One-Sentence Novel Summaries

It depends on you, of course.

With Randy Ingermanson's Snowflake Method, you start your novel planning with your one-sentence summary. This becomes the core of longer summaries, as you build your one sentence to one paragraph, one paragraph to one page, and one page to four pages.

The advantage to this is that you get all the summarizing out of the way to begin with (although you may have to make substantial changes as you go along). You also start out knowing the heart of your story. That way, if you get too far from that heart as you write, you can think about whether you should go back to the story you thought you were telling, or if you should reassess the situation and change your one-sentence story.

Of course, if you're more of a seat-of-the-pants writer, you may have no idea what the heart of your story is, and may have to write a few drafts to figure it out. Even then, you could consider writing your one-sentence summary before finishing your final draft, so you know the central focus of your novel.

I'm not an expert; I'm learning about these writerly things as I go along. But there are a few experts who can tell you how to write a one-sentence summary (although their advice sometimes conflicts in minor ways).

Writer Randy Ingermanson describes the one-sentence summary as step one of his Snowflake Method. If you go through his blog, you can follow the one-sentence summary critique sessions he holds occasionally. He also gives examples of one-sentence summaries of popular books.

Literary agent and writer Nathan Bransford has a helpful blog post on one-sentence, one-paragraph, and two-paragraph pitches. A later post describes how to write a one-sentence pitch.

Literary agent Rachelle Gardner also has a post on how to write one-sentence summaries, which includes examples from some popular books. She held a one-sentence summary contest, and afterwards described some common problems she noticed in the entries, with some helpful examples of what not to do.