Following the lead of Angry Young Man, I asked my AutoSummary feature on MS Word to take a stab at one of my old stories. Here’s the result, edited down from twenty-three pages to these five lines:
Meng waited.
Meng held his breath. Meng glanced around. A hand stretched toward Meng. Meng squinted. “You’ve misunderstood,” Meng said.
“My dog,” Meng murmured. Meng nodded.
Meng felt his throat catch.
Brilliant!
(via Maud.)
9 Comments
January 11, 2007 at 3:59 pm
OMG this is hilarious and brilliant and all else. I’ve got to post about it.
January 11, 2007 at 6:19 pm
I wonder what autosummary would do to my blogposts. That could be frightening.
January 11, 2007 at 8:51 pm
You should ask your writer friends to expand this summary into a story. See if it reproduces your story word for word.
January 12, 2007 at 1:41 am
Terrifying.
January 12, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Hilarious, frightening, and terrifying. A nightmare. A fluke. Yikes.
Lisa, Pierre Menard is on my mind all the time, yes!
January 13, 2007 at 7:10 am
!! That. Rules.
January 15, 2007 at 11:29 am
[...] Solitude posted a MS Word Summary of a short story and the results were intriguing. I had been wondering about other tools that might [...]
January 20, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Hilarious, terrifying, frightening–and irresistible. I’ve already autosummarized the chapter of the novel I’m trying to cut drastically–it was bizarre what sentences were picked as important–not the ones I’d pick at all.
January 21, 2007 at 2:17 am
Lucette, it’s such a weird instrument, no? As I don’t quite connect with the word “summarize,” I think of it more as a crystallizing process, where I’ll see an important detail that hadn’t occurred to me before. It’s kind of like reading the horoscope: it’s fun; and if it makes sense, go for it; but if it doesn’t, just shrug and press on, until the next time you remember its existence and try it out again as a gag.
And now that I’m looking at the five lines more properly, what the hell does it mean for a throat to catch? Very bad. (And this story is published, too. Very, very bad.)