"We all now tell stories by cutting from one dramatic scene to the next, whereas Victorian novelists felt free to write long passages of undramatic summary"
About this Quote
Follett is quietly confessing the trick behind his own page-turners while also diagnosing what modern attention has done to storytelling. “We all now” isn’t just descriptive; it’s coercive. It smuggles a personal craft preference into a broader cultural rule, as if contemporary narrative has reached a consensus: keep moving, keep cutting, keep the reader’s pulse up. The sentence is built like an edit itself, snapping from “dramatic scene” to “undramatic summary” with a clean, almost contemptuous contrast.
The subtext is about legitimacy. Victorian “summary” gets framed as a kind of indulgence, a leisurely authority that assumed readers would tolerate digression, social texture, and the slow accumulation of meaning. Follett’s present tense positions today’s scene-driven style as the new baseline, but there’s an implied loss: if everything has to be a sequence of cinematic peaks, where do you put the connective tissue that explains why those peaks matter? Character becomes behavior under pressure, not consciousness over time. Society becomes backdrop, not system.
Context matters: Follett writes in an era shaped by film, television, and prestige-series pacing, where “cutting” is the dominant metaphor even in prose. He’s naming the way novels have absorbed the grammar of screens - not because writers can’t do summary, but because summary now risks feeling like dead air. The line doubles as a defense of commercial narrative: speed isn’t shallowness, he implies, it’s craft tuned to the contemporary reader’s impatience and the competition for their eyes.
The subtext is about legitimacy. Victorian “summary” gets framed as a kind of indulgence, a leisurely authority that assumed readers would tolerate digression, social texture, and the slow accumulation of meaning. Follett’s present tense positions today’s scene-driven style as the new baseline, but there’s an implied loss: if everything has to be a sequence of cinematic peaks, where do you put the connective tissue that explains why those peaks matter? Character becomes behavior under pressure, not consciousness over time. Society becomes backdrop, not system.
Context matters: Follett writes in an era shaped by film, television, and prestige-series pacing, where “cutting” is the dominant metaphor even in prose. He’s naming the way novels have absorbed the grammar of screens - not because writers can’t do summary, but because summary now risks feeling like dead air. The line doubles as a defense of commercial narrative: speed isn’t shallowness, he implies, it’s craft tuned to the contemporary reader’s impatience and the competition for their eyes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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