To say that a summary is important to a work of fiction — or, indeed, any work in general — is an understatement. The summary is almost certainly the first thing your prospective reader will see; it is where they go to know what the work is about and to get some idea of whether they will want to read it or not. You are essentially making a pitch for their time (and money, if you're writing professionally), so your summary is a vital way of letting them know that spending it on your work won't be a waste.
It should be noted, though, that writing a good summary can be legitimately hard, especially for an inexperienced writer. This is especially the case if your story is complex or is a Long Runner or Door Stopper — the question becomes a matter of what to include in the summary and what to leave out so that you're both giving a clear sense of what the story is about while not saying too much. It is also worth remembering that creative writing and summarising are different skills, and it is entirely possible to be better at one rather than the other.
In the interests of being helpful, therefore, we at TV Tropes would like to offer you a few suggestions if summarising your story is something you struggle with:
- Think about what the main "beats" of the narrative are; what are the absolutely essential things that happen? Focus on those. Your reader doesn't necessarily need to know about the conversations your protagonist has with their landlord about the rent every morning, but if your protagonist is going to be solving a murder in the story then that's probably something the reader should know about.
- Focus on John Rogers's three rules of storytelling. 1. Who wants what? 2. Why can't they have it? (Like, what's stopping them?) 3. Why should The Reader give a shit? A good summary explains all three.
- In particular, think about what the inciting incident of the story is — where does your story essentially start? Focussing on this will help give your reader a flavour of what the story is about while at the same time not revealing too much about what happens later in the narrative (and thus spoiling the surprise). Don't spoil the third-act twist that Granny was the murderer in your summary, but by all means tell the reader that the protagonist's troubles start when an old Love Interest re-enters their life.
- And incidentally, if you don't really know where your story starts, or if it seems to start well before the interesting stuff starts happening, that's likely a sign that there are some problems with your story that a summary, no matter how good, isn't going to help with. In that case, you might want to hold off on hitting "Publish" and put it through a few more drafts, but that's a discussion for another page.
- What kind of genre is your story predominantly? What kind of mood do you want to set for your reader? Think about how you want your reader to react when reading the story and frame the summary around that. If your story is primarily horror, you probably don't want your reader going into it thinking it's going to be a romantic comedy (unless you really want to surprise them, but that's a tricky needle to thread and is likely to risk backfiring and annoying the reader, which isn't going to help you; if you're inexperienced, it's probably better to be more upfront at first).
- Keep it short. Frankly, it doesn't matter how long the story is, how much complex it is, or how much space you have to write it — the purpose of a summary isn't to tell your reader everything that happens, it's simply to provide a brief overview of the essential details of what the story is about, and/or to offer a tantalizing reason for the reader to want to read the whole thing. You actually don't want to give away everything that happens in the story, since you want them to learn what happens by reading the actual story — and if they know everything that's going to happen from the summary, why would they bother doing that?
- Think about words that generally describe what happens in your story in a way that may be intriguing to someone who hasn't read it, but which avoids going into too much detail. For example, if your story involves a lot of action scenes, you don't need to tell us about every one (even your favourite one), but you can tell us that there's a lot of "mayhem", "chaos" and/or "adventure" in your tale.
- Practice by summarising other films, books, TV shows, etc. Boil them down to their essential components and see if you can summarise them in as few words/sentences as possible while making them intriguing. As an example:
- "When the hobbit Frodo Baggins is given a simple gold ring by his uncle, little does he realise that it is the beginning of a quest to finally free the land of Middle-Earth from a long-dormant dark power that seeks to rise again, bringing war and devastation in its wake." That's a 481,000 word trilogy summed up pretty concisely in just over 50 words. If you'd like a chance to try, maybe try writing some laconic entries.
- Accept that your summary might not be able to, and should not be able to, encapsulate everything. Part of the reason The Lord of the Rings is so fun is that it divides into Two Lines, No Waiting: Frodo leads a small group to actually destroy the Ring via Stealth-Based Mission while Supporting Leader Aragorn essentially pulls a "We Need a Distraction" by defending against Sauron's armies. Notice how, technically, neither plot is mentioned in the above summary. Notice how the above summary isn't particularly harmed by their exclusion. We already know the stakes; we already know what story, what emotional journey, we'll be going on; the details of how things play out, even at a high level, aren't particularly necessary.
- Sometimes, especially with fanfiction and other internet fiction, people skip the summary and instead write an apology for not being good at summaries. Please avoid doing this, because, as mentioned in the first paragraph, summaries are important, and it might lead people to think the story itself is bad because they don't realise that summarising and creative writing are different skills.
