Summary as character development in V.E. Schwab's Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

If you’ve read all of the preceding scene studies, you will have seen me cover action, interiority, setting, backstory, and dialogue. One component I haven’t spent much time discussing yet is summary, which is a compressed recounting of a scene or scenes we don’t see live on the page. Of course, summary is especially important for any novel that has a very long chronology, like V.E. Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, which carries readers through centuries, opening in 1521 and ending in 2019.

Summary is one of the unsung heroes of fiction. It gets overlooked in part because it falls under the category of telling rather than showing. While you do want to focus on showing readers a live, vibrant, dramatic scene, you can use telling elements (summary, character description, backstory, and interiority) to add a great deal of texture and depth. Summary isn’t just connective tissue. Used well, it also develops character, and that’s what we’ll see in this scene study.

I’ve deliberately chosen a scene that is heavy on summary as well as interiority, another telling tool. As we’ll see, Schwab anchors these telling tools to action beats to keep the scene from feeling stagnant.

Before we dive into the scene, let’s spend a moment to note all of the things you can do with summary:

We met the point-of-view character, María, in the opening chapter of the novel, which takes place in 1521. The scene I’m analyzing here takes place two decades later. María, now a vampire going by the name Sabine, has spent a decade living on her own until she falls in with two other vampires, Hector and Renata, in Seville, Spain, and they become a family of sorts. In the scene I’m going to walk you through, chapter four of Sabine’s first POV section, Schwab summarizes their first year together.

The chapter opens with interiority, which establishes the theme: “How strange it is, after so many years alone, to find herself with constant company. Strange, but not unwelcome.” When we first met María/Sabine, she was struggling to find a way to thrive within a rigidly patriarchal structure that positioned her solely as the carrier of status and of heirs. María’s solution, in the end, is to burn it all down (literally and figuratively) and escape into the violent anarchy of vampirism, where she always has the most power in any relationship—if you can use the term relationship for her brief encounters with victims.

So that’s what Schwab is interested in exploring here: How does Sabine adapt to being in close, long-term relationships with others? How does she negotiate power, boundaries, and intimacy? In the preceding chapters, Sabine is positioned as a student, with Hector and Renata as her teachers. It turns out that there are subtleties to vampirism that Sabine does not know and is eager to learn. In later chapters, we’ll discover, alongside Sabine, that there are power dynamics and rules Hector and Renata have not yet taught her, but the chapter we are examining covers a kind of honeymoon period for the trio.

After the snippet of interiority establishing the scene, Schwab turns to summary to move us rapidly through time:

“That first month . . .”

“Now and then . . . as summer nears . . .”

“Every night . . .”

“And every night . . .”

“. . . their first year passes in a blur”

Schwab then shows us a compressed snippet of a live, not summarized, scene in the last third of the chapter, but first let’s take a closer look at the summary sections to see which details she chooses to show us. Here’s the first chunk of summary:

Schwab grounds us in the chronology first, establishing how much time has passed since Sabine set sail from Seville with Hector and Renata. The next two sentences give us an efficient snapshot of their daily life: “Most days . . . Most nights . . .” We get a sense of time passing and a broad sense of how it passes, as they “skim a dozen harbors” or “now and then . . . pretend they have been stranded.” One of Schwab’s magic tricks in the book is to make vampirism feel ordinary to its longtime practitioners—and make it viscerally shocking all over again each time a new POV character makes the transition.

The pattern is established and then, just as efficiently, it’s broken. They leave the ship and move to land to find trouble. Once again, Schwab uses chronology—the repeated phrase “every night”—to establish the new pattern and convey the sense of weeks or perhaps even months passing in the same way. See the figure below for a visual snapshot of how Schwab uses scene components.

At this point, Schwab shifts her attention to the characters and their relationships, returning to the core theme of the chapter. We learn that “Hector and Renata fold Sabine into their games, as if each were made for three instead of two.” There are hints of sexual attraction between Sabine and Renata, but Hector’s touch is “both familiar and familial.” It is also “different from her husband’s, firm but never laying claim.” This family unit, it seems, is not governed by patriarchy but by something that looks right now like equality.

Sabine, too, is changing, perhaps becoming more herself. There is a section of character description embedded in the summary as we learn that “every night” Sabine collects a charm or token of some kind from her victims and wears them around her throat and wrists:

A snippet of interiority follows another summary time cue and tells us how the relationships are transforming Sabine internally:

Across this section, Schwab demonstrates that summary can be much more than just connective tissue between scenes. In this chapter, she layers summary, character description, and interiority so that each component is doing double duty—compressing time while also extending Sabine’s character arc and further exploring the themes of power and relationships.

You can put this to work in your own summary passages. Look for opportunities to layer them with another component or detail that tells us more about your POV character—an object your character keeps, a distinctive habit, a revealing line of interiority.

Schwab now modulates from summary into a compressed live scene—one that functions as story proof, dramatizing in a single moment what the summary has told us about these characters and their relationships. Here’s how she manages the transition:

With the verb “drawn” we get the first live action of the chapter. Schwab is still moving quickly here: This is a compressed scene with impressionistic details that together summon up a vision of what is happening—the dancing, the music, the seduction before the slaughter.

You can use this technique in your own work. After you’ve moved through time in summary, drop in one short live scene that shows what the summary has told. This is another way in which showing and telling can work together naturally, with a telling component (summary) allowing you to show less while delivering more meaning.

The slaughter itself is skipped over with another summary phrase, which prefaces what I think is the true purpose of the scene, also told as a summarized action:

We get our first line of dialogue here, so we can enjoy the near echo between espina (thorn) and esposa (wife) in Spanish:

Schwab is making explicit here what the summary section hinted at: All relationships have power dynamics. Sabine, in this moment, believes herself to be more free than she was in her marriage. And in some ways she is. The final images of the chapter include Sabine pulling the rose from her hair, deliberately puncturing her own thumb with its thorn, licking the blood, and dropping the flower on the street before she rejoins Hector and Renata. If she is Hector’s thorn, why does she turn it on herself? And why does she discard his offering in the street?

Those answers come later in the novel, but readers will now be looking for them. In addition to raising these questions, Schwab manages to move Sabine’s character arc forward and cover an entire year in less than eight hundred words. In my post on the structure of the novel, we’ll see how Schwab sustains that control over summary, chronology, and pacing across nearly five hundred years.

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