Chapter Summaries?

[Andrew the Great he/him]

One of the most commonly heard complaints about big series is that it gets very hard to keep track of everything very quickly.

I know that a lot of other series as large as the Stormlight Archive will eventually be often have summaries (either chapter by chapter, or overall plot) for each book.

I'm about to do a reread of Way of Kings, and since I'm already taking extensive notes, it wouldn't be too much more work to do summaries, just to help give people who don't want to reread a refresher on what happened. Also, it could serve as a useful reference when we're trying to find where some event happens in the book. Not incredibly useful right now, but when there get to be four or five of these things....

That being said....

Chapter summaries would be VERY spoilerish, so we'd have to put Spoiler warnings all over the place. Also, I wasn't sure if this was something the almighty powers of administration would want put on the wiki, or anywhere else on the site for that matter. Heck, I could even do them as a series of posts somewhere, if we wanted to do it that way.

In any case, I would like to hear the opinions of the Powers the Be on this matter before I get too far into WoK again. And anyone else who'd like to chime in.

[Chaos he/him]

A lot of the Wiki will be spoilery. I... I'm not sure how exactly we would do spoiler warnings on this, since you could probably search any given article and find spoilers on it.

I think chapter summaries would be important, however. Look at how Memory Alpha does Trek stuff. You can literally read for days on things, reading episodes or movies. I have no problem doing things like that.

[Andrew the Great he/him]

True Enough. I suppose I'm too used to the whole forum thing, where it's all about avoiding spoiling it for people. Since the point of the wiki is to provide in depth info, that would tend to be spoilery. I'll plan on doing summaries as I read, then.

[Chaos he/him]

You and me both, man. I'm not familiar with doing wiki stuff at all.

[Silus - Shard of Flame he/him]

Would you want others to do this for the rest of the books?  I'd be willing to do this for Mistborn, Elantris or Warbreaker.  Though I'd love to do it for Mistborn (it's my favorite ).

[Andrew the Great he/him]

Well I certainly don't have time to in any sort of timely manner, plus the only books of Brandon's I actually have with me at the moment are Way of Kings and Gathering Storm. The rest are still in Idaho Falls.

So, if we want summaries for Brandon's other books, yes, someone else would need to do it. I can't imagine that it would hurt to have summaries for the other books. Especially since there are going to be two more trilogies of mistborn books, and a sequel each for warbreaker and elantris.

[Shivertongue he/him]

Perhaps on the wiki's main page, we could have just one big spoiler warning?

[Zas678 he/him]

For the chapter summaries, do we also want to include the herald pictures since there seems to be some correlation between the header pictures and who's in the chapter (i.e. masked man in Hoid chapters)?

Or is that too unsure and obscure for what we're doing?

[Andrew the Great he/him]

I'd say that it's probably a bit obscure for what we're doing with them. Actually, no, the purpose is to remind people who've read it before of what they read, and that's a nice touch. So that wouldn't hurt. I'd say we should probably throw the illustrations in there too. Though we should also probably get permission from Brandon before we start putting any of the various pieces of artwork up. And I'm not actually sure if it would be him who could give us permission on those, since he didn't design them. I think Isaac is the one who did the chapter headings, but the illustrations could be tricky. I hate copyright law. So confusing. Although I suppose it is kind of a good thing, most of the time.

Sorry I've been so slow on these of late. I'm swamped with midterms. And I just read Antiphon, which took 4 or 5 hours out of my reading time. I'm finding that I spend about an hour per chapter (though about 5/6 of that is in my notes, which are now extensive and will eventually be organized), so this could be a while, but I'll try to get three or four chapters done this weekend, and I'll do one more tonight if I can swing it after I finish my homework.

i do feel obliged to warn that come November, all progress on this will stop. Towers of Midnight will be out, which will eat about three days when you factor in the time that I'll spend doing homework to make up for the homework I didn't do while reading, and I'm doing NaNoWriMo again. I expect to have no time whatsoever. And if I do have time, it will likely be spent doing something else.... like maybe having a social life or something. 

[Andrew the Great he/him]

So I've done several of these in the last couple of days, and now I'm wondering - Do you guys think that the summaries I've already done are too detailed? Granted, there's a lot of ground to cover, but if I keep adding summaries this size, that page is going to be huge.

A lot of the material I've been putting in really isn't strictly necessary to understand the story, too. I've just been going through and summarizing everything that happens, not necessarily what moves the plot along.

For example, the current version of chapter 1:

Five Years Later

Cenn, a new recruit in Brightlord Amaram's army, is terrified. The first battle of his career as a soldier is about to begin, and he has almost no idea of what to expect. They're fighting against another Alethi army over a minor border dispute. Most of the full-time well-trained soldiers are at the Shattered Plains, fighting a war against the Parshendi, so the leftover squads and new recruits are used to fight unimportant battles like this one.

Cenn is transferred to the squad of Kaladin Stormblessed at the last minute, for reasons he doesn't understand. He thinks it has something to do with camp politics. He is being guided by a veteran named Dallet, one of the senior members of Kaladin's squad.

Kaladin appears, and Cenn is amazed to discover how young he is. He appears to be no older than 19. Kaladin and Dallet discuss tactics for the upcoming battle briefly, and point out a promising hill to make a stand. Then Kaladin asks Dallet to help Cenn, since he won't know any of the squad's signals.

The battle begins, and Brightlord Amaram's untrained army is unable to hold a line, even against the other Alethi force, which is just as poorly-trained. Kaladin's squad races to be the first to the enemy lines, as doing so separates them from the rest of Amaram's army, and makes them a less appealing target for archers. They reach the hill that Kaladin and Dallet had chosen earlier, and make a stand there. They use various formations to shield their wounded while still effectively attacking the enemy.

Kaladin's men continue holding this hill for the better part of an hour without losing a single man, though they do have several wounded. Then, a large portion of Brightlord Amaram's army breaks, and Kaladin and his squad try to assist in keeping the enemy away while they reform formation. In the confusion, Cenn is isolated, and runs into a group of six enemy spearmen. He attempts to attack them, but takes a leg wound. Just as one of the enemy spearmen is about to kill him, Kaladin appears, somehow killing all six enemy spearmen before the rest of the squad can even arrive.

An enemy Brightlord appears on the battlefield. Cenn mistakes him for a Shardbearer, but Dallet tells him that no Shardbearers will take part in the conflict, as they're far to important to waste on simple border disputes, especially with the war with the Parshendi. Kaladin and his squad decide to try to kill the man, as it will make it more likely that they will be sent to the Shattered Plains, where they believe the true, honorable soldiers to be. Kaladin and his squad leave to engage the enemy Brightlord. Dallet explains to Cenn that a runner will come for him to take him to the surgeons, because Kaladin spends most of his pay on bribes to be certain that his men are well taken care of.

Cenn and Dallet discuss briefly that Kaladin is not like other men. He cares about what happens to his men, and he fights

[Munin he/him]

I like the second summary better.

The first, in my opinion, is basically an undesirable hybrid between book and summary.

[Andrew the Great he/him]

Oh, I know the writing sucks in a large number of those. I fully intend to go on an editing spree to fix them up so that they sound like semi-decent writing. What I'm mostly wondering is if you lose too much detail in the second, or if it's still ok for our purposes. If you guys feel like that's enough detail for a summary, I'll trim them all down to that length, as I prefer conciseness. But if there needs to be more than that, I'll work on getting a decent length that doesn't sound like the craptastic book-summary hybrid Munin mentioned that it sounds like now.

[Munin he/him]

The second one still gives enough detail, in my opinion.

Anyone who's reading the summaries has probably read the book. They don't need a play-by-play, just an overview.

[Andrew the Great he/him]

Awesome. I'll get to work shortening them so they don't suck. Play-by-play is a good word to describe what they are right now.

[Deano Stormblessed he/him]

I think they need to be a bit spoilerish. It helps not only for a reference guide for those who already read the series, but can't remember which chapter something happened, it also allows for people to pick up on small things they may have missed. However it is still a summary.

Anyway, doing chapter summaries for WoA, check it out. Some are long, some are short. I've included all epigraphs for chapters, and am checking to see if there is anything in the annotations to help support the chapters. I have put a warning at the beginning for spoilers so people will be warned.

[Andrew the Great he/him]

We decided a while ago that there's no avoiding spoilers with the wiki. There's a general spoiler warning at the beginning, and I thought it followed you through and was on every page too, so it's probably not even necessary to put a spoiler warning in.