene steady, and then moves into emotional reaction in a way that makes the response have a little arc of its own. It’s schematic, but for a beginning novelist, it might be a calm, clear strategy for sorting out structure; you can always fiddle with passages again later to vary the pattern.
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