User blog comment:DJay32/On Writing Synopses/@comment-1988716-20140129172440

Also, I realize I accidentally left the questions in the blog post ambiguous, since some questions should be answered with "Yes" and some should be answered with "No." The running theme to this is What is your blog about? What is essential to conveying this?
 * Is this piece of information vital to understanding the story? (Your answer should be Yes. Let's use my blog Benefits, for example. The story is "a man loses his wife for ambiguous reasons and turns to smoking to attempt find answers to his life." I could include that his friend also loses his wife, or that he gets a job for a while, or that he often hallucinates a fiery version of his former wife, but these are all details that would only really be essential to something like an analysis of the story rather than a simple "What is this blog about?")
 * Does this feel like it's being written by someone who isn't the author of the story? (Your answer should be Yes. I mean, really, this isn't something you should be worrying about most of the time as it's usually easy to keep your wording objective, but generally what I meant with the question is "If it sounds like the blog is being described in a personal manner or like it's trying to be sold to the audience, the readers can probably assume the author is the one writing the Wiki page." Tone of voice should be neutral.)
 * Is this line trying to make this character look good or bad to the audience? (Your answer should be No. Even if you were writing World War II and describing Hitler on the Wiki page, the Wiki page should not pass judgment on its characters. The Wiki page is here for information for information's sake. Tell us what a character did, or how a character felt if necessary. Tell us a character is, literarily speaking, the protagonist or antagonist or deuteragonist or a foil or an audience surrogate. Don't tell us how to feel, don't even try to influence how we feel. A Wiki article exists about a story, it is not the story itself.)
 * Do I need to mention every Fear that's in the story? (Your answer should depend on what's necessary. Like the Benefits example above, it's important to mention The Brute and The Burning Bride, as they are a metaphor for the central conflict of the blog. It is not important to mention that EAT and The Cold Boy also appeared as metaphors, because they were just side details that often only appeared for a post or two.)

..also look let me make another thing clear which kinda undermines things in the blog post: You don't have to keep your synopsis short, and you can include little details if you want to, just keep it consistent and keep it objective. The Rapture article's synopsis has a Full Synopsis which tells the story in probably a dozen paragraphs (which, granted, is still very short compared to how long the actual story is), so you can do that too. Just keep your synopsis consistent and objective. Don't bring up every little detail. You can bring up details that help characterize the protagonists or antagonists, especially if they convey independent things about the characters that bigger details don't already tell. Or if you're going to literally say everything the character does, only do that if the story itself didn't already. Like, for example, the Wiki articles for Built For Two, Harlequin Metropolis, The Topography of Thought, and Rapture, where in all the stories what literally happened can be hard to tell.

BUT IF ALL OF THIS IS EITHER POINTLESS OR MAKING IT SOUND LIKE A WIKI ARTICLE IS A HARD THING TO DO, screw it all and just remember that the Wiki is meant to be an objective resource. People check the Wiki to find out generally how Fears have been written without having to read a lot of stuff themselves. And say what you want about that kind of mentality, but we don't want to force people to read our stories. That's not what kind of mythos this is.