This Summary Lab Bonus features Nathan Bransford, who was an agent for 9 years at Curtis Brown. He’s now an author and the blogger behind one of the biggest industry sites: nathanbransford.com.
In this session, Nathan discusses one of the biggest challenges for authors who are trying to summarize something as lengthy and involved as a manuscript. He explains the concept of summarizing through specificity. This means focusing on key events and what actually happens to the characters, rather than using broad summarizations.
As you’ll see from the Hotseat examples that Nathan revises in the session, by introducing specificity, the summary becomes more interesting and easier for the reader to grasp.
The end of the call featured an on-the-spot Q&A session. (Forward past the first 10 minutes — we arrived early and waited.)
Download the slides in Keynote format here — and as a PDF here.