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

[thenewbuzwuzz]

My main observation is that summaries rarely seem to be the deciding factor. Seems like maybe I go off recs more than I thought (or maybe that's mainly for the stories that I bookmark and never end up reading?), and I choose a lot of fic because of familiar authors. Or snappy titles! These choices were more summary-based:

"Just a couple vampires enjoying the holidays, vampire-style."

"How dare they?"

"The OT3 of Champions."

"It’s almost a year and a half since Sunnydale fell into a crater. Now retired from slaying, Buffy’s been voluntold to go to Wesley Wyndham-Price’s memorial service, where she finds a few familiar enemies. Everything’s so surreal anyway, Buffy decides she might as well just give into it and see if lunch with Drusilla and Harmony might be one of the better things she does that year. The day keeps getting weirder, but the year might just be unsurpassable by the end of it."

"A bit of self-indulgence in the form of a character-study vignette about Spike's love for Buffy. Written right after the musical episode, it probably will contradict all upcoming canon, but c'est la guerre."

"Buffy gets a glimpse of different aspects of Spike's personality, and finds that the things she thought she knew about him -- and how she feels about him -- might not be everything she believed."

"What if Spike had actually saved Dawn, and thus saved Buffy, in The Gift? Does being a reluctant hero change your status with the people who are reluctant to admit your heroics? And would Buffy know it if the ending of her story was supposed to be different? Short novel/long novella length."

"The monks turn the Key into something they feel certain, after some rather brief magical research, that Buffy will protect with her life: her loofah."

[yourlibrarian]

At least 50% of my reading is rec based, and this is 95% for anything outside my main fandoms or pairings. However I think most recs do tend to include at least part if not all of the summary for that work, so I think that still has some bearing.

Also, while finding an author or artist one enjoys means one's likely to look up their other works, I find that summaries still are important to me. This is particularly true if, say, that author (or vidder) creates work in other fandoms or for characters I'm not so interested in. I'm lucky enough to have lots of choices since I'm in large fandoms so I do need to be convinced to try out something outside my main choices.

What you said about titles was intriguing though because I very rarely remember a story's title (and given all the fic searches going on everywhere, I'm clearly not alone). Plus if one searches at someplace big like AO3 it's clear that there are many stories using the exact same title across fandoms (or sometimes even the same ones). I have sometimes been pleased when reading a story to click with what the chosen title was, but right now I can only remember one story title that helped me remember the fic. It was a line from the Beatles Come Together and other lines from Beatles songs were used as chapter titles in a lengthy fic, generally quite aptly. Overall I think I'm more likely to be grabbed by the summary than title and at least some authors I've worked with as a beta hated having to choose titles, so I daresay the average writer would rather be challenged by the summary ;) But I could be wrong about that!

That last summary made me laugh.