AUTHOR QUESTION: Summaries

Authors & Readers
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Summaries! We all have to write them. Some of us are excellent at them, others feel we struggle.

Do you have a philosophy for how you approach summaries? Do you tease the spicy material within to pique interest, or are you explicit about what happens in your story so readers know what to expect? Do you like writing summaries, or is it the worst part of submitting a story? Do you think summaries matter, or are they secondary to tags for garnering interest in your stories? What advice would you give to authors struggling to come up with their own summaries?

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My philosophy for summaries is to completely forget that I actually have to come up with one until I submit the story/chapter. Then, I groan and let my shoulders slump, quickly discard a couple of really awful ideas and then choose the first (or maybe second on a good day) decent one that comes to mind.

What constitutes decent for me? Something that covers the overall events of the story, usually. Maybe something that introduces the early events of the story, like how the subject(s) get themselves into trouble or something along those lines. If I touch on what the hypnotist does at all, it’s usually left pretty vague so that readers—hopefully—want to read and find out.

As for summaries vs. tags, I think both are important. Some people keep track of what the new stories are, and I think summaries are probably more important in that case with tags giving specifics that may not be captured in the summary. For searching, however, I think tags are probably more important.

The only advice I have for authors struggling to come up with their own summaries is not to do it the way I do it. :slight_smile: Try to think of something as you’re writing.

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Hard same on all points. Literally just groaned as I realized I hadn’t thought of a summary or tags at all for the story I just submitted, even though I’ve been writing/editing/reviewing it for weeks now.

Thankfully part of my process for submitting a story is doing a last read-through to catch markdown and formatting errors, get the spacing right, etc. So it’s at least fresh in my mind before I have to go back up and do the (very necessary, very appreciated, truly essential) librarian work of cataloguing and summarizing what I’ve done.

I’m less coy than I used to be about the tags - I can see the appeal of wanting to leave something as a surprise, but many people find surprises to be unwelcome in their stroke lit and I’d rather people pass on my story if it’s not their thing, so they can find something that is. And vice versa: if there’s a hot hivemind or mpreg story out there, I don’t want to miss it (look, we all have our things).

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I highly value summaries (and titles to a lesser extent) as an exercise in synthesis and I think they’re a lot of fun to write—they make me feel like the work I’m posting is coherent, complete, and has a clear purpose and theme. That said, I am looking for three things when I come up with a summary:

(1) it needs to be hook-y. It can’t be excessively wordy; it needs to sound enthusiastic, tempting, tantalising, it should make the reader want to know more because they see something they like.

(2) it needs to summarise the central action of the chapter or work. This is a loose requirement for me, but basically, I want readers to have a sense of the arc of the story. Where is it starting and where is it going (but not where it ends up!).

(3) if possible, it needs to describe some central theme, emotion or vibe of the chapter. It’s not sufficient for me to just tell readers what happens, I want them to know if it’s frenetic, sultry, somber, risky, etc. I communicate this using the tone more than the words, but the words matter too.

A few other side things: I use short, snappy sentences, or clear, simple action words and conjunctions if I need to write a longer sentence. I also use horny buzzwords when possible with the intent to draw and keep reader attention.

I’ve put some of my favourites in this drop-down, spanning different lengths and intended emotions.

Summary Examples

From “There’s Only One Seat on This Bus and It’s You

Lap-sitting is for bottoms. Talley insists on that point, but Riki’s lap insists otherwise. Might as well take the comfiest seat on the bus, right?

From “Pheromones and the Boys Who Don’t Want Them”

Boys fall all over Levi when he’s alone with them, and he’s damn tired of it. (A story in three parts.)

From “How to Train Your Kraken”

Transforming into a raging fuck machine shouldn’t be so stressful. Good thing Talley’s here to ease that transition with lavish attention to the prince’s asshole.

From “Showing a Prince Your Frat Boy Balls”

At the Frat Meat-and-Greet, Marco’s supposed to show freshmen what it takes to fight and fuck like a frat boy, but the Prince short-circuits his brain at the worst possible time. If he doesn’t pull it together, he’ll end up under the frosh he’s supposed to dominate.

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Hate hate hate summaries! I’ll write a clever one-liner that I feel is really cheeky and punchy, but then worry that it’s actually just nonsense that no one will understand, so I backpedal and wind up with something dry and unwieldy, and usually settle on something unsatisfyingly in the middle.

It particularly grates on me because I have two different series that each follow a format, so I (foolishly) felt compelled to make their summaries all follow a formula too. What I wound up going with is not very effective because the summaries accurately describe how each story fits into the series, but they’re flaccid without context and leave out the juicy details that the individual stories actually contain.

Like, I wrote a 16k word story that starts off with a meta prelude deconstructing some of the tropes surrounding body swaps, which acts the lead in for a tale where a fat old professor steals the body of a hot college student. The story bounces back and forth between scenes of the professor going on a spree at a party (showing off, drinking, and hooking up) and scenes of the student trying to track him down while coping with being turned into an older man, which all culminate in a heated confrontation where the professor strips himself down naked and taunts the student as his boyfriend tries to switch the two of them back. The description I went with for all that was this:

Trevor, an expert in different kinds of body snatchers, tackles the tricky topic of body swaps. Also: his boyfriend Andy gets body swapped with a college professor.

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But I feel bad submitting edits for a bunch of stories if the only thing I’m changing is the summaries so I just keep going with it.

In this sense, I lean pretty heavily on tags. Even if I don’t make the story sound particularly interesting, they might see a tag they like and give it a shot just because of that- that’s how I am as a reader.

If anything, I think the thing that I value the most about summaries is that they give me a taste of a writer’s style. The sight of a well constructed sentence is sexy; a lazily written description with a lack of punctuation is a turnoff.

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Teasers/ Blurbs are some of my favorite things to write. You have to throw off your writer/ author hat and throw on your publicist/ promoter hat.

I always say, what would it say to make me pick up the book and read it?

Then I just start playing. Honestly, for me, it’s the fun part.

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