Why Writers Hate Summarizing Their Work

It is a notorious fact that writers--especially writers of fiction--hate summarizing their work. However, there is less discussion of why this is the case, with certain idiots seeing writers' distaste for the activity as another occasion to mock the sensibility of "creative" types.

Nevertheless, considering the writing of summaries for works like novels it is actually very easy to understand why writers so dislike going about this task, with three reasons especially worth discussing.

1. When a Writer is Finished with a Work They are Likely to be Desperate to be Done with it--and Writing a Summary Forces Them to Go Back to it Instead.
Consider the situation of someone who has written a long work like a novel. The sheer length of the work all but guarantees a long process, and therefore an exhausting one, the more in as the stages of a writing process are not all the same, with the beginning apt to be easier than the end--the bits that come naturally, easily, pleasurably concentrated at the start, getting fewer as they go along, and the later part of the process a slog as they complete the bits that they may not actually care to write at all if given the choice, but which they regard themselves as forced to write for the sake of completing the project. (They liked writing that scene, and that scene, but not so much this scene they needed to connect the two so that it all coheres.) This is all the more the case if they are the kind of writer who finds themselves compelled to rewrite a great deal, and especially rewrite as they go along--finding themselves fleshing out earlier material, making changes in the course of their writing that force them to go back and make alterations, etc., spending hours and hours working arduously on something they thought (or at least, hoped) was done, giving a very great deal to achieve what may on the page look like a very little improvement (and might, on later refelction, seem no improvement at all). Indeed, it has seemed to me that the "80/20 principle" applies in writing fiction and nonfiction just as it does in writing code.

Contrary to what those who love to preach puritanical homilies would have you believe, the exhaustion that comes with the hard work does not make finishing the job more satisfying, but less so, apt to befoul their mood, all as they likely face disappointment in how things turned out--the gap between their Platonic image of how they wanted the thing to be, and what they actually have (no matter how good it may actually be). A writer's being in such a state of weltschmerz is all the more reason for them to not want to think about the thing anymore--the more in as they may be the kind who have a tough time "letting go"--but no, they have to go back and write the summary, which task entails its own miseries.

2. Writing a Summary Means Taking a Cold, Hard, Look at Your Work--and Sucking Everything Interesting Out of It.
In considering the task of writing a good summary one ought to contrast that particular writing process with what writers actually enjoy about the writing process--its spontaneous, unconscious, intuitive aspect in which, as their brain fires on all cylinders and they feel themselves in a "flow state," the words just pouring out of them.

By contrast writing a summary of anything is likely to be a very deliberate, conscious process--and the writing of a summary of their own work requiring them to be not just conscious but self-conscious about their own writing. A painful and often inhibiting thing, touching their every insecurity (writers do need a capacity of self-criticism, but I think a writer's enduring too much self-criticism hurts their creativity, and very often squashes it altogether), it is, again, likely to be coming at a moment when they would least like to look at it or think about it, that period of weltschmerz after a long project, with all this does to worsen the experience.

Moreover, the act of summarizing itself is apt to make them feel worse rather than better about what they have written--because the summary is apt to strip away everything of which they were proud to leave something simple and dry and banal on the page. Consider, for example, what David Walsh has accounted the greatest work of American literature ever produced, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Even Dreiser's greatest admirers will not attempt to persuade anyone that he deserves renown as a stylist (indeed, literary snobs sniff at his "journalistic" prose), but there is no question that the interest of his story of a murder is all in the telling--the way in which Dreiser tells the tale of Clyde Griffiths up to the point of the crime, "painstakingly and painfully buil[ding] up" to it "inexorable incident by inexorable incident," and after it, and in the process makes what can appear a very ordinary (if also horrible and ugly) crime an indictment of a whole society . But in the summary you won't get any sense of that buildup or that indictment, or the "frightening power" it all has for many a reader, just that commonplace-seeming crime--a grave injustice to the work, with, in a writer's producing the summary themselves, they the one committing the injustice, again at this emotional low point, with this all the more problematic because of why they are doing so in the first place.

3. Writers Aren't All Natural-Born Salesmen (Often They are the Extreme Opposite)--and Being a Salesman for Their Own Work is Especially Painful.
Why is a writer apt to be summarizing their work? The most likely reason is that they are trying to interest others in it--with the principal reason for subjecting themselves to that particular bit of wretchedness the desire to make a career of their writing, most likely by sending blind submissions to the slush piles of the few publishing houses and literary agencies that even go through the hypocrisy of claiming to be willing to look at such things, a process that commonly requires the writing of summaries. They are "selling" their work--an activity that is not equally easy for all. Selling is an outgoing, aggressive, often rejection-filled and emotionally bruising activity. Even the extroverted and thick-skinned get their fill of this, burning out on the job, while in spite of society's demand that its members all be extroverted and thick-skinned in this way and its attempts to induce them to all be so (hammering the square peg into the round hole), people commonly grow up to be the very opposite in temperament, introverted and thin-skinned--while I dare say that these traits are even more common among writers than they are among the generality of the public. (After all, someone who hates being alone isn't likely to get much writing done, and likely wouldn't bother to try to write much if they didn't have some sensitivity to the world around them, while at least one attraction of a career as a writer for many is that they will be able to in at least some measure retreat from the world and its brutalities.)

Making matters worse is the fact that, in a state in which the writer may be feeling disappointed in and insecure about their work, as they are apt to feel at the end of a project, the thought of their career compels them to go and sell that work, often as quickly as possible after getting the work into passable shape. Greatly amplifying the unpleasantness of it all is the fact that a writer in so marginal a position relative to their market that they have to send blind submissions to slush piles is likely to quickly amass a mountain of dispiriting experiences of the kind that Jack London wrote about so frankly and illuminatingly in Martin Eden, endured without support or sympathy from anyone. The misery of the attempts accumulates with each try, the more in as they have again and again seen no reward, the hard work not paying off, so that they have an increasing sense of futility sets in about it--that emotional baggage apt to be part of the experience of summarizing what they have written, giving them that much more reason to hate the task. Indeed, I suspect that the misery of the sales process, of which summary-writing is a part, has probably killed off a very great number of literary careers before they ever properly began, and at least some of those murders have surely left world culture the poorer--not that the Dauriats of Park Avenue, or the lickspittles who fly to their defense on hearing the slightest criticism of them, will ever admit such a thing.