Over a decade ago, sometime around high school and before I started studying creative writing more seriously, I had a bad habit of writing a summary as a short story or a chapter. I knew an entire universe, and I tried writing it out as a book with eight chapters. It did not go well. Show versus tell. That sort of thing.
If you ever dig up my old works, you’ll see a summary of the Flinders family – a continuing line of generations across more than the lifespan of a universe in my stories. Younger me thought that a summary could suffice. Exposition galore. It’s lazy writing, I suppose.
Or how this universe connects to Vylron. I tried too much too early. In the end, I had to print it out as a personal guide among my manuscripts and delete the online version. Looong ago. I doubt it was cached.
The last time I wrote a summary in place of a chapter, I was rushing to finish my Bachelors thesis – an early version of Chimera Anamnesis. The final chapter was miserable. It was all summary, as anticlimactic as it could get. It was so embarrassing, I waited almost another decade of rewrites before I deemed the novel complete enough. Now that it feels ‘complete enough’ I’m preparing to submit my first novel to publishers or literary agents.
Here’s hoping it makes the cut.