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

[doranwen]

Not sure what I look for specifically - I read a lot of small fandoms so in those you look at every single fic, no matter what the summary is, just in case the fic will end up halfway decent. You don't have the luxury of fics to pick and choose from.

For the big fandoms, hmm - I guess it would be ones that give me an idea of what's in the story, what the themes are, etc. On AO3 the tags tell me a lot, ff.n a bit less but they at least do have the chars listed so I have an idea of the possible pairings and whatnot (I am picky about those), though if that's cued in the summary I find it helpful too. A lot of what I am concerned about with reading fics is visible in the tags/fic settings on either site (for instance, whether it's porn or not), so summaries aren't as important to me. I'm not consistent in how I do my summaries either - sometimes they're a brief synopsis of the main idea, sometimes they're a line taken from the fic… So I try not to be judgmental about which kind is chosen.

As for what I don't care for, any summary riddled with spelling/grammatical errors (because that usually indicates the story is about as bad, and that's one thing I can't wade through—it was bad enough reading one fic where the author absolutely adored ellipses and used them every other sentence). I tend to get a bit side-eye-y when it comes to ones that say "summery" instead of "summary", or that don't seem to realize that capital letters exist, or that sound like a really bad kids' book report "hook". Beyond that, I'm pretty good at using the back-button, so I'm willing to give a lot of fics a chance as long as they're not focusing on pairings I can't stand, or don't have some really unusual kink that I can't handle.