summaries

[sixbeforelunch]

So here's a question I've often wondered about. What makes for a good fic summary? Is there anything that can get you to click when you might otherwise not have been inclined to?

Conversely, what types of summaries do you like least? Are there summaries that will make you skip a work even if it's tagged with all of your favorite ships and tropes?

Comments

[megpie71]

The usual thing I wind up doing for my summaries is either a single line from the story (possibly slightly altered to remove punchlines/spoilers) or a brief, literal, summary of the story. So either a tagline, or a "this is what I was aiming for". I have no idea how it works for my readers - presumably it works for some people and doesn't for others. I freely admit I am lousy at summaries.

Lyrics or poetry quotes as colophons can work as a summary in the right circumstances. I'm sure I'll run across something, someday, where it did. So far I haven't, but this may be because I'm not looking in the right places or at the right authors. The thing is: when you're using someone else's words to describe your story, you have to have your story matching very closely with the feeling of the quote you're using - if it's even slightly off, it's not going to work.

The kinds of summaries which don't get me reading: the ones I saw a lot of on ff.net where it's "I wrote this on a sugar high/I don't really like this/I won't post new chapters until I get reviews/I thought this idea sounded really neat so I wrote it" - basically, author notes as summaries don't work. Particularly not self-deprecating ones - I mean, if you thought it was so bad you weren't sure about posting it, you need an editor, not an ego-boost comments section.

Also, on a purely stylistic note: please put your author notes at the end of your fic, where I can read them afterwards if I want to, or skip over them if I don't. Please do not put them at the beginning of the fic, and if you're using a service like AO3, where there is a specified field for author notes, please do not put your author notes in the main text body of your story as the first five to six paragraphs on the page! (I suspect the fic which was doing this had been transferred to AO3 from FF.net by means of straight copy & paste, with minimal attention paid to more than the bare basics of filling in the compulsory fields on the posting form).

[coyoteclaw11]

God,,, self deprecating author's notes in summaries are the worst. Like... just put "Do Not Read This Fic It Sucks" and move on at that point. It's okay to doubt your writing, but you don't make that your reader's first impression of it. Just give them the fic and let them form their own opinions. It's still kinda :/ in the author's notes too, but w/e I tend to skip over author's notes unless they provide background for the fic (ofc this shouldn't be too lengthy, but if they have some worldbuilding they want you to start the fic clear on, I don't mind that. Especially when I rly don't feel like trying to put the pieces together myself).

I wonder who did lyric/poem summaries so unbelievably well that it sparked this trend... I've literally never found one that I've wanted to read without a bunch of tags I'm interested in... I do like poem/song excepts as titles/chapter titles. I think that one works really well to add to the story without taking anything away from it.

[recently_folded]

Actually, the one author's note I want to read up front is the one where they explain that they just threw the story together and couldn't wait to get it posted so didn't have anyone beta it. Then I know to close the tab.