What makes a good summary to you?
What kind of summary makes you actually click on a story to give it a try?
As a writer, what kind of summaries do you usually write?
There is definitely an art to it, and it's one I still have a long way to go at myself.
The summaries that are turn offs are the ones with way too much detail. You know what ones I mean, the ones with like two paragraphs and is almost like a short story in itself.
Yeah, I've noticed that I tend to gloss over any summary that's more than one paragraph, or looks like a wall of text.
The things that draw me in are the simple ones that don't totally give away what the story is about but gives enough detail to let me know it's the kind of thing I would want to read.
That's what often happens with long-winded summaries, one of the reasons I avoid them, aside from the fact that Text-O-Wall usually screams to me "Author doesn't know what s/he's doing."
She had a dream. He had a secret. They had a deal. In exchange for her silence, he’d make her dream come true. But at what cost?
I agree, that is an excellent summary. It establishes tension, conflict, and important thematic elements, without the Information Dump.
It makes a couple promises: secrets, and how far people will go to keep them; and dreams, and how far people will go to fulfill them. As long as the story delivers on these two promises, then that summary was probably the best possible choice for it.
I tend to write wordy summaries that describe the character more than the actual story (see the summary for The Time Watcher for example). I do feel that shorter summaries are more effective/better, though.
That is a different approach than I've seen in most summaries, but some care must be taken with the description to make sure people don't glance at it and think "Mary Sue / Marty Stu" without reading any further.
I never know if I'm giving too much away or not giving away enough to intrigue the reader. Sometimes they come really easily for me and sometimes they don't.
They tend to be hit and miss for me, as well. There are still some I wrote years ago that I'm still a little iffy on, yet I can't seem to come up with anything better, so I just stuck with them.
And sometimes it's hard when you're just starting a story and don't know exactly where you're going with it yet, cause I feel like to write a summary, you need to know what the story is really about, even if you don't include all that in the summary itself.
Wow, and I thought it was tough coming up with summaries for
finished stories!
(Though I guess that brings up the completely different issue of deciding whether or not to wait until a story is complete before releasing any of it.)
Though the Fictionpress site rubs me the wrong way in most regards, there was one thing about starting there that I think set me on the path to writing presentable summaries. There's a
188 character limit on story summaries there, so all of my original summaries are written with this very practical restriction, forcing some brevity and focus on someone as wordy as myself. My point is not really about the exact number, so much as it about how placing a cap forces you to stay on-point. With the exception of the Book of Hondo, all the summaries I've ever written are 188 characters or shorter, for better or worse.
