PLEASE GODS YES I WILL PAY YOU. for real though that does sound like a fun idea even if i hate summaries with such a passion as this world has never seen before
Summaries stress me out, so I pluck out an enticing paragraph or two from the story, tag descriptively, and just let things run from there. I can't deal when people are presenting their thing to me, theoretically trying to show it in the best light and make it look appealing, and the first thing that hits my eyes is a disclaimer about 'I'm not good at--'. If that's what you start with, I'm either gone, or I'm still around but resentful about it. 'Not good at summaries' isn't the same as 'not good at writing,' but you've just punched my 'drastically lowered expectations' button and I'm probably not going to recover from that. I get being nervous about your ability to write the thing, but please stop sabotaging yourself.
I feel like summaries are a different skill from writing. Storytelling is the telling of the story. The title and summary are kind of like advertising copy to get people to read your story. I am ass at summaries because I have a lot of internalized weirdness about tooting my own horn and so i just ???? when I have to do it with a summary. I usually go with a relevant paragraph from the story
That said "Im bad at summaries" also makes my eyes glaze over and is bad form IMO, it just looks so unpolished and whether you're good at them or not, the summary itself is not the place to share that
My issue is ok how do i narrow this down to what is most important. And then how do i make that interesting to potential readers. My current solution is vague statements on the scene and themes, followed by writing for a fandom that has like 12 people in it
so far my strategy has been: funny/sad/representative couple of lines from the thing, then a description. also i cheat at titles by stealing all of my titles from the mountain goats song lyrics lmao
Oh gods I WISH I hate doing summaries for my own stuff, I love how AO3's tags make the summary less important. But I reckon I could do it for someone else's okay.
I love writing fic summaries -- it's the titles that get me where it hurts lmao. My usual cheat is grabbing lyrics from songs I like... Also the 'writing summaries for other people's fics' sounds like fun!
Hell, let's do it! How about: a thread where you can post a link to a Googledoc, private Tumblr post, the whole fic under a spoiler, whatever, and you also offer up summaries for the 2/3 fics before you. Does that make sense?
Though there is a certain appeal in Russian Rouletting with fic summaries, just shooting off summaries at random without reading the attached fics and seeing which ones actually fire true.
what if your fic is a WIP + really obscure? should we just post finished works ? if WIPs are ok, can/should i include the doc with my detailed notes?
I'm not going to do the summaries, because they stress me out and I am le bad at them. But if any people who don't have fics but want to do summaries want to play along with the whole game, you can pillage my archives for material, and it's not like you'd be stealing anything I was planning to use :P
imo the more summaries the better! i mean i don't know if i even have anything to post because right now my unfinished fics are in the "early draft" stage where idk if they'll ever be finished and posted, and my finished fics/chaptered WIPs are... already posted & have (probably bad) summaries lmao
If the first seven chapters center around a carefree romance, it might be useful for the summary writer to know that chapters 8-64 are going to be about coming to terms with terminal illness. I don't know if even that would require *all* your notes. I tend to see summaries as more premise-oriented. But I'd say do what feels best and maybe we can work out the kinks.
I can't guarantee I'll produce any results worth inflicting on anyone, but spoons willing I'd really love to give this a try. I've never done anything like it before and it sounds like an interesting challenge.
it would also be good for the fic writers to give the tags of the fics before they are put in the summary game, to avoid people accidentally reading something that triggers them.
Having the tags also gives some idea of roughly what the author might expect, or be willing to live with, readers knowing about right from the start.
