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miramira16 – Summaries- Do you like them or hate them? How do you come up with them, if you use them?
I like summaries; I just don't think I'm much good at them. Far too many of mine end up following the same formula: "Character experiences setback. But something unexpected makes things better!" Only since I think I've used the word "unexpected" in at least five of them, it's lost all its meaning at this point.
Lately, I've been trying the "pull one or two lines directly from the fic" trick instead, which seems to be working reasonably well. I'm pretty sure I'm never going to be able to top the summary for Snake-Botherer, though.
17 - Titles – Are they the bane of your existence, or the easiest part of the fic? Also, if you do chaptered fic, do you give each chapter a title, or not?
A writing professor of mine once advised the class as a whole that if a good title didn't immediately jump out at us, we should just pick the single most relevant word from the story and go with that. It was good advice. I really ought to follow it more often, instead of coming up with tangentially related phrases that I end up hating after the fact. But somehow, it's just not as satisfying as the inspired ones.
I did come up with chapter breaks and titles for some of my longer pieces when I posted them to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
diagon_elite, which I thought worked out okay. But when I'm actually writing novels, I tend to stick to numbering.
I like summaries; I just don't think I'm much good at them. Far too many of mine end up following the same formula: "Character experiences setback. But something unexpected makes things better!" Only since I think I've used the word "unexpected" in at least five of them, it's lost all its meaning at this point.
Lately, I've been trying the "pull one or two lines directly from the fic" trick instead, which seems to be working reasonably well. I'm pretty sure I'm never going to be able to top the summary for Snake-Botherer, though.
17 - Titles – Are they the bane of your existence, or the easiest part of the fic? Also, if you do chaptered fic, do you give each chapter a title, or not?
A writing professor of mine once advised the class as a whole that if a good title didn't immediately jump out at us, we should just pick the single most relevant word from the story and go with that. It was good advice. I really ought to follow it more often, instead of coming up with tangentially related phrases that I end up hating after the fact. But somehow, it's just not as satisfying as the inspired ones.
I did come up with chapter breaks and titles for some of my longer pieces when I posted them to
diagon_elite, which I thought worked out okay. But when I'm actually writing novels, I tend to stick to numbering.