Submission Protocol: Summary Execution

In my opinion, one of the toughest things for writers to do is summarize their work into a few sentences. I mean get it down to pitch length, still make it interesting, and avoid giving away the entire plot. Authors aren’t called on to do this very often with short story submissions, but a few markets ask for a brief synopsis in the cover letter.

So how do you write a good summary? Well, I’ll tell you how I do it, but before we get started be advised that story summaries are somewhat rare in...