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Meme: 30 Days of Fanfic
Sep. 30th, 2015 11:23 pm16 – Summaries – Do you like them or hate them? How do you come up with them, if you use them?
Ah, summaries. I remember a time in the world of fanfic when summaries were innovative and, I believed, completely superfluous. We were all going to read every story, so why waste the time on writing blurbs for their content? (I also remember when fanfiction.net was started and how I believed it was completely redundant, since every fandom already had its own archive. ::sighs::). My opinion did come around after I started to grasp that fanfic was neither a fixed nor a finite resource.
I like summaries. For the most part, I think they're fairly easy to write--though that doesn't stop me from agonizing over the exact wording. I try to do an original overview of the major themes or plot beats of every story, and I try to limit that overview to one sentence, with, I'm sure, varying levels of success. It's a lot like writing a thesis sentence for an essay: Identify what the story is about and, preferably, put it in declarative form.
When I'm reading, summaries that ask questions tend to put me off the story since the questions rarely seem to invite participation: "Main characters from the canon have gotten in over their heads. Will they survive?" Um ... yes. They will. (Unless the story is tagged for major character death, in which case I'm not interested). Question answered, I have no reason to read the story. Since it would make me a hypocrite to ask questions of my readers that I'm not willing to engage with as a reader, I always aim for the declarative.
When all else fails, there's also the pull-quote. I've done pull-quotes on a handful of occasions, one of which was because a sentence from the story did seem to perfectly sum up the whole story. Overall, pull-quotes feel a little cheap to me, so I don't tend to use them.
The biggest problem I have with summaries is finding the line between being intriguing and dispensing spoilers. There's a huge part of me that still feels that any info about the story up-front is a spoiler, and that the summary should be worded to conceal everything. This is stupid, yet is still the biggest block between me and a decent summary. I'm continually having to remind myself that stating "this thing happens" is not the same thing as stating "and these were the consequences."
Ah, summaries. I remember a time in the world of fanfic when summaries were innovative and, I believed, completely superfluous. We were all going to read every story, so why waste the time on writing blurbs for their content? (I also remember when fanfiction.net was started and how I believed it was completely redundant, since every fandom already had its own archive. ::sighs::). My opinion did come around after I started to grasp that fanfic was neither a fixed nor a finite resource.
I like summaries. For the most part, I think they're fairly easy to write--though that doesn't stop me from agonizing over the exact wording. I try to do an original overview of the major themes or plot beats of every story, and I try to limit that overview to one sentence, with, I'm sure, varying levels of success. It's a lot like writing a thesis sentence for an essay: Identify what the story is about and, preferably, put it in declarative form.
When I'm reading, summaries that ask questions tend to put me off the story since the questions rarely seem to invite participation: "Main characters from the canon have gotten in over their heads. Will they survive?" Um ... yes. They will. (Unless the story is tagged for major character death, in which case I'm not interested). Question answered, I have no reason to read the story. Since it would make me a hypocrite to ask questions of my readers that I'm not willing to engage with as a reader, I always aim for the declarative.
When all else fails, there's also the pull-quote. I've done pull-quotes on a handful of occasions, one of which was because a sentence from the story did seem to perfectly sum up the whole story. Overall, pull-quotes feel a little cheap to me, so I don't tend to use them.
The biggest problem I have with summaries is finding the line between being intriguing and dispensing spoilers. There's a huge part of me that still feels that any info about the story up-front is a spoiler, and that the summary should be worded to conceal everything. This is stupid, yet is still the biggest block between me and a decent summary. I'm continually having to remind myself that stating "this thing happens" is not the same thing as stating "and these were the consequences."
