After the SFD: Summary | Scene | Reflection
So you’ve written your shitty first draft and it’s everything Anne Lamott says it should be: shitty AF. Congratulations! But now what? Obviously you can’t post, publish, or submit that. No, no. That needs to pull up its pants and wash its hands (I won’t take the metaphor any further, I promise).
Here’s an activity that helps me diagnose what and where I need to revise. It’s called “Summary, scene, reflection,” and basically, what you’re doing is looking for where you summarize, where you use scene, and where you reflect in that first draft.
I like to think of summary, scene, and reflection as the jars of Creative Nonfiction. The jars don’t necessarily have to be evenly filled, but they shouldn’t be overflowing, either. Too much summary is boring. An abundance of scene is the equivalent of a body builder. Impressive sure, but what’s it all for? What is it doing but, well, flexing? And when you have too much reflection? Honey, that’s just a journal entry. Keep it to yourself, love.
But when these “jars” are working together, each builds and adds to your story. For example, summary gives us back-story. It tells us where we are. Scene makes that information jump off the page. Reflection allows the writer to express a feeling (or feelings) about the situation.
Here’s an example:
Summary: I am outside an ice-cream shop with my brother, Geoff, on an August afternoon.
Scene: Steam rises from the sidewalks and sweat drips down my back. We are considering the worth in getting an ice-cream cone in this heat. We both agree it’s probably not a good idea because it’ll melt before we can say, “Extra sprinkles, please,” but we are already salivating from the sweet cream and sugar swirling around in those soft serve machines.
Reflection: To order and then eat an ice-cream cone in the Chicago summer heat is our call. It is our quest.
In this example, scene follows summary, and reflection is at the end. Scene is also my largest “jar.” This is typical Callie writing. I don’t like to tell my readers how they should feel. I trust them to figure it out for themselves, but I do like to set the table for them, so to speak. And my feeling about reflection is that I don’t like to do it. Reflection should be the sliver of the finest dark chocolate at the end of a meal.
Here’s another example taken from A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenburg:
My mother came to visit during my last week. One night, we dressed up and went to dinner at Le Repaire de Cartouche, one of my favorite restaurants. I had taken my father there in the Spring of 2002, at the end of my time working in Paris, when he came for a visit. He was tired during the trip, and he had nerve pain in his feet, but we didn’t think much of it. Of course, when he was diagnosed with cancer four months later, we put two and two together: the nerve pain had been from the tumors in his spine. But he was seventy-three that spring, and it didn’t seem weird to me that, at that age, he should be tired, even though he never had been before. He loved Le Repaire de Cartouche. He ordered marinated sardines and tuna with an eggplant tapenade, and we both had the rhubarb clafouti for dessert. He wrote everything down on that trip, every dish at every meal, every last detail duly noted. Now I know where I get it.
That night, after dinner, my mother and I walked to the Pont de Sully, one of the bridges that spans the Seine. The wind was blowing from behind us, and we stood quietly for a moment, looking to make sure that no one could see. Then my mother reached into her purse and pulled out a plastic freezer bag, the better part of my father’s ashes. She unzipped it and held it over the ledge, and when the wind came up just right, we tipped it and let him float down into the river.
I say that Paris is the place where I’ve been loneliest, and also where I’ve been happiest. But what I mean is harder to say. The thing I call loneliness is delicate and lovely, like a blown-out eggshell. It’s both empty and hopeful, broken and beautiful. Paris couldn’t be anything else for me now, because it’s full of my father. That night on the bridge, I could almost see him, waving over the water.
//
While it could be argued that there are sniffs of all three in every paragraph, this is a perfect example of the three jars working together to build an unforgettable picture. In the first paragraph, you have the who, what, where, when, why. While Wizenburg reveals that her father has cancer, and that is terribly sad, she isn’t evoking in this paragraph. Each sentence is a fact.
In the second paragraph, she brings us into the evening. We are on a bridge, the wind is blowing, we are quiet and looking around to make sure no one else will see what we are about to do. We watch the mom reach into her purse, we hear the crinkle of plastic, we hear her unzip the bag of ashes, we see her father’s ashes float down the river. Almost every one of the five senses is called upon here.
And finally, we have that gorgeous anchoring image of the blown-out eggshell that Wizenburg uses to describe loneliness. (I admitted I don’t like to reflect, but if I could do it like Molly then maybe I’d feel differently.) A lot of times, writers will use reflection as an opening because it’s the most dramatic part of their story. But that rarely works because they haven’t taken us anywhere, so then they’ll back up and write something like, “Let me explain.” Stories don’t want to explain. They want to take you somewhere.
Here’s an example where summary, scene, and reflection are integrated within the text. I have color-coded it so you can see the breakdown. Red = summary. Blue = reflection. Green=scene. I’ve underlined one section in yellow because I think it’s a mixture of summary and reflection.
Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis
Lauren Winner
“Who gets the face jug?”
That’s my sister speaking, Leanne, the one with the enviable red hair. We are at the museum, looking at Picasso’s Segment of Pear, Wineglass, and Ace of Clubs, and by Leanne’s feet is her daughter who is not yet two. This is my niece’s first visit to an art museum and she is charming everyone with her happiest ever smile and her cheeks round as biscuits. She seems charmed, too, by the art, and I find myself imagining that she will grow up to be a famous art critic and she will credit her passion and her success to this first visit to a museum, which was suggested by her aunt. Meanwhile I have no idea what the sentence my sister just uttered means.
“Come again?” I say to Leanne.
“Who gets the face jug?”
Oh. What she means is: You and the man you were married to for five years – a man liked by everyone he meets, a man you made miserable with your own marital misery and whom you finally left – you and he recently met to divide up what people in a previous century (and lawyers still) would call movable property: the china your grandmother gave you on your wedding day, the few crystal glasses, the beds, the linens, and the pottery you so assiduously collected on all those Saturdays spent at kiln openings and craft fairs, selecting pottery goblets and teapots and also a face jug (which, by the way, he gets, and yes it is as depressing as you suspect it is that five years and promises you thought were making in good faith come down to this).
The face jug after which Leanne inquiries is one of a genre: simple ceramic vessels protruded by ugly, mismatched facial features, bulbous noses, eyes like fertilized eggs, sometimes fangs (it occurs to me that it is not unreasonable for Leanne’s mind to wander from Picasso people to face jugs). In North Carolina, we like to claim that face jugs are Southern in origin, but in face their antecedents lay in medieval Saxony, in England, in the Congo and Ghana.
The one Leanne is asking is oversized, enormous, really; it is hideous, pearl grey with higgledy-piggledy gashes of blue gaze, and I adore it; it has sat by the fireplace for three years. Face jugs are supposed to scare away evil spirits. They are supposed to bring good luck.
Note that while the last two sentences are indeed summary, they call us to reflect and that is because Winner has dropped us someplace and given us the facts of the situation she is in.
Be proud of your SFD. You believed in whatever was calling to come out enough to sit down and begin. Now continue to believe in that voice even if you’re disgusted by what’s on the page so that you can turn it into a story. Summary, scene, reflection is a handy tool to turn the SFD into a DSF - a damn satisfying tale. (I’m sorry, except not really.)
Exercise:
Think of an experience or memory that won’t leave you alone. Using the chart below, write all the facts of the situation in one column. In the next column, write any feelings that come up when you think about those facts. Use these columns to “balance” your summary, scene, and reflection.
Once you have a draft, use different colored highlighters to identify where you are using summary, scene, and reflection. Is your reflection heavy-handed? Can you replace some of it with a scene that evokes?