If you’re an unpublished YA writer I don’t think you can overestimate the value of writing a summary of your work.

It’s not always on the list of requirements for submissions to publishers, more often they want to see the first three chapters and synopsis, but if you want a tool that will support your story long term- then a summary has to be it.

For each chapter, write a two sentence main event, it’s not always true but if you can’t write a two sentence main event for the chapter then it might have too much going on (or worse – too little). The first sentence should be a set up, “The main character arrives in a new town but as night falls she realises she is alone.” The second sentence should be a climactic note, “The character is attacked by bandits and escapes into the desert.”

That done, write a 500 word description of the entire chapter. You can also summarise number of pages and word count per chapter.

It’s such a revealing process! You might immediately notice that three of your chapters are twice the size of the others and need to be split up or edited down.

You’ll see potential edits and redrafts easier than you would by just reading and rereading the same chapter. If you find yourself summarising as follows; “There are two pages of description of their journey.” or “For three paragraphs the main character talks in detail about an irrelevant hobby.” then you might want to change them.

Be strict with yourself, and keep to a 500 word limit per chapter. This process of carefully editing your summary down to the absolute minimum is, of course, a scaled down process of what you should try to do with the full size chapter, but it’s much easier to manage on a small scale. Once you’ve nailed the 500 words, go back to your original chapter and see what you think of it.

In addition, should you get feedback on your manuscript, or if an editor suggests changes you’ll be more able to make them quickly. Rather than having to sort through the story as a whole you can look at your chapter summaries and make concise changes there, which you’ll then find easier to write back into the main text.

The magical beauty of summaries doesn’t stop there- no! If you’re writing series fiction you can have 500 word book summaries. If you apply this process to someone else’s work you get a review, and If you want a fantastic example of this you should look at John Crace’s Digested Read in the Guardian newspaper. Here he is on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Two sentence summary of this post:

“Writing a summary of your work will quickly reveal important changes you hadn’t seen before.”

Oh- just one sentence. Perhaps the post wasn’t interesting enough?

For a prize, who can summarise it in the least words?

Total words (not including post heading): 500