So you want to write a summary that doesn't suck...
So you’ve taken the fall. You’ve posted your first attempts at fanfic on fanfiction.net, or dipped your toe into the much smaller lj circle. But you’re not getting reviews! Obviously, no one likes your story, right?
Wrong
They just aren’t reading it.
Getting people to actually read your stuff is half of the battle. You have to have good writing and a plot, of course, but the readers are never going to appear if you don’t draw them in through a good title or summary. The outside matters!
Yes, I know that your teachers and parents try to tell you that it doesn’t matter, and you shouldn’t judge by the cover blahblahblah [insert feel-good crap here].
They are WRONG.
Books are ALWAYS judged first by what is on their cover.
Think about it. You walk into your local bookstore, and look at the fantasy section. I’m betting at the very least, it is nine bookshelves full of novels upon novels, just clamoring for your attention. What makes you pick up the ones you do? The title. Yes, you skim along the books, and see a title that interests you. Title is a third of your battle! The next third comes from cover. Matching colors, pretty designs, eye-catching pictures… Summary, or the little blurb on the back, is the rest of the battle. Which book are you more likely to read, one that has comments about how great it is from people you’ve never heard of, or one that tells you something about the book?
Why do y’all think publishing companies hire advertising companies to design book covers? People are drawn in to something new by an interesting poster, or cover, or blurb on the websites they read. Advertising companies manage all of these things for published authors. Fanfiction writers, on the other hand, must learn to do this on their own.
COVERS
Now, I am aware that fanfiction.net does not allow covers, and the majority of writers post there. However, for the LJ users, a hint: a banner, or something colorful, before the cut leading to your fic can entice people to click on the link. NOT recommended for those of you who are photoshop-retarded, unless you know someone who isn’t.
1) Make sure that such banners are small, so as to not overwhelm people’s friend pages or the dial-up users. Otherwise, people will definitely NOT be generous enough to spend their time reading your stuff.
2) A banner should involve your characters. If there is something totally random in there, like you’re writing a Will/Warren fic, but you’ve got Medulla on your banner… people aren’t going to read more than a paragraph or two. Be careful about this.
3) Banners should be tastefully done. Shitty, done-in-five-second banners don’t bode well for the quality of your fic, since you spent so little time perfecting the banner or finding someone well versed in photoshop to do it for you. Those kinds of banners do not speak well to your dedication and proficiency.
4) Banners that only give the title, and maybe a quote or two from the story… or perhaps lyrics, along with an interesting background, are perfectly acceptable. You do not always have to have pictures of your main characters. Try not to give away your entire plot.
TITLES
One of my favorite scifi authors wrote a book entitled Dune. It was a black book, with a small sand dune and just the title on the side. What drew me in? Obviously, it was the intriguing aspects of a book that could deserve the name of a desert phenomenon.
Clichés and Proverbs for titles can be cute, but they are SO OVERUSED. Try to be original! Unless the proverb fits your story almost perfectly, or was used for inspiration, avoid it if at all possible.
Choose a title that has something to do with your plot. But for God’s sake, please don’t use something like “Shades of Grey” or “When Worlds Collide”, or any variation on “Love”. Those are worth less than Enron stock.
Dune is a fabulous title because the book takes place on a world so overrun by desert that sand dunes are the prominent feature. Also, it is the name that the natives call the planet, while the colonists call the planet Arrakis. So that title implies both the setting and a hint at the essential conflict between the natives and the colonists.
Your title should do something essentially similar. Say you’re writing a story about how Layla and Will met in preschool. Sure, titling it “New Girl” is descriptive to a point, but the title is so bland. Why would I want to read something that implies you’re introducing an OC (usually Mary Sue, and thus, to be avoided)? A better choice for title would be “Preschool Woes”. It is still descriptive, but implies that Will and Layla were having problems before they met and made everything better.
While that is a decent title, there are still better options!
First, never title your fic before you begin to write the plot. If by the time you’ve planned out the plot, a title just jumps out at you, then you should use it. However, I usually wait until I’ve written the first chapter. Within the first chapter, the writer uses adjectives and certain phrases that are cute, unique, or vital to the plot. Take one of these phrases and use it as your title.
Take this sentence: “his hands were hot running down her back, like little sparks erupting each time she inhaled.”
It is one of the author’s first sentences, and it’s really interesting. A good piece of it to use for title would be “Little Sparks Erupting”. This is really interesting, and almost guaranteed to quirk the casual reader’s interest, as well as not giving away too much of the plot. Also, its already been thought up and is just waiting to be copy-pasted. Another possible title is “Hot Running Down”. Sounds pretty, no? It implies the smuttiness of the story without giving away couple, or anything else crucial. Just enough to draw the reader in without ruining the story. Those two possible titles are only from the first sentence! Just think of how many possible ones you’d have in your entire story. Be inventive!
But be careful. Just because some words appear once in your story doesn’t mean that they are suited to be your title. It should be something fundamental to the action in your first chapter, which is fundamental to all of your other chapters. Like flows from like; don’t choose words that describe how Ethan looks when your plot focuses on Maj’s shapeshifting abilities.
Another choice for title can be synonyms for the idea that you’re trying to get at. Most fics have a point, or some sort of objective to be achieved by their writing. Say you wrote a fic about what all of the sidekicks were feeling when Will stood up to his father. Okay. Your underlying ideas/motives are obviously loyalty, courage, admiration, maybe some fear. You could title your fic anything that could convey those ideas. Just sit at a computer and explain why you wrote the fic to a friend, and you’ll find ideas for titles in there.
There are no guidelines to title length. It could be a sentence, or just one word. Just apply the above guidelines, and you’ll be alright. Also keep in mind that ff.net has a character limit when it comes to things like that; I think it is something like 50 chars.
IMPORTANT: Titles can give away plot, and if the reader already knows the plot, fewer of them are going to want to read the story. This is the philosophy behind the pernicious SparkNotes: provide summaries of the plots of books so that people don’t have to read them. “New Girl” tells far too much about your premise, as does “Lamentations of a Dark Heart”. Unless this is your intention, avoid similar titles at all costs!
SUMMARIES
So you’re on fanfiction.net, and you’re paging through random pages of random sections, looking for a fic that looks even vaguely interesting. Yes, I know that this task is almost impossible on the Pit, but work with me, here.
You find two stories in the Sky High section:
This was written for the person who was first to read my story and review. So if your own please read and review!Its about Warren!
and
There is a pathalogical need born into every elemental to regain the easy control over their lives they had before their powers surfaced. What happens if they don't? Simple. They go crazy.
Which one are you more likely to read?
Yea, the second one. That’s a no-brainer, right?
The first rule to writing a summary is DON’T TALK TO YOUR REVIEWERS. You only come off as desperate or pathetic. No one else should need to see how “awesome” your story is. Responding to reviewers should be a private thing, done only in emails or comments. No one needs to know who you’re writing this story for; none of us know or care about that person. Okay, so you wrote it for you brother. Woohoo! Big deal. I don’t know your brother from the serial killers I see on the news every night. I want to know what your story is about. Dedications belong as a footnote, much like the author’s notes.
The second holy rule to writing a summary is DON’T TALK TO YOUR REVIEWERS. Don’t beg for reviews. Please. You only show how pathetic and needy you are being, and it also doesn’t really imply that you write well. Most people who write beautiful things don’t beg for reviewers, because they don’t write for the feedback, they write for the joy of the story. Once you beg for reviewers in a summary, you categorize yourself in the “talentless” category in the minds of readers. Harsh, but true.
Now, this is going to be repetitive, but DON’T TALK TO YOUR REVIEWERS. Don’t tell them pairings. Half the fun of reading a long story is figuring out what the couple is, or watching them evolve. If you’re trying to draw in readers purely because they’re fans of the couple, then you’re only getting biased opinions and responses. Readers should not always read only Will/Layla fics, or they aren’t exploring their fandom to the fullest potential. Cutting pairings out of the summary can help with this. After all, if you read a wonderful fic that manages to draw you into it… and then surprises you with a pairing you hate, you’re not going to stop reading it! But if you’d read the summary and it included the pairing, you never would have touched the fanfic. Do not reveal pairings.
For another viewpoint on the pairings debate, view this excellent rebuttal by saturniia.
Finally, DON’T USE YOUR PLOT AS YOUR SUMMARY. In this case, your summary is like the SparkNotes version of your fanfic, and no one actually needs to read it to get the story. You’re defeating yourself right off the bat, if you do this. It should be obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people utterly reveal all surprises and the ending in their summaries. I do not want to know the ending of your story before you’ve written it, yea? Keep the reader interested!
Now that we’ve got all of the boring negative rules out of the way, we can move onto the actual writing of your summary.
First, do you know what your fic is about? If you don’t, then what are you doing writing it?! Plot should be paramount!
Okay, now that you’re reread your fic, and had chats with your friends about what you were trying to accomplish or whatever, you’re ready to write a summary. Keep your plot in mind, but don’t write it down.
What is your story about? Is it about the trials of getting people to notice Penny as more than an evil cheerleader? Or did you write something about Steve Stronghold’s struggle with his inner bias and love for his son? Whatever it is, forget about your ending for a second. Forget about the later plot twists. Focus like a laser only upon your first chapter or so.
When you’ve pared down your information, what happens in the first chapter? Does Penny get released from jail? If so, you could write a summary along these lines:
Felons can’t vote, can’t hold major jobs, and usually end up back in the pen within a few years of their release. I am so out of my league...
See? Its interesting, manages to keep your main plot point in line (Penny out of jail), and it also leaves the rest of your plot (Penny’s struggles with people’s perception of her) mostly out of view, except as a vague hint. Smoke and mirrors, loves, smoke and mirrors. Draw them in with something they can satisfy immediately, and keep them coming back with a vague reference to the future of your plot.
This can be hard, but involve several of your friends in the process, and you’ll eventually come up with something.
One-shots are even simpler to write summaries for, because you’ve already got your entire plot in your hands. Write a sentence expressing the overall idea behind your story. If your underlying theme is “alienation as felt by Ethan”, an appropriate summary could be:
They ignore me because they envy me...
It is short, sweet, and speaks to the theme/plot.
As to length, look at your story. How short is it? If it is any less than 500 words, one sentence should do. Two or three sentences for longer stories, although the shorter, the more mysterious, and the less chance you have of committing a grave sin.
Your summary should also be in the same tense as your story. It is bad manners to write a summary in first person to draw in readers, but then write the story in third person omniscient. Be consistent!
Keep in mind that all of these examples are merely that! Do not write all of your summaries in the same format, because then it feels stale and mechanical. You should be writing out of your own ideas, I’m just giving guidelines for unearthing your own methods.
I’m done lecturing, so go forth and be prolific!
Wrong
They just aren’t reading it.
Getting people to actually read your stuff is half of the battle. You have to have good writing and a plot, of course, but the readers are never going to appear if you don’t draw them in through a good title or summary. The outside matters!
Yes, I know that your teachers and parents try to tell you that it doesn’t matter, and you shouldn’t judge by the cover blahblahblah [insert feel-good crap here].
They are WRONG.
Books are ALWAYS judged first by what is on their cover.
Think about it. You walk into your local bookstore, and look at the fantasy section. I’m betting at the very least, it is nine bookshelves full of novels upon novels, just clamoring for your attention. What makes you pick up the ones you do? The title. Yes, you skim along the books, and see a title that interests you. Title is a third of your battle! The next third comes from cover. Matching colors, pretty designs, eye-catching pictures… Summary, or the little blurb on the back, is the rest of the battle. Which book are you more likely to read, one that has comments about how great it is from people you’ve never heard of, or one that tells you something about the book?
Why do y’all think publishing companies hire advertising companies to design book covers? People are drawn in to something new by an interesting poster, or cover, or blurb on the websites they read. Advertising companies manage all of these things for published authors. Fanfiction writers, on the other hand, must learn to do this on their own.
COVERS
Now, I am aware that fanfiction.net does not allow covers, and the majority of writers post there. However, for the LJ users, a hint: a banner, or something colorful, before the cut leading to your fic can entice people to click on the link. NOT recommended for those of you who are photoshop-retarded, unless you know someone who isn’t.
1) Make sure that such banners are small, so as to not overwhelm people’s friend pages or the dial-up users. Otherwise, people will definitely NOT be generous enough to spend their time reading your stuff.
2) A banner should involve your characters. If there is something totally random in there, like you’re writing a Will/Warren fic, but you’ve got Medulla on your banner… people aren’t going to read more than a paragraph or two. Be careful about this.
3) Banners should be tastefully done. Shitty, done-in-five-second banners don’t bode well for the quality of your fic, since you spent so little time perfecting the banner or finding someone well versed in photoshop to do it for you. Those kinds of banners do not speak well to your dedication and proficiency.
4) Banners that only give the title, and maybe a quote or two from the story… or perhaps lyrics, along with an interesting background, are perfectly acceptable. You do not always have to have pictures of your main characters. Try not to give away your entire plot.
TITLES
One of my favorite scifi authors wrote a book entitled Dune. It was a black book, with a small sand dune and just the title on the side. What drew me in? Obviously, it was the intriguing aspects of a book that could deserve the name of a desert phenomenon.
Clichés and Proverbs for titles can be cute, but they are SO OVERUSED. Try to be original! Unless the proverb fits your story almost perfectly, or was used for inspiration, avoid it if at all possible.
Choose a title that has something to do with your plot. But for God’s sake, please don’t use something like “Shades of Grey” or “When Worlds Collide”, or any variation on “Love”. Those are worth less than Enron stock.
Dune is a fabulous title because the book takes place on a world so overrun by desert that sand dunes are the prominent feature. Also, it is the name that the natives call the planet, while the colonists call the planet Arrakis. So that title implies both the setting and a hint at the essential conflict between the natives and the colonists.
Your title should do something essentially similar. Say you’re writing a story about how Layla and Will met in preschool. Sure, titling it “New Girl” is descriptive to a point, but the title is so bland. Why would I want to read something that implies you’re introducing an OC (usually Mary Sue, and thus, to be avoided)? A better choice for title would be “Preschool Woes”. It is still descriptive, but implies that Will and Layla were having problems before they met and made everything better.
While that is a decent title, there are still better options!
First, never title your fic before you begin to write the plot. If by the time you’ve planned out the plot, a title just jumps out at you, then you should use it. However, I usually wait until I’ve written the first chapter. Within the first chapter, the writer uses adjectives and certain phrases that are cute, unique, or vital to the plot. Take one of these phrases and use it as your title.
Take this sentence: “his hands were hot running down her back, like little sparks erupting each time she inhaled.”
It is one of the author’s first sentences, and it’s really interesting. A good piece of it to use for title would be “Little Sparks Erupting”. This is really interesting, and almost guaranteed to quirk the casual reader’s interest, as well as not giving away too much of the plot. Also, its already been thought up and is just waiting to be copy-pasted. Another possible title is “Hot Running Down”. Sounds pretty, no? It implies the smuttiness of the story without giving away couple, or anything else crucial. Just enough to draw the reader in without ruining the story. Those two possible titles are only from the first sentence! Just think of how many possible ones you’d have in your entire story. Be inventive!
But be careful. Just because some words appear once in your story doesn’t mean that they are suited to be your title. It should be something fundamental to the action in your first chapter, which is fundamental to all of your other chapters. Like flows from like; don’t choose words that describe how Ethan looks when your plot focuses on Maj’s shapeshifting abilities.
Another choice for title can be synonyms for the idea that you’re trying to get at. Most fics have a point, or some sort of objective to be achieved by their writing. Say you wrote a fic about what all of the sidekicks were feeling when Will stood up to his father. Okay. Your underlying ideas/motives are obviously loyalty, courage, admiration, maybe some fear. You could title your fic anything that could convey those ideas. Just sit at a computer and explain why you wrote the fic to a friend, and you’ll find ideas for titles in there.
There are no guidelines to title length. It could be a sentence, or just one word. Just apply the above guidelines, and you’ll be alright. Also keep in mind that ff.net has a character limit when it comes to things like that; I think it is something like 50 chars.
IMPORTANT: Titles can give away plot, and if the reader already knows the plot, fewer of them are going to want to read the story. This is the philosophy behind the pernicious SparkNotes: provide summaries of the plots of books so that people don’t have to read them. “New Girl” tells far too much about your premise, as does “Lamentations of a Dark Heart”. Unless this is your intention, avoid similar titles at all costs!
SUMMARIES
So you’re on fanfiction.net, and you’re paging through random pages of random sections, looking for a fic that looks even vaguely interesting. Yes, I know that this task is almost impossible on the Pit, but work with me, here.
You find two stories in the Sky High section:
This was written for the person who was first to read my story and review. So if your own please read and review!Its about Warren!
and
There is a pathalogical need born into every elemental to regain the easy control over their lives they had before their powers surfaced. What happens if they don't? Simple. They go crazy.
Which one are you more likely to read?
Yea, the second one. That’s a no-brainer, right?
The first rule to writing a summary is DON’T TALK TO YOUR REVIEWERS. You only come off as desperate or pathetic. No one else should need to see how “awesome” your story is. Responding to reviewers should be a private thing, done only in emails or comments. No one needs to know who you’re writing this story for; none of us know or care about that person. Okay, so you wrote it for you brother. Woohoo! Big deal. I don’t know your brother from the serial killers I see on the news every night. I want to know what your story is about. Dedications belong as a footnote, much like the author’s notes.
The second holy rule to writing a summary is DON’T TALK TO YOUR REVIEWERS. Don’t beg for reviews. Please. You only show how pathetic and needy you are being, and it also doesn’t really imply that you write well. Most people who write beautiful things don’t beg for reviewers, because they don’t write for the feedback, they write for the joy of the story. Once you beg for reviewers in a summary, you categorize yourself in the “talentless” category in the minds of readers. Harsh, but true.
Now, this is going to be repetitive, but DON’T TALK TO YOUR REVIEWERS. Don’t tell them pairings. Half the fun of reading a long story is figuring out what the couple is, or watching them evolve. If you’re trying to draw in readers purely because they’re fans of the couple, then you’re only getting biased opinions and responses. Readers should not always read only Will/Layla fics, or they aren’t exploring their fandom to the fullest potential. Cutting pairings out of the summary can help with this. After all, if you read a wonderful fic that manages to draw you into it… and then surprises you with a pairing you hate, you’re not going to stop reading it! But if you’d read the summary and it included the pairing, you never would have touched the fanfic. Do not reveal pairings.
For another viewpoint on the pairings debate, view this excellent rebuttal by saturniia.
Finally, DON’T USE YOUR PLOT AS YOUR SUMMARY. In this case, your summary is like the SparkNotes version of your fanfic, and no one actually needs to read it to get the story. You’re defeating yourself right off the bat, if you do this. It should be obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people utterly reveal all surprises and the ending in their summaries. I do not want to know the ending of your story before you’ve written it, yea? Keep the reader interested!
Now that we’ve got all of the boring negative rules out of the way, we can move onto the actual writing of your summary.
First, do you know what your fic is about? If you don’t, then what are you doing writing it?! Plot should be paramount!
Okay, now that you’re reread your fic, and had chats with your friends about what you were trying to accomplish or whatever, you’re ready to write a summary. Keep your plot in mind, but don’t write it down.
What is your story about? Is it about the trials of getting people to notice Penny as more than an evil cheerleader? Or did you write something about Steve Stronghold’s struggle with his inner bias and love for his son? Whatever it is, forget about your ending for a second. Forget about the later plot twists. Focus like a laser only upon your first chapter or so.
When you’ve pared down your information, what happens in the first chapter? Does Penny get released from jail? If so, you could write a summary along these lines:
Felons can’t vote, can’t hold major jobs, and usually end up back in the pen within a few years of their release. I am so out of my league...
See? Its interesting, manages to keep your main plot point in line (Penny out of jail), and it also leaves the rest of your plot (Penny’s struggles with people’s perception of her) mostly out of view, except as a vague hint. Smoke and mirrors, loves, smoke and mirrors. Draw them in with something they can satisfy immediately, and keep them coming back with a vague reference to the future of your plot.
This can be hard, but involve several of your friends in the process, and you’ll eventually come up with something.
One-shots are even simpler to write summaries for, because you’ve already got your entire plot in your hands. Write a sentence expressing the overall idea behind your story. If your underlying theme is “alienation as felt by Ethan”, an appropriate summary could be:
They ignore me because they envy me...
It is short, sweet, and speaks to the theme/plot.
As to length, look at your story. How short is it? If it is any less than 500 words, one sentence should do. Two or three sentences for longer stories, although the shorter, the more mysterious, and the less chance you have of committing a grave sin.
Your summary should also be in the same tense as your story. It is bad manners to write a summary in first person to draw in readers, but then write the story in third person omniscient. Be consistent!
Keep in mind that all of these examples are merely that! Do not write all of your summaries in the same format, because then it feels stale and mechanical. You should be writing out of your own ideas, I’m just giving guidelines for unearthing your own methods.
I’m done lecturing, so go forth and be prolific!