#summary tips

(Because i keep seeing people who struggle with it and I want to help)

Summaries don’t have to be long or something you agonize over! They can be as simple as:

A few lines/a paragraph from the beginning of the fic just copied and pasted (if it’s a multi-chapter fic then I definitely recommend picking lines from the first chapter…if you don’t think the first chapter is interesting enough to pick specific lines out of then use one of the other options, but that might also be a sign that your first chapter doesn’t have anything that’s really crucial to the story and might need to be edited/reworked at your discretion)

The premise. Whatever inspired the fic, or how you might pitch it to a friend. Basically “X and Y do Z (and it goes well/poorly/about as well as you’d expect/because I wanted them to)”

A combination of the two! Maybe a couple of bits of dialogue (example: “Miss me?” “You wish” followed by “Character X and Character Y reconnect after *insert length of time between canon and the fic* and (fluff/smut/arguments/chaos ensues)”)

You’re honestly more likely to run into things you shouldn’t do in a summary the more you stress about it. For example, some things that I personally think you should avoid when posting a fic because they make me avoid reading a story even if it has all of the niche tags I’m looking for:

Writing an Author’s Note in the summary part. There’s an Author’s Note section for a reason, which is where all of your “I got this idea in the middle of the night and couldn’t sleep without writing it” and “This is my first time writing something like this so feedback is appreciated” and “This is actually garbage but I’m posting it anyway” notes should go

Not writing a summary at all! If you don’t have a summary and you just have a mountain of tags, things can and will be missed, and a lot of times readers are more likely to open your story if they have an idea of what your writing style is like

Picking lines or dialogue from a later chapter that you’ve written but haven’t posted yet. I’ve opened a handful of fics in the past where I was really excited about the dialogue in the summary…and then the story didn’t actually include the dialogue or summary in any of the posted chapters and I was disappointed. You can update your fic summaries later if you write something you’d rather highlight, but don’t post your fic with that to start