The Recap

So last month I read Armor by John Steakley, which was a fantastic story and I still recommend it as a great story for anybody interested in military sci-fi.  Because I'm somewhat compulsive, I had to find out more about this guy's work and eventually, I ran across his website, johnsteakley.com and disovered that he died in 2010.  This is a shame but from what I gathered, he had a good life and what more can you ask for yourself?

Anyways, they offered the first eight pages of his manuscript for Armor 2, his planned sequel to Armor.  While this story would never be finished, I was intrigued to at least see what sort of things he had been planning for his uncompleted book.  I'm not averse to reading incomplete works.  It sometimes gets my imagination going to make up four or five different ways that that story could end.  Maybe even one of them would be the ending that the author had in mind.

The eight pages were not completely bad.  Steakley was very gifted with prose and had a way with grim humor.  Plus, it was narrated by Jack Crow, one of the protagonists in the first book and that is never a bad idea.

The trouble was that at the end of the eight pages, I still didn't even have a taste for what the new story was going to consist of.  It was because all the available manuscript had was recap of the first novel.  And by the end of what I could read, there was clearly going to be at least 2-3 more pages of recap before the story actually started.

Recaps are not bad things.  In fact, they're pretty necessary for series, depending on the length of the books, the amount of time between the instalments publications, or if you just happen to skip a book or two (I don't think the last is a bad thing;  after all, maybe the library you go to doesn't carry volume 3 but you still want to read the series.  These things happen.  It's like me missing the last couple weeks of Alcatraz because I can't always fit my Monday night around that show.  I still want to know what's going on when I finally make time to watch it.)

But man, there are two ways to not do recaps and Steakley does both of them in these eight pages.   1) Telling everything that happened in the previous story.  All this really does is advertise the last book.  I mean, the whole time I read the eight pages, all I did was reminisce how great a time I had reading the first book.  It gave me no clue what this story was about.  And since Armor 2 was the story I expected to be reading, I wanted to know why I wasn't given even a hint what was about to happen.

The second, (and this one is only my opinion) don't do all the recap in the first chapeter.  This bothers me because I've seen it way too much.  The most ready example I can think of is Animorphs by K.A. Applegate.  These were among my top five favorite books when I was a kid.  I eagerly anticipated each monthly instalment, but there was one thing that frustrated me to no end: the chapter 1 recap.  Bored me to death, especially because it was always the same recap.  Even after thirty books, I'd have to skip to chapter 2 before it started getting good.

This is where watching television can actually help writing.  After all, especially for TV programs with continuous storylines, they have to do a fair amount of recap and repetition so that their audience always knows what's going on, or at least enough to know what's going on, whatever week they actually manage to flip to that channel.  They are experts at doing recaps correctly.

For example, they do not recap everything that went on in prior episodes.  If you needed to know everything that happened in episode one and two to make episode three make sense, they'd just have to do reruns to catch you up to speed.

The webcomic Sluggy Freelance may be the best example of how to do recaps right.  It does a lot of them, obnoxiously so, but it's an easier pill to swallow because the recap itself has become its own running gag.  The humor helps the recap run smooth but the other thing that Pete Abrams does so right is that he only recaps the information that's important to the current story arc.  No more and no less.  His timing has gotten much better over the years, too.  Sometimes he starts an arc off with recap, but other times, he gives it at the very moment within the story arc where recap is necessary.  (He also knows when to recap what's happening inside the current story arc when the tale threatens to be too convoluted, and that's a talent in and of itself.)

As for the first chapter recap, if it absolutely has to be done... fine.  But at least seriously consider making that the prologue or a special prelude to even that.  I mean, the way I see it, chapter one is where the story begins.  Prologues are the set-ups for the real story and mentally, I as a reader treat it as such.