Good news, fellow hoppers. I do have literary pet peeves, so no more violent hijackings...at least for this week. Thanks to Ingrid and the girls, this question comes at a very good time in my readings, because I have just finished a book that pissed me off: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by white suit extraordinaire Tom Wolfe.
It's something simple, but it doesn't have a name. I call it the skimming/cramming process. There are some of it in every story and it's fine in small doses, whenever you need to shed some light on backstory or on a subtle point in between two characters, it's OK to insert a paragraph that resumed what happens, skims over most of the backstory and crams a LOT of information in a few lines. Here's a totally bogus example I just made up, but you're goingto understand.
Steve and Dave disliked each other since kintergarden, when Dave stole Steve's dinner muffin . A very primal distrust settled in between the two, that followed them for all their lives. But, coming from a small town, both guys kept each other in their social circle for the longest time. Steve was always suspicious that Dave hit on his long time girlfriend Carrie, behind his back, during their teenagehood. Now that Dave needed money to buy an appartment with his girlfriend, Steve had a hard time to assume a power position with complete objectivity.
See? This is cool. It brings the reader up to speed and sets up a scene. I can take one or two paragraphs of this every now and then. But when a WHOLE story is written like this, it loses any form of structure and becomes quite confusing, REALLY fast. It's too much information for the reader and it makes him(her) uncomfortable because he (her) has no time to sink in a scene. Writing a whole story like that is like taking your reader by the collar and run him through your story very quickly. It's extremely rude. Wolfe does that, but one of my favorites, David Foster Wallace does that too sometimes. The Depressed Person, one of his most praised short stories just runs you through the life of a depressive girl very quickly. Some parts are beautiful, but if it would have been great to have a 300 pages novel just on her.
Scenes are cool and to a certain extent, they are why we read. They highlight important part of your story. If you don't have them, I'm going to skim over your novel and it's going to be one big blur. Because you crammed to much information in too little space.
Hence, Skimming/Cramming process.
