Continuous Flow vs. Episodic Approaches to the Novel

Whenever I bring chapters from my novel-in-progress to my workshop group, the group inevitably wants to cut out the first two paragraphs, and sometimes more, of the pages I bring in.  I always see where they're coming from: as an episode, the chapter would have more immediacy without the quick summaries of what characters do while time elapses, before the scene begins.  Yet when I think about the novel as a whole, I wonder if something human would get lost if I wrote it episodically, in this filmic, stay-with-the-action manner.

One of the writers I research, as a means for understanding how to suck readers into a book, is J.K. Rowling.   One would think, given the popularity of her books—and the fact that they've been made into films—that the Harry Potter series would be written in this filmic/episodic way.  This isn't, however, the case.

The Harry Potter books have a huge amount of these quick summaries in them, where Harry and Ron and Hermione study, and get frustrated with teachers, and worry about exams, and other really mundane things.  The effects of these quick summaries are subtle, but I think instrumental to the popularity of the series:

For one, these mundane worries that the characters are having are the same worries that all school children have, providing a window for readers to imagine themselves as Harry and Ron and Hermoine.

For two, and this relates to one, showing downtime—quickly on the page—reflects a reader's own life experience.  There are days when we just do the things we do, and nothing really all that interesting happens, and then there are days when all kinds of crazy stuff happens.

 Finally, by bridging time gaps between one "episode" and another, the book becomes harder to put down.  In a film, one is glued to the seat, or the television, so there's no need to literally keep the viewer there—the viewer arrives from one scene to the next scene in a split-second.  In a book, the reader keeps his or her own time, so if an episode ends in a chapter, and then picks up again two months later at another episode—you have a natural stopping point.  If the book has a continuous time flow, however, it seems harder to put down: at least that's how the Potter series works.

(Of course all of this could just be a long-winded excuse for not doing the month's worth of work I would need to do to inject this sense of time passing into the scenes themselves.  Laziness defending laziness...)