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#54: When to Summarize Dialogue
A common writing aphorism is “show don’t tell.” When it comes to dialogue, it is often powerful to show the dialogue in its entirety: to hear what the characters say and how they say it.
Yet while Jane Austen is a master of dialogue, there are countless moments throughout her novels when she chooses to summarize dialogue rather than showing it in scene.
Jane Austen summarizes dialogue when doing so better serves her storytelling purposes.
To consider what purposes summarizing dialogue could serve, let’s analyze a scene from Northanger Abbey.
Near the end of Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland is unceremoniously thrown out of Northanger Abbey by an angry General Tilney. When she arrives home, she tells her family what happened. Soon, they meet up with her friends, the Allens, and they too must hear the story.
What is interesting in this passage is that Jane Austen does not show us the full scene. Instead, she intermixes telling (in this case through summary) with showing.
In the first paragraph of the scene, Austen summarizes the entire interaction, giving a bird’s eye view of what occurred, with narrator interpretation. Then we are brought to near the beginning of the scene in order to hear Catherine’s mother, Mrs. Morland, tells the story, giving her dialogue line by line.
[Catherine] was received by the Allens with all the kindness which her unlooked-for appearance, acting on a steady affection, would naturally call forth; and great was their surprise, and warm their displeasure, on hearing how she had been treated—though Mrs. Morland’s account of it was no inflated representation, no studied appeal to their passions. “Catherine took us quite by surprise yesterday evening,” said she. “She travelled all the way post by herself, and knew nothing of coming till Saturday night; for General Tilney, from some odd fancy or other, all of a sudden grew tired of having her there, and almost turned her out of the house. Very unfriendly, certainly; and he must be a very odd man; but we are so glad to have her amongst us again! And it is a great comfort to find that she is not a poor helpless creature, but can shift very well for herself.”
The summary at the start of the paragraph frames the conversation—it tells us what happened, and what to look for in the responses. It also offers insights into their characters, particularly in light of how they react in response to what is a plain, unstudied account of the events. Then we see, in scene, the exact four sentences of dialogue that Mrs. Morland used to tell the story.
This paragraph is followed by another paragraph of mostly summary. When there are direct quotes, they are statements that the characters say multiple times, and their inclusion is used as an example of the type of response that Mr. and Mrs. Allen make:
Mr. Allen expressed himself on the occasion with the reasonable resentment of a sensible friend; and Mrs. Allen thought his expressions quite good enough to be immediately made use of again by herself. His wonder, his conjectures, and his explanations became in succession hers, with the addition of this single remark—“I really have not patience with the general”—to fill up every accidental pause. And, “I really have not patience with the general,” was uttered twice after Mr. Allen left the room, without any relaxation of anger, or any material digression of thought.
The conversation then turns to Mrs. Allen’s recollections of Bath. This conversation is shown in scene, with each line of dialogue included by Austen. Mrs. Allen explains that she had her gown with Mechlin lace mended, and then she elaborates on their experiences in Bath and the Assembly rooms. To each statement, Catherine gives only short responses, because this conversation is bringing to mind her love interest, Mr. Henry Tilney, which also reminds her that Henry’s father, the General, has just thrown her out.
In the next two paragraphs we have dialogue from Mrs. Tilney on Bath, followed by a sentence of dialogue summary, followed by more dialogue from Mrs. Tilney:
“It was very agreeable, was not it? Mr. Tilney drank tea with us, and I always thought him a great addition, he is so very agreeable. I have a notion you danced with him, but am not quite sure. I remember I had my favourite gown on.”
Catherine could not answer; and, after a short trial of other subjects, Mrs. Allen again returned to—“I really have not patience with the general! Such an agreeable, worthy man as he seemed to be!”
The summary phrase is of note: Catherine could not answer and after a short trial of other subjects. The use of summary here emphasizes that Catherine is struggling to hold this conversation, because everything connects back to the Tilneys. Mrs. Allen tries introducing other subjects—and the exact subjects they try speaking about are not included, because they aren’t actually relevant to the story. But summarizing the fact that she tries various conversation topics shows how very difficult this is for Catherine—the Tilneys are what dominates her mind, and it is difficult for her to speak of them, but also difficult for her to speak of anything else.
There are a number of reasons to summarize dialogue rather than to show it in scene.
The most common reasons Austen summarizes dialogue:
- To show the passage of time.
- To condense unimportant dialogue.
- To focus the reader on the most important dialogue.
- To give interpretation of the dialogue, and provide commentary on the scene.
- To draw us into the lens and perspective of the narrator OR to draw us into the perspective of the character.
Whenever I am writing a scene where the dialogue is not quite working, one of the questions I ask myself is: Would part of this dialogue be more useful if it was conveyed through summary? Summarizing dialogue is another useful tool that can be used to powerful effect.
Exercise 1: Write a short scene that consists largely of dialogue between two characters. However, there’s a catch. For one of the characters you can include the dialogue, but for the second character, you can only summarize their dialogue. Try to give a feel for the second character’s dialogue and its effect even though you cannot include the dialogue itself.
Exercise 2: In film, dialogue is rarely summarized: because of the conventions of the medium, it is almost always shown in scene. Find a dialogue-heavy scene in a film and rewrite this scene in prose. Include a significant portion of the lines of dialogue exactly as they were stated in the film, but then summarize other sections of the dialogue. What effects does this summary create? How is summarizing some of the dialogue useful?
Exercise 3: Take a draft that you have written and analyze the dialogue. Are there any full scenes of dialogue you could eliminate and replace with a summary? Are there scenes of dialogue where it would be advantageous to replace a small or large part of the dialogue with summary? Find at least one spot in your draft where dialogue summary would be useful and revise.
Everything You Wanted to Know About Newspapers in the Mary Bennet Series
Some of the most common questions I get about The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennet and The True Confessions of a London Spy relate to the epigraphs at the start of each chapter:
- Are they from real newspapers?
- What inspired you to include these epigraphs?
- What purpose do they serve?/ What do they mean?
- How did you find them?
In this post, I’m going to give readers the answers to each of these questions.
The first page of The True Confessions of a London Spy, with an epigraph from The Times
Are they from real newspapers?
Almost all of the passages are real excerpts from real newspapers, with the exception of three headings in Secret Life and two headings in London Spy. In the upcoming third novel, The Lady’s Guide to Death and Deception, only one is from my own imagination, and one is from a letter instead of a newspaper.
What inspired you to include these epigraphs?
I loved the short newspaper excerpts at the start of each chapter in Mary Robinette Kowal’s alternate history science fiction novel The Calculating Stars, and I thought that they would fit well in my own story.
What purpose do they serve? What do they mean?
The newspaper excerpts do a number of things:
- Historical underpinning: unlike Jane Austen’s contemporary readers, most of us today don’t know the full historical context of the Regency. I wanted to Mary Bennet to solve mysteries that deal directly with the historical events and social issues of the day, and including these excerpts helps provide that context for the reader. For example, I wanted to establish the widespread dread of Napoleon Bonaparte, which is clearly present in the newspapers.
- Mary and other spies read a lot of newspapers: In the books, Mary, Lady Trafford, and other characters read numerous newspapers. I wanted to give a sense for some of the stories they encounter.
- Direct commentary on the content of the chapters: Because I use real historical events in the novels, many of the newspapers made direct commentary on these events. For example, in The True Confessions of a London Spy, the account that The Times made of the customs house explosion is devastating, and in the third novel, The Lady’s Guide to Death and Deception, I wanted to showcase some of the alternative viewpoints on the war that aren’t held by the main characters of my story.
A portion of the first article in The Times about the Custom House fire, printed on February 14, 1814
- Parallels and Alternate Experiences: Some of the epigraphs are not specifically connected to any of the events, but they create parallel narratives and showcase alternate experiences. For instance, in each of the books I include excerpts about women in disguise or as spies. In London Spy, the weather acts as a sort of character and so receives a number of newspaper excerpts.
- Other Purposes: At times the newspaper excerpts are in conversation with the subtext of the novel, deal with the themes of the book, or add humor or satire to elements of a chapter.
How did you find the excerpts?
For each of the books, I waited until at least the third draft to start looking for newspaper headings. I needed the overall story to be mostly solidified, and I wanted the date each chapter occurred to be relatively fixed.
I used two newspaper subscriptions: a personal subscription to the British Newspaper Archives (which has digitized hundreds of newspapers), and a university subscription to The Times.
The tricky part is that computer programs have a hard time reading old newspapers, some of which were not well preserved. If you do a search in the British Newspaper Archives for the name Napoleon or Bonaparte in the year 1814, you’re lucky if the computer program finds 10% of the actual references. (It also doesn’t help that some of the newspapers wrote his name as Buonaparte to try to delegitimize his rule.). Most of the time instead of searching, I would download half a dozen different newspapers for a given day and read them.
Sometimes I had something very specific in mind that I was looking for—I was looking for a news story Bonaparte, crime, the stock exchange, the or the Viennese Waltz, or the weather. Yet most of the time I didn’t have a specific type of news in mind. Instead, I would read the articles with a sense of discovery, letting myself wander to columns or advertisements that drew my attention, and finding endless connections to my book. Sometimes I would find the perfect article quickly; other times I would choose three or four possibilities and then consider which really had the effect I wanted for the chapter, and fit the overall arc of the epigraphs.
I quickly got a good feel for different newspapers of the news, which ones were liberal or conservative, had the most interesting ads, included a regular fashion column, published poetry, or wrote the best opinion pieces. There was also a variety of different formats—while many of the newspapers only printed ads on the first page, others included articles from the start. Newspapers would reprint articles from other papers, and sometimes the news would be about events weeks or months in the past, depending on how long it took the information to reach England’s shores.
Sometimes I shifted the dates and timeline for a book because I really wanted to use as particular newspaper heading. And I definitely revised numerous details in the chapters because of things I learned through reading the newspapers—for example, in London Spy, Kitty’s reference to ice skating in Hyde Park came from a newspaper reference.
I have now read hundreds of newspapers from 1813, 1814, and 1815, and I feel like doing so has not only helped my books, but made me a more interesting person at parties—after all, who doesn’t want to hear 1814 trivia?
More About My Journey with Newspapers
All this newspapering has influenced my readings of other Jane Austen texts.
- I was recently a guest on the podcast The Thing About Austen, talking about Anne’s newspapers in Persuasion.
- I wrote a post for Jane Austen’s World about how 1814 newspapers should impact our reading of the snow scene in Emma.
I also did a guest post on My Favorite Bit, talking about some of my favorite newspaper excerpts.
Coming Soon!
Next week, on this blog, I’ll be posting about my trip to London and how that influenced the setting of The True Confessions of a London Spy. I’ll also be showing some of the actual dresses that were influences for Fanny’s designs. So come back to the blog, keep a watch on social media, or subscribe to my newsletter!