Advice: An Explaination of my Story-Description Writing Method (and how it could work for you) · 6:21pm Feb 28th, 2019
Jawbreaker's 1995 album (the only one on a major label), Dear You.
So, it's come up a few times in conversations, seeing as I end up with some pretty long and robust descriptions on my stories. I've had people say they're too long, and I've had people say they're highly informative. I make them that way because I kind of dump everything I want to say in them, but I do that because it's what I want to see on other story descriptions. A large number of the descriptions on the site are decidedly sub-par, either because they're messy or lack actual info, which is a huge problem, seeing as the description may be the most important part of a story submission. When I see a description that has typos, poorly describes the story, or doesn't give me enough information, I almost always move on. Seeing as I'd like to see some better descriptions, I figured I should go through and explain my methodology and reasoning, piece by piece, so that y'all might be able to make it work for you. Please note that I'm not saying you SHOULD use my model at all times, only that understanding what I'm doing and why will provide some insight if you're struggling.
I will be referencing 3 stories in this.
If you are not familiar with all of them, that's fine, because we're just talking about descriptions here. I suggest that you go open them if you're worried you won't get the references.
The Sequentially Detailed Long Description
The first thing you should understand is that my descriptions have multiple parts to them, because with the formatting options you get (bolding, centering, horizontal rules, etc), you can really break them down and do fun things with them. The parts I think of them as are...
- Short Indicator
- Story Hook, which is a simple introduction to the plot
- Author Explanation of what you're trying to write
- Etcetera: Accolades, Q&A, etc, all the stuff that didn't fit above
General advice is that if they aren't moved to start reading by the first part of a description, they either aren't interested or they want more information before they make the time investment in reading, and I tend to agree with that. Many readers (myself included) only get the time and energy to read one or two fanfics a week, so we have to be careful that we don't start reading something we're not going to enjoy, as that would be a trade-off with one we actually would enjoy. That can, at times, mean that I pass up stories simply because the long description isn't long enough. It's always best to err on the side of giving too much information rather than too little.
Another piece of general advice is to be concise with all the text in the descriptions. Don't ramble or use unnecessary words, just get the point across. Outlining, where you make little bullet points to figure out what you need to get across before you write, is going to be essential to this process. I go into that elsewhere in the advice blogs.
1. Short Note (AKA Custom Tag)
I always like to start these with a very brief, couple word description of what they are, centered and bolded, so people can see, at a brief glance, what I'm about to try to get them to read. This mainly came about because the tags aren't that good at telling you what a story is trying to do. It also has the bonus of messing with the search engine, which prioritizes things based on how early they are in the description: this is the set of search terms, aside from tags, that your story is going to be prioritized for. That also counts for things like Related Stories.
What's Your Problem? uses this one...
[Dramatic Character Study of the Young Six]
...which tells you that the Young Six are going to be going through some sort of drama which will end in some sort of point about them as characters. If you do a search for "Young Six Character Study", it's the first thing that comes up.
The Mare in White originally used this one...
[ Gothic Horror ]
...which honestly, isn't as good as the one it has now...
[ Gothic Horror / Ghost-Story Mystery ]
The point of this one was to tell someone who was interested in that genre that this is the story they're looking for: it was my attempt at emulating that genre. If you do a search for "Gothic Horror", you'll see it on the first page, and if you do a search for "Ghost Mystery", it comes up on the second.
Once again, not saying you HAVE to do this, but it's gonna help both the site's software and your potential reader to quickly profile your story.
2. Story Hook
This is the meat of my descriptions, because it's going to tell your reader right now if this is a story they should care about. I recommend you start this from the perspective of being in-story (AKA, "Watsonian"), perhaps giving a short version of whatever premise your story sets up at the beginning, and some clues of where it's going. Often, people include a direct quote, and on a shorter story like Mare in White, where you have a quote like “and perhaps someday, we can prove, once and for all, that there is no such thing as ghosts!” which really drives home the premise, that can work really well. (I actually wrote that quote BEFORE I wrote the rest of the letter, just because I knew it'd work so well)
In fact, let's look at that one right now...
Nopony knows where she came from, or who she was. No book describes her origin, no story of her was ever passed down, but since the it’s founding, the woods outside the seaside town of Serenity Falls have been haunted. Nopony even knows the name of the mare who stalks the woods, all she is known as is...
The Mare In White.
“and perhaps someday, we can prove, once and for all, that there is no such thing as ghosts!”
Twilight Sparkle is about to learn that some secrets are better left covered...
I think this is a really good story hook, because I've basically told the reader that there's a mysterious ghost in the middle of nowhere, and Twilight is skeptically investigating, and I've done so in a way that really plays up the atmosphere. If that's the story you're looking to read, I've just told you that this is that story.
You might also notice shift towards an out-of-story perspective by the end of these, as it talks less from an in-universe blurb to a more narration-based tone. "Twilight Sparkle is about to learn that some secrets are better left covered" is basically me telling you, as the author, what's about to happen.
3. Author Explanation
So, now that the reader has an idea of what's going on in story, I put a horizontal rule in, enter a completely out-of-story (AKA, "Doylist") perspective, and start talking about my thoughts on the story are as an author. This is where I explain what I'm trying to write, as a story, what I'd like to accomplish, why I'm doing this, and what my expectations are. Remember, this is pretty much the main place people are going to look for information about a story, so if you have something you want people to know about your story, this is where you need to say it.
For example, Displaced into Nothing goes on this long big about how I'm going to the edge of my comfort zone to literally write something to mess with other potential writers' heads and play with concepts that aren't common, in the hopes that me and everyone else who reads it will be a better author. I also mention some of the other elements I plan to bring in, and where I've been getting my ideas from.
4. Etcetera
Once you've done that, you're going to have a huge number of characters left to put in whatever information you want, so why not do it? After I'm done talking about what I'm writing, I like to list the Accolades (features) and positive Reviews, before going into a sort of "FAQ" section which answers any questions a reader might still have about the story after reading my description, which is a place where paying attention to the coments helps.
This is also a good place to link other stuff, and to give those trigger-warnings that people often list on the more depraved stories.
More Thoughts on Descriptions
Summarizing the entire plot
Notice that I didn't mention any point here where you should be summarizing your plot? That's because you shouldn't. If the setup and the idea of where it's going isn't enough to draw a reader in, they'll read the damn story: you don't need to tell them the entire plot in your description. Every once in a while we see a bunch of new authors do that, and it's bad practice.
Proofread It!
As I said at the beginning, this is one of the most important parts of your story. If you have any spelling or grammatical errors, or are bad at explaining things, or just plain uninteresting, that basically tells everyone that your story is going to be the same way. You should proofread every paragraph you post on your story, description included. I cannot stress this enough! You should read through it even more thoroughly than your actual story, because it's the part that's going to be seen by the most potential readers, and it's gonna be way shorter than the rest of it.
Change Your Description
If your story is being uploaded over the course of more than a couple days, you really need to be changing this description. Remember that changing the description changes where it shows up on the site, meaning different descriptions get different people, so from a promotion perspective, this gets more eyes on your story. On top of that, as you write, your abilities as a writer and my understanding of that story in particular are going to change for the better, especially if you're mining the comments for criticism and interacting with your fans: this means you can write a much better description by the end of a project than you could by the end.
The most important time is probably after a major shift in the plot: sometimes you write a chapter which makes a tag or detail that worked well early on not work as well as another you didn't use does afterwards. I try to look at it again every chapter on Displaced into Nothing, simply because that's how often I change my mind about what's important. It's had at least 6 different genre tags and 10 different character tags: it's always been Twilight, Spike and an OC, but 'Discord', 'Mane Six', 'Princess Luna', 'Flash Sentry', and 'Princess Celestia' have all held the 4th and 5th slots.
A moment on Tags
You should honestly have as many of the tags which work for your story, simply because that's how people find your story in searches. The limit used to be 5, but so many stories abused this with tags that didn't really fit that Knightly lowered the number to 3. This is why stories more than a few years old sometimes have 4 or 5 tags, but almost never content warnings. This means you're probably going to run into issues with more ambitious works. The staff's stance (at least, at the time of those discussions) was that you should figure out which tags are most crucial to your story. I was later advised to go look up which ones are most popular with readers if you're not sure, because that can be a big deal. I'm told the "thriller" and "horror" tags are to be avoided, and I do not recommend using both at once, even though I did for Displaced into Nothing at points: it may have been one of the main reasons The Mare in White didn't get many views early on.
The End
I hope this helps you all when you're putting together a description next time. As I said, this is MY method, and it doesn't HAVE to be yours, but if you consider this stuff when writing descriptions in the future, and you haven't been, I can guarantee your descriptions will be better for it. Happy writing everypony!
Read your blog, read my story description and said fuck it and changed it up a little. Not as much as you had suggested, but still because of this blog. This is a fantastic guide though, I just don't think I am capable of following all of it at my current writing level. Or may that's the insomnia speaking, who knows? Thanks for this anyway, done a great help.
5021655
Might I ask which story you're referring to? I'd be willing to offer some quick feedback...
5021805
You started reading it a while ago, was called "Hmm... I'm dead", I renamed it into "The Reliving". It's not a masterpiece, but I'm working on it. If you are willing to give me some feedback, I'd appreciate it, but you don't have to. There was a comment by you when you found out on the second chapter that it is anthro. Flop of infinite sadness. It was actually pretty funny but understandable. You definitely read chapter three at least, but I edited them all a teensy bit. Not much story-wise, but comfort-wise.
5021833
Let's take a look...
So, with FiMFiction, one of the places the reader can't control the line spacing is the long description. I suggest you add some double-spacing here, manually. You might also consider adding a horizontal rule and doing some author explanation, like I was talking about, and perhaps a few words at the top to mess with the site's profiling. I highly recommend that you mention things like who your character is displaced as and what kind of world they've been displaced into, because that helps people know what they're getting into. Other than that, it doesn't have any typos and it's a decent hook.
5021881
Thank you for this, I'll take this into consideration if I decide to better it up.
I've never seen anybody write descriptions even 1/5 as long as yours. Interesting... but I don't know if it will lure in more readers than it turns away. One of my favorite descriptions:
5027717
Those are good too, though I really do prefer the long ones...
That has good points. I will definitely take this into consideration when writing a description for another fanfic. (If I do another one)