Just what is a hook, anyway? And how do you write one?

There are three things everybody seems to agree upon when it comes to hooks: 1) They come at the beginning of the story; 2) They catch the reader/editor’s attention so they’ll want to keep reading; 3) They’re really, really important.

After that, everybody goes in a different direction. Starting with length: the most common definition seems to be “the first sentence of the story,” but you can find places that define the hook as the first paragraph, the first page, the first scene, or the first chapter of a story.

Once someone has defined how long they think a hook can or should be, they usually jump right in with recommendations. “Start with a question.” “Start in the middle of something.” “Start with dialog.” “Start with conflict.” “Start with a dilemma.” “Start with a simile or metaphor.”

None of these are particularly bad advice, but none of them really address the fact that a hook has to fit the story. Any fisherman knows that if you bait your hook with worms, you won’t catch the same fish that you would if you used minnows, or a lure that imitates flying bugs. And you don’t use the same bait in the ocean as you’d use in a fresh-water stream or in a lake, because the fish are different.

Similarly, if your story is slam-bang action-adventure, then a bomb explosion in the first paragraph is likely to hook the right readers (i.e., the ones that will enjoy your book). If your story focuses on relationships, the explosion likely won’t work very well. Fooling readers into reading further because they’re expecting one sort of story will not make them suddenly like the kind you’ve actually written. Also, the wrong bait is likely to drive off the readers who would like what you’ve written. Bad idea.

So Principle #1 for writing a hook is: It has to suit the story.

Principle #2 is that the hook has to be intriguing. That is, it has to have bait on it, something that will interest the kind of readers who’ll like the story. The theory is that once you get somebody interested, they’ll stay interested…but this only works if you paid attention to Principle #1 – the hook has to suit the story.

This is why all those recommendations aren’t worth the pixels they’re displayed in. Any one of them might suit your story, but also might not. It depends on the story, and on the readers. You have to ask “Is starting with a question/conflict/a dilemma/dialog/etc. right for this story? Can I come up with a first line based on any of those things that will intrigue the readers who’ll enjoy the book?” Quite often, you can’t answer those questions until you know what the story is, which brings us to the third point.

And the third point is that a hook does not have to be the very first part of the story you write. Yes, the hook is the first bit of the story, where “bit” obviously ranges from one sentence to one chapter, depending on who you talk to. But it doesn’t have to be hook-y until the story is finished. (This is where most of the how-to advice places miss the boat; they assume that, since the hook comes first, it must and will be written first, and if it’s the first thing you write, then they don’t have to mention Principle #1, because of course the writer will write a story that suits the opening line.)

Some writers do start by coming up with a killer opening. Other times, ideas just arrive as a hook; “Mother taught me to be polite to dragons” hooked me into writing the rest of the story. But quite a few writers start writing with “scaffolding” – anywhere from a paragraph to a couple of chapters of “getting into” the story, all of which will have to be dismantled/deleted when the story is finished. And doing something just to get going (and then revising it later when one has a better idea what’s going on) works very well for quite a lot of writers, even when it’s not actual scaffolding.

If generating a killer first line is what gets you started, by all means sit down and write a list of twenty opening lines that intrigue you. But if not, don’t worry about it. Just treat it as a revision problem.

Which brings me, finally, to the actual question of writing hooks.

If you have a cool idea that came with an opening line, or an opening line that is just begging for a story to go with it, you already have your hook. Write it down and keep going. If generating one is the first step in your process, then Principle #2 is the most important thing to remember: the hook must be intriguing. Unless you already have a very specific audience in mind, start by intriguing yourself. You’re the one who’s going to have to write the story that flows from the hook, after all.

That means, if you love reading/writing action, start with action. If what gets you interested in a story is a question or a mystery, start with presenting the reader with a puzzle. If it’s characters, start with the most interesting thing about the most interesting character in your head. If you hate not knowing where the story is happening or what’s going on, don’t begin with a paragraph that hides these things from the reader; instead, think of the most interesting and intriguing way you can present them. And then write the rest of the story.

If you’re treating the hook as a revision problem, you do this in reverse. An analytical sort of writer or reviser will look at the story they’ve already written and think about it, about what kinds of things are at the heart of it (characters, relationships, adventure, etc.), and about what kinds of readers are likely to enjoy that kind of story. They ask themselves what those readers will like best about the story, and try to work out how to get as much of that thing into the coolest possible first few lines. (You can run down those lists of recommended ways of writing hooks as a sort of brain teaser, a way to jog your mind into coming up with some possibilities, but you don’t have to use any of them.)

A more intuitive writer will also look at the story they’ve written, but instead of thinking about all that, they’ll probably read it over a couple of times until something catches their attention, and then they work whatever-it-is into the perfect opening, even if they can’t explain why it’s perfect. They just know it feels right.

Either way, ultimately it’s the writer who gets to decide what makes the perfect opening line for a particular story. There aren’t rules or a limited list that you have to choose from. If all your betareaders stop reading before they get to the end of the first paragraph, then whatever you did isn’t working and you need to fix it somehow. That may just mean working on it, not changing it to someone else’s idea of “what makes a good hook.”

Note that although nearly every advice-giver looks at the punchy, first-line hooks when they give examples, the main reason they do this is because punchy, first-line hooks are short. Books that take a paragraph or a page as their opening hook rarely get quoted as examples, because that means there’s less room for the advice-giver to explain why they’re a perfectly good method of starting the sort of book that ought to start that way.

Since the immediate-background stuff usually comes up in the story, a lot of writers can just make it up on the fly. I find that I’m better off at least thinking about some of it in advance, because if I wait until two of my characters are introduced to each other in Chapter Three, I’ll probably have them bow or shake hands just because that’s my default and I want to get on with the scene. If I make it up ahead of time, I’m more likely to take a few minutes to come up with a formal greeting that reflects the culture I’ve invented.

Which brings me to the other other kind of worldbuilding, the kind that every writer does to some extent, and that’s the kind that’s done in the story itself. It’s not about inventing the cool details and clever twists on history; it’s about conveying a sense of place and culture and background to the reader.

There are three things to look at when thinking about this sort of worldbuilding:

1. How familiar is the place/time/culture to your expected readers?
2. How much does your story depend on unique features of the place/time/culture in which it is set?
3. How much would your story be enriched by including unique features of the place/time/culture in which it is set?

1. A lot of present-day fiction is set in Generic City or Generic Town, Writer’s Home Country, because the writer quite reasonably expects the story to be published in his country, and they’ll all know how things work there. Also, if you set a story in a place, time, or culture that you have no experience of, you will have to do research to get it right, and let’s face it, generic is easier.

The farther you get from the place, time, and culture your readers live in, the more worldbuilding your story has to offer them if you want it to feel as if it really is in a different place, time, or culture. Chicago is not L.A. is not New Orleans is not New York is not Miami…and those are all major cities in the same country. The farther out you branch, the greater the differences; Paris is a lot more not-Moscow and not-Beijing than New York is not-Chicago, and Paris in 2013 is not Paris in 1968 or 1798 or 52 BCE.

2. This ought to be a no-brainer; after all, anything that the story depends on needs to be in the book, right? When a story is based in a real place, time, or culture, though, some writers forget that they can’t leave out a critical bit of information just because their readers can google on the meaning of cranes in Japanese culture. Worse are the folks who presume that if they can rattle off a list of every type of hobgoblin in the British Isles, all of their readers will know all about them as well.

3. The first two points aim the writer at things that really need to be in the story; this one is for looking at the things that are optional. Every place has things about it that are unique, or groups of non-unique things that add together into a unique “feel.” A story may not need to be set anywhere more specific than Generic Metropolitan Area, but speaking as a Chicago ex-pat, there’s something special about books set in Chicago that capture the feel of the place. It may not matter to the story that the El (elevated train, for non-Chicagoans) is really, really noisy, but I get a warm fuzzy feeling when the characters in a Chicago story have to stop talking in mid-conversation every so often while the El rattles by.

And that brings me to the how part of the post. A lot of writers seem to think of worldbuilding as description: what things are there, what they look and feel and sound like. But places, times, and cultures are – or should be – a lot more than a painted backdrop that you can unroll behind your characters as they move through the story. Good description is certainly part of worldbuilding, but if you really want your readers to get into your world, you have to give them more than a handful of local placenames and a vivid description of the harbor/town square/other big tourist attraction.

Every aspect of the story is part of the worldbuilding on some level, from what the characters have for lunch to the style and type of clothing they (and others) wear to their manners when they’re greeting someone to things like having to stop in mid-conversation to let a noisy train go past. The particular piece of the world we live in affects every aspect of our lives, all the time, but we take it so much for granted that we don’t often think about how. My sister in Alabama does not have the January Reflex where you automatically take your shoes off just inside someone’s door, because where she lives, she a) does not have to wear snow boots in January, and b) does not come in with shoes covered in ice-melter and dirty snow that will track over two rooms, minimum, if you forget to take them off.

Worldbuilding in a story is remembering to include all those little things, from the vitally important social aspects (whether that means remembering to curtsey to the king and bow to the queen, never vice versa, or whether it means always stirring your tea clockwise) to the everyday things like swapping your shoes for an “indoor pair,” or opening/closing all the windows at particular times of day because of the temperature.

It’s the way living in a place affects the everyday lives of the characters down in the details. How many details are too many is a matter of taste; some authors go for lots of lush description of everything, even making breakfast, while others go for bare-bones Hemingway-esque sketches. One way or another, though, the world is always there in the story…because stories need a place to happen in as much as they need a problem to be about.

This is complicated by the fact that one of my best friends and story-noodlers is highly character-centered and dislikes having to make up much/any deep background in advance of the story. So her noodling questions have all been focused on the characters and plot (because she knows I do plot), which sometimes hits the “deep worldbuilding” button, but mostly doesn’t.

What I mean by “deep worldbuilding” is all the background, from geography to cultural history, that shapes the place and time the characters are living in. When I’m writing alternate history, I have many libraries’ worth of information to use or choose not to use. I can look up where the rivers and active volcanoes are, or where certain crops originated; I have the Han Dynasty, the Egyptian Pharaohs, and the Greco-Roman Empire that can be assumed with all their real-life consequences, or tinkered with, or eliminated with all those consequences (what if the rulers of the Indian subcontinent had chased Alexander back home and conquered Greece? Or Cleopatra had managed to annex Rome, instead of Rome getting Egypt?). Even if I made the world unrecognizable save for the geography (because, oh, aliens messed around with life on Earth at the end of the Mesozoic Era, so we have civilized dinosaurs instead of us), I’d know where the mountains and rivers were, and what the climate was like in various places, and so on.

But the New Thing isn’t alternate history in any way, shape, or form. Bits of it are modeled on Real Life History, but it’s more like visiting a museum exhibit of Michelangelo’s work and then coming home and trying to build a Cubist version of the Pieta out of cardboard boxes than it is like a mash-up of actual places and events.

Doing a lot of deep worldbuilding in advance is not for every writer, but it helps me. In fact, as has become quite clearly obvious, I need to know a fair amount of it, or I can’t get things to hang together properly at the immediate-backstory stage. That doesn’t mean I do all the deep worldbuilding at once; on the contrary, it develops in fits and starts, forwards and backwards. That is, sometimes I know something (like “this is a coastal city”) that implies a bunch of other things (a harbor, trade, seafood dishes). Other times, I know something (there are three distinct and mutually exclusive types of magic) and it begs a question (how were they discovered, and why do they have more-or-less equal status and emphasis?). The answer to that (three major empires back in their early history, each with a different attitude/philosophy toward What Man Is Allowed To Tamper With) implies some more things (my city must be somewhere that was either not directly influenced by any of the empires, or influenced equally by all of them, there are going to be at least some people who still have very strong opinions about whether each type of magic is good/bad).

I like the idea of a trade crossroads at some point in the middle of my three empires, which fits with the harbor-and-trade part I established earlier, but it might be inconvenient. I’ve already got a three-way magical conflict; do I really want a three-way philosophical and political conflict as well? Even if it ends up being just the historical remnants of the empires that my present-day people have to deal with? On the other hand, can I really avoid it, given what I have so far for background, even if I stick the city far away?

If I make the location somewhere well away from the ancient empires, then it’ll need to have some local resource that’s valuable enough to stimulate trade with all three, but not so valuable that any of the empires would come all the way out there and conquer the place to get it. So not iron or gold, but maybe silk or purple dye or porcelain. That will probably also affect their trade and lifestyle during the period of the story, and possibly the prosperity of the city, depending on whether said trade item is still in demand or has been made obsolete by some new invention or discovery.

There’s also the question of when and how those empires collapsed. Rot from within and barbarians from without, like Rome? War, leading to mutual exhaustion? Plague? Is any of that still a danger? And what’s left of them – a handful of more-or-less equal countries, or some small new places trying to expand into the decaying core of the original empire? I don’t plan on getting into lots of geopolitics in this story, but if my city is a trade center, what’s going on in it will be of interest to the rest of the world, and vice versa. Also, at least one of my characters is from away, so I’ll need to have her place-of-origin developed more than just “up north.”

Then there’s the city government (is it a charter city, like London, with a mayor and aldermen, but still answerable to the king? Or a city-state run by its own prince or council?), what the local factions are (besides my three kinds of mages), and a bunch of cultural stuff, especially cultural stuff revolving around clothes (because my main character is a seamstress).

Which brings in the question of what fabrics and decorations are available, and whether they’re produced locally (they don’t have to be; it’s a trade center, after all), which ones are expensive luxuries and which are the working-class wear, whether or not there are sumptuary laws. I know that unicorn leather is banned, but do they feel the same way about anything else?

I know there are at least some magical creatures in this world – fairies of the small-butterfly sort and unicorns, at minimum – so I need to know whether or not they’re intelligent and/or have their own magic, how different cultures treat them, and how the inevitable conflicts in attitude will get handled in this particular place. Possibly also how they’ll be handled in other places, if I end up with more characters who are From Away or who have traveled widely.

Many of these things, when I get them fully developed, won’t get into the story directly, but they’ll affect it profoundly because the historical and cultural cross-currents affect almost everything in the story. This is particularly frustrating for my story-noodler, because every time another bit of background clunks solidly into place, part of the plot changes, and she’s not used to it because I haven’t done this for the last eight or ten books. Also, because she doesn’t need to do as much of it, or not in advance anyway.

Most of the writers I know of use one of three basic methods to get past this point: 1) Power on through; 2) Composting; 3) Plot Noodling.

Powering on Through works best for those writers who like to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and just make it up as they go along, and for those who actually do know “what happens next” but who for some reason just don’t want to be bothered writing it down. (For me, it’s usually because the sticky bit that comes next is going to be an explanation of something or a transition scene, and I purely hate writing explanations and transitions. Other writers have different stuff on their hate lists.) Powering on through is just what it sounds like: you sit down and write something, anything, to get past the sticky bit.

The trouble with powering on through is that if you aren’t the sort of writer who makes it up as they go, or don’t know what happens next, it may not get you anywhere useful. You can end up with two or three chapters that are totally wrong, and have to go back and pitch them, which is painful. It’s a particularly bad idea if what the story actually needs is more development, which is what the other two methods do.

Composting is my term for letting the story sit in one’s backbrain until it’s ready to grow things. This is the one where you stick the story in a drawer or file somewhere and work on other stuff. Periodically — every couple of months, say, or if you’re really busy, maybe once a year — you pull it out and look at it and see if it’s ready to be a story yet. You do this in order to gently remind your backbrain that it is supposed to be working on this story. This one works well for people who have so many possible stories to do that they don’t have to develop any one in particular because they’ve got plenty of other ones to work on in the meantime, for people who get bored easily by working only on one project, and for people who like to maximize production time by rotating from one story to another while they’re waiting.

The trouble with composting is that there’s a tendency to end up with a whole heap of WIPs or UFOs (UnFinished Objects)…and no finished projects. This problem seems to be particularly common for relatively new writers, but it can strike anyone. It helps to go back over everything in the compost pile once every month or two, like stirring a real compost pile to keep it cooking. It also helps to be really determined about working on things, and perhaps to try the next method from time to time.

Plot Noodling basically involves taking the idea you have and the chapters you have written and looking at them very carefully, poking at them and turning them over and looking for loose threads and rough edges and incomplete background and generally trying to figure out what it is you need to know in order to move on. “What it is you need to know” is, quite often, backstory: How did this character get into this mess? What have all the other characters, especially the villains/antagonists, been doing? What is the goal each of the main characters is trying to head for (and it may be “I want to get home and not be bothered with swords in stones and saving the country!”)? What are the possible things that can interfere with each of these goals (especially the main character’s)?

Sometimes, one also needs to clearly define what constitutes “winning” the situation for the Hero — or, to put it another way, what sort of ending you’re heading for. Is the ultimate resolution going to be the wedding, or the defeat/death of the dragon, or the main character wrestling with temptation (again) and winning at last? Some writers need a goal to aim for; others are better off with a general sense of direction.

Plot Noodling often works best if you can find someone who is good at asking you the sorts of questions you haven’t thought about asking yourself, but you can learn to do it all on your own (and in my experience, at least, there aren’t a whole lot of people who are good at asking the right sorts of questions without considerable training, so you may be best off planning to do it yourself). It can often be profitably combined with Composting — you poke at the story and make some notes and think about the obelisk or the missing sword or the international political situation (the one in the story, not the real-life one), and then put the manuscript away for a couple of days or weeks. When you bring it out, you poke at it some more, have a brilliant idea about a useful minor character and a possible plot twist, make more notes, and set it back to compost some more.

Eventually, it reaches the point where when you pull it out, you realize that all the pieces are there and it’s ready to grow roses. (One of my friends refers to this stage as “the story reaching critical mass,” but that works for nuclear bombs, not compost…) And then you sit down and write it, until you hit the next wall or the next veil and the process starts all over again.

The first, most common reason for this is that the author didn’t actually have any idea what was going on to begin with, and when they start having to explain all their mysterious hints and ominous warnings, whatever they come up with just doesn’t measure up to the menace in the early chapters. It’s as if they’ve had livestock go missing and a field mysteriously burned, and everyone’s muttering about legends of dragons, and then they find out that the livestock was stolen by gypsies and the field caught fire when two kids were careless with the cigarettes they were smoking back behind the barn. It’s a let-down.

Obviously, one cure is to stop doing this – that is, first come up with the dragon, and then figure out what mysterious hints to drop to get there. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for folks who’ve already fallen into this trap and don’t want to throw away a perfectly good set of three-to-ten-chapters. What they need to do is come up with a problem that lives up to whatever level of threat they’ve established at the beginning. Better yet, come up with something that’s even worse than the opening implied.

My experience is that the most effective way to do this is to turn off your Inner Critic, sit down, and make a list of at least twenty things that could be the Big Problem. Gypsies, cigarettes, bandits, infiltrators from over the border, dragons, human sabotage, enemies setting a trap for the king or lord or Our Heroes, a new Fire Lord rising…twenty things, minimum. The first three to five will be the easy choices, the stuff that’s at the top of your mind. Mostly, they’re unlikely to develop into a particularly interesting story, but sometimes one of them is just the thing you want. After the first three-to-five, the ideas usually start getting more unusual and unexpected – dragons, traps, etc. – and you can pick one or more of those to use or combine into something that will live up to your opening. That’s why it’s a list of twenty things: to force yourself to come up with possibilities that aren’t obvious.

The trick to this is not to judge your ideas as you’re coming up with them, or think too hard about how they’ll twist the story you thought you were telling. There’ll be time for that when you have the list. Once you have the list, cross off the easy, obvious choices at the beginning and look at the rest of them. Maybe some can be combined for even greater impact – those infiltrators from over the border may be setting a trap for the king in preparation for starting a war, or perhaps the dragon is merely the servant of the rising Fire Lord.

The second reason for the falling-apart problem is that even though the writer has what’s supposed to be a huge problem facing the protagonists – the dragon – it seems much too easy once everyone finally figures out what’s going on. Missing livestock, burned field, dragon legends…ah, right, so there’s a dragon. So we call in the army with lots of cannon support, they set out some fat sheep for bait, the cannons blow the dragon out of the sky, and bob’s your uncle. This tends to happen either when a) the writer is much too eager to get to the Grand Finale and the confrontation with the dragon, and so skips over any problems that might occur on the way there, or b) hasn’t thought everything through (i.e., as in, not realizing early on that an army with artillery could take down the dragon fairly easily, as soon as they know there is one).

The fix for this one is similar to the brainstorming I just described, but instead of coming up with a list of ideas for what the Big Problem could be, the author has to come up with two lists. The first is a list of What Could Go Wrong from wherever the beginning ends. We know there’s a dragon now, so we’ll send a messenger to the king to get the army and the cannons. But: the king won’t send the army because he doesn’t believe in dragons, the trail up the mountain is too narrow for the cannons, the dragon eats the messenger so the king never hears, the cannons were built by the cheapest bidder and explode, the dragon is one of a larger flock and the cannons can’t take down twelve dragons at once, etc.

The second list is the list of What Else Could Be Going On that Our Heroes don’t know about yet. The dragon is the servant of a new Fire Lord, who will be really annoyed when Our Heroes kill it. The dragon was lured to Our Heroes’ village on purpose, by somebody who has it in for them and who will certainly try something else once they get rid of the dragon. The dragon has a dangerous object in its horde – cursed, stolen, something that possessed people, whatever – and once the dragon is gone and the object is found, they’ll have a whole new problem to deal with. Again, no judging ideas or worrying about how they might fit into the story until after the lists are complete.

The last reason for the falling-apart problem is usually that the writer is paying too much attention to The Rules ^TM, specifically the ones about how the heroes have to make mistakes, make their situation worse, etc. until the Grand Finale. The standard plot skeleton is DEscriptive, not PREscriptive, and it just means that a story wherein things run along too smoothly is seldom interesting to read. The heroes have to face and overcome obstacles, but the obstacles don’t necessarily have to be of their own making.

One needs to be very, very cautious about deciding that you really need a prologue to do whatever-it-is. There are very few things that a writer truly cannot do without resorting to a prologue. Adding a prologue may be the first and most obvious thing the author thinks of when faced with a recalcitrant bit of backstory or characterization, but that doesn’t always make a prologue the best choice. Easy and obvious are not the same as effective.

On the other hand, while it may be quite possible to have your archeologists discover letters or a diary discussing life in Pompeii, it really isn’t plausible for them to find a first-person account written by somebody as they were fleeing the erupting volcano. The archeologists can piece things together and imagine what it must have been like, but if the author needs that dramatic flight scene as a scene, he’s probably going to have to put it in a prologue.

The second thing to remember about prologues is that if a book has a prologue, the prologue is the start of the book. The prologue doesn’t have to be full of action, any more than any other opening of a story does, but it does have to pique the reader’s interest so that they’ll keep reading. (This is why so many “ancient myth” and “historical background” prologues fail – they’re just not very interesting on their own.)

The third thing to remember is that no matter how brilliant your prologue is, there are going to be readers who skip it on principle. This means that a book with a prologue has, in essence, two different places (the prologue and Chapter 1) that each have to function as the start of the story (i.e., hook the reader into reading more).

Depending on the sort of prologue you’re doing, this usually means that Chapter 1 is going to have to start even more strongly than it normally would, in order to re-hook the readers when they have to switch gears, however slightly, at the end of the prologue. (Note that I said “start strong,” not “start with action.” There’s a difference.)

Prologues come in several varieties, and it helps to have some idea which sort you are doing. The different kinds of prologues tend to fall into categories according to timing, viewpoint, and style/function.

Timing: a prologue can happen before/long before the action of the main story; at the same time as the main story; or look backward after the main story is over. Viewpoint: The prologue can be told from the point of view of the main character from the main story, from the point of view of a secondary character, or from the point of view of some other character who never actually appears in the main story as a character (as with Steven Brust’s Paarfi novels, where the POV of the prologue is a crabby Dragaeran historian who is the putative author of the “historical fiction” that follows). Style/function: The prologue can be a scene; it can be narrative in a style different from but related to the main story (as when the prologue is a fairy tale or myth, or a summary of the historical background, or a fictional academic introduction to the material that follows); it can function as an introduction to the world or characters, or as a frame (usually with an epilog in the same vein) for the main story.

All of these aspects can be mixed and matched to some extent; that is, your prologue may be a dramatized scene from your protagonist’s childhood or a first-person protagonist’s narrative introduction to his memoir (setting the prologue solidly in the “future” of the main story); it can be a myth from your world’s ancient history or a centuries-in-the-story’s-future mythologized version of the events in the story; and so on.

A good prologue should leave the reader with more questions than simply “How does this tie in to the main story?” or “What happens to these people next?” This is especially important if the prologue is from a different viewpoint than the main story, because if the only thing the reader wants to know is what happens to these people next, she’s likely to get annoyed when the main story turns out to be about somebody else.

Generally speaking, a good prologue requires the reader to switch gears (from one time period to another, one viewpoint to another, one style/structure/format to another, or all of the above) between the prologue and Chapter One. The bigger the shift in gears, the stronger your opening of Ch. 1 has to be to re-catch and re-interest the reader. If there is no shift of gears between the end of the prologue and the beginning of Chapter 1, then what you have is probably actually Chapter 1 and not a prologue after all, and all you really need to do is renumber your chapters.

In addition to all of the above stuff, prologues are usually significantly shorter than the average chapter in the rest of the book. This isn’t an actual format requirement, but it is well to remember that the more one can condense the scene or information, the more likely one is to get at least some of those readers who hate prologues to read it anyway. On the other hand, three pages of super-neutronium-density narrative summary are likely to put off more readers than one might lose with a ten-page scene that conveys less actual information but keeps the reader interested with less effort on their part. It really depends on what you’re trying to do.

The first and biggest mistake a lot of writers make, especially in science fiction and fantasy, is to assume that there is no way to get the reader up to speed on the story background except to provide a three-page infodump of all the presumably-critical material right at the start of the story. So the writer starts off with a history lesson or a summary of cultures, and half the people who open the book close it and put it back on the shelf, while 90% of the people who do stick with the story skip the prologue and start with Chapter One…and have no problem whatever understanding what is going on.

Too many writers think that because they know all sorts of background information, said information is absolutely necessary in order to understand the story. It hardly ever is, and even if the writer is correct and the reader ultimately does need to know the tangled history of the United Planets and how various alien races came to join, they usually don’t need to know it in order to have a basic understanding of the opening scene where Bob is trying to book a seat on the shuttle to Betelgeuse. Yes, it will make the scene much richer in nuance if the reader understands exactly why Bob doesn’t want to take a seat designed for Rigelians, even if it’s the only one left, but it’s hardly ever truly necessary. It is, in fact, often much more effective to let the reader presume that Bob is worried about the fact that seats designed for three-legged insectoids aren’t particularly comfortable for humans, and only later work in the political tension…and later still, the historical reasons behind the political tension.

My friend Lois Bujold has a thirteen-plus book series, no volume of which has a “what has gone before” prologue. Yet new readers who pick up the latest book in the series never seem to have a problem understanding and enjoying the story, even if they don’t know all the details of the Time of Isolation, the Incendiary Cat Plot, the names and relationships of every recurring character, etc., right from the start of the story. Yes, some of this is because she is really, really good at working the necessary information into the story, but some of it is also because she is well aware that not all the existing information is necessary for this particular story. And also that readers are smarter than a lot of writers think.

The second big mistake a lot of writers make is that they forget that it is not enough for a prologue to contain necessary information; it must also be interesting to the reader. Too often, even the most necessary prologue presents information in a dry, dull, or utterly predictable manner, with the result that many readers put the book down and don’t pick it up again, and many others skip the prologue entirely.

If a reader can skip the prologue and still understand and enjoy the story, you don’t need the prologue. If readers complain that they don’t understand the story, and you find out that they are consistently skipping the prologue, the author needs to either fix the prologue to make it fascinating or ditch the prologue and find some other way of getting the necessary information into the story.

Which brings me to another point: prologues are not a clever way to dump all the background information, so that the author can start the real book with a slam-bang action scene. If a book has a prologue, the prologue IS the start of the book. It doesn’t have to be full of action, any more than any other opening of a story does, but it does have to pique the reader’s interest so that they’ll keep reading. Fifteen pages of history and/or cultural and worldbuilding detail belongs in an appendix for the truly dedicated reader who is fascinated by such stuff, not at the start of the story.

A prologue is also not a clever way to start with slam-bang action when the story opens with eight chapters of ordinary life and slow character building. Sometimes, this sort of thing happens, but it only ever works if the writer is doing more with the prologue than “Gosh, I’m supposed to start with action…I know! I’ll put in a prologue with a battle scene!” (I’ll get to what else you can do in the next post.)

There’s also the scaffolding problem. There are quite a few writers whose process requires them to warm up or ease their way into a story, and some of them use a prologue for this purpose. Usually, this is not a conscious decision, which is unfortunate, because in this situation, the prologue is not part of the story, it’s part of the writer’s process.

It’s like the scaffolding that construction workers put up in order to build a skyscraper. Once the building is built or the story is complete, the scaffolding is no longer needed and should be taken down. This is obvious when it’s a building, but not always so obvious when it’s a story and the writer isn’t really aware of his/her process yet. The best test for this that I know is the one mentioned above: if your first-readers can understand and enjoy the story without the prologue, you probably don’t need it. (The “probably” is there because, very occasionally, there’s a story that works fine without a prologue, but that is much cooler if one includes the prologue. The coolness factor tops everything else.)

Next time: Some thoughts on doing a prologue right.

The thing I’ve noticed, over the years, is just how many people react to my declaration that I’m a writer with a rather wistful statement that boils down to “I’ve always wanted to write, but I don’t have any imagination.”

It took me a long time to decide that maybe they were right…but not for the reasons they think. Their problem is indeed a failure of imagination, but it comes a whole lot earlier than the point at which they try to think up a story. They simply can’t imagine themselves – or people like them – being writers, and so they never really try to become one.

Occasionally, I run across someone for whom it’s not so much that they can’t imagine themselves being a writer as that they’ve never seen stories of the sort they want to write, and thus they assume either that a) nobody will buy the kind of stories they want to write, or b) there is something wrong about the stories they want to write – they’re not good because they don’t follow the patterns and tropes of the fiction they’ve read or seen on TV and movies.

What these folks are doing is telling themselves a story: that because they have never seen X before – whether X is someone like them who writes or whether X is a murder mystery with magic set in historically accurate Han Dynasty China – they can’t or shouldn’t try to do it themselves.

Sometimes, folks like this can be inspired by suddenly finding out that someone like them – a homebody, a lawyer, a high school dropout, a person of color, an eighty-year-old ex-wrestler – has successfully written (or written the kind of story they’re dying to write). More often, though, I meet them again two or six or ten years later and discover that they still are convinced they can’t do it, despite whatever counter-examples I’ve provided (and I have quite a collection of them).

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and our dreams are enormously powerful – far more powerful than the stories that come from outside. And the longer we’ve been telling them, the more powerful they become. I know people who persevered through decades of outside discouragement and apparent failure because they told themselves the story that they were writers; because they had a powerful vision of themselves as someone-who-writes; because they told themselves that there were other people out there wanting to read the stories they wanted to write, the ones they couldn’t find on the current bookshelves or on TV.

Not all of them have been successful, even by their own definitions (which do not always include publication or making a living writing as measures of “success”). A lot of them have, though, and the jury’s still out on the rest of them. The ones who don’t try at all are guaranteed never to make it (whatever “making it” means to them).

You don’t have to believe you will be a success in order to write. You don’t even have to believe that you could be. You just have to believe that you, or someone like you, can sit down with a notebook or at a computer and make up stuff that somebody else might want to read; that you, or someone like you, can learn the craft part of writing and rewriting so as to make your stories more effective at doing whatever it is you want them to do until you’re satisfied with them; that even if there are only three other people in the entire world who will like the particular, peculiar fiction you have to tell, it’s worth your time and effort to put them down in pixels for them and for you; and that all this is something you want to put time and effort into doing.

The so-called “writer’s imagination” starts by imagining oneself as a writer.

Writer: “I’m totally stuck. My characters are down in the ravine and I don’t know what happens next.”

Me: “Sounds familiar.”

Writer (despairing): “How do you decide what comes next?”

Me (frowning slightly): “That’s not really your problem yet.”

Writer: “Huh?”

Me: “You can’t make a decision until you have something to decide. Right now, you have nothing.”

Writer (wails): “So what do I do?”

Me: “Make stuff up. Then you decide whether it’s useful, because you’ll have something to decide about.”

At which point I got a blank look, but after a bit more discussion (OK, a couple of hours worth), she did get things back on track. The problem was that the writer was looking too far ahead. She was trying to think about the next scene, the next chapter, what the next exciting bit was going to be, how to get her characters from the bottom of the ravine to the triumphant climax of the novel. What she wasn’t thinking about was the very next step.

Getting to that step can be a little trickier than it sounds (which is why it took a couple of hours). First, you have to be clear about where the characters are. Where is their location? What do they know (or think they know) at this exact point in the story? And most important of all, what is it that they think they need to accomplish next?

What the characters think they need to accomplish right now – whether it’s rescue someone from the villain’s dungeon, or head to the cafe for a well-deserved cup of coffee after having decimated the wolf pack that was (they think) eating the sheep – will play a large part in determining the next step they take, and what direction they take it in. If they want to rescue a companion from a dungeon, the cautious one will want to plan a rescue mission and then get some supplies, while the reckless one may grab a musket and head for the lockup, but whatever they pick as the very next thing to do, it will take them in the direction of the dungeon, not in the direction of the coffee shop.

Sometimes there are multiple ways in which the characters can proceed. If they have just realized that the villain is up to something, and that they need to find out what, they may spend some time discussing the best way to find out, or they may go running off instantly in a variety of possible directions. Once the writer recognizes this, the first step is to figure out what the likely possibilities are.

Then one has something to decide: would these particular, individual characters, in this particular situation, do A, or B? If they need to find something out, will they stay in the ravine and plan for a few hours, dash back to town as a group to check the local gossip sheet, or send one of their number off to the oracle while the others compile lists of things to investigate and people to question?

Having made this first decision – what is the next step, or the next several steps, that the characters are going to take to try to do what they need to do – one has a second thing to decide: whether it is interesting and relevant enough to show in detail, or whether one would be better off skimming lightly past all the planning and dashing around, and going straight to the meeting three days later when they tell each other what they’ve found and realize, to their horror, that things are much worse than they thought.

The second decision is more complex, because it’s not only a decision about whether the next few things your characters choose to do are interesting and relevant; it’s also a decision about whether the writer can or should try to make them more interesting by throwing in something unexpected or having something go totally wrong. A trip to the library to check the microfiche of the 1851 newspapers that haven’t been digitized yet may not rate a full-blown scene if that’s all that happens, and sometimes what the writer wants is to say “Three days later, they got together and Gerald told them what he’d found.”

Sometimes, though, the trip to the library is the perfect opportunity for the secondary villain to send a thug after Gerald to collect that gambling debt, or for an unexpected car accident, or a fire at the library, or an apparently unrelated attack by mutant ninjas on the library. So the writer has to decide: is this worth making into a scene on its own, and if not, do I add something to make it something worth showing? Or would that be too distracting? What does it do to the pace and the plot development and the characterization if I show or don’t show the scene – and which is more effective for the story I want to tell?

My writer friend was trying to start by knowing about the gambling and the fire and the ninjas, before she even knew that the characters were going to send Gerald to the library. What she really needed was to back up, slow down, and think about what her characters needed to do next, one tiny step at a time. (And not just the characters in the ravine – the villain wasn’t just sitting around twiddling his thumbs and waiting for the heroes to show up and thwart him, after all.)

I didn’t. I never, ever wanted to “be a writer.” I wanted to write. I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to get these blasted characters out of my head and nailed down on paper so I wouldn’t have to keep thinking about them.

Being a writer is something that happened as a result of writing, almost by accident. It was never my goal. My goal was always to finish the current story, and then come up with something even cooler to write about next time. Publishing and making a living were afterthoughts.

At what point in your life did you think you could actually make a living from your writing?

About five and a half books in. That is, I had written and sold five novels, of which two (I think) were somewhere in the production process, and I was partway through the next book, which I was about to send off to my agent to sell. My first book had earned out by then, and I think the second had, too, so I had variable royalty income from those, plus the known amounts I was getting as the second- or third- partial advance payments on the two that were in the production process. This meant I had a pretty good idea what my writing income was likely to be over the next year or two.

At that point, I’d been thinking about quitting my day job for a few years, so I’d been building up a savings account in anticipation. The idea was that I’d have enough cash to get me through a dry period or two, and if it ever dropped below six months’ living expenses, I’d start looking for a new day job (figuring that six months would be long enough to find one). I’ve had to dip into that fund several times over the years, but it’s never gone below the six months line (knock wood).

So if you’re asking when I started thinking about quitting the day job (and planning and preparing to do so), the answer is some time around 1983, roughly two years before I actually quit and went full-time. It didn’t become a serious possibility until I had the income and the bank account in place, which took two years to get fully set up.

When you work with fantasy, how is it different from something like realistic fiction?

I wouldn’t know; I’ve never written anything that wasn’t fantasy. I did try once, but one of the characters turned out to be a wizard in Chapter Two, and I gave up.

Still, I think I can say a little more than that. The basics of writing are the same, regardless of genre: style, viewpoint, dialog, characterization, plot, etc. Sometimes there are genre conventions that are important and that can expand or limit the range of techniques that are available to the writer in that genre, but by and large, effective writing is effective regardless of content.

Worldbuilding and background tend, I think, to be a bit more important in speculative fiction in general than in so-called realistic fiction, simply because one can choose to set realistic fiction in places that the reader is likely to be familiar with already, and which therefore need much less development in the story. That’s about all I can think of, though — and it’s not a hard and fast rule. Lots of realistic-fiction authors set their novels in places that their likely readers will consider exotic (whether that means New Orleans or Tokyo, Los Angeles or Paris, Moscow or Sydney). Part of the point of doing so is to give the readers a chance to image places that are strange to them, which requires just the same sort of in-story background setting as any SF story.

What are some of the criteria you look at when first starting a piece?

Sometimes, there a business considerations that dictate what comes next; for instance, if I’ve signed a contract to write a trilogy, then when I finish the first book, the next piece is going to be Book #2. Or if my agent is trying to re-sell some of my out-of-print backlist, sometimes it is easier if I promise to write a new sequel. Or I need to write something to fulfill the option clause in a contract before I go on to what I really want to write next.

But apart from a couple of multi-book contracts, business considerations haven’t come up terribly often for me, so the main thing I think about when I’m deciding what to write next is, “Is this a story I’m interested in writing?” Since I usually have anywhere from three to twenty possible stories for which the answer to that question is “yes,” the next question is “Is this story insisting on being written now?” If one of them is, then that’s the one that comes next. Usually, there isn’t any one piece on the list that’s at critical mass and/or chomping at the bit to get going, so the next questions are “Which story(s) are almost ready to move forward and/or can be gotten to that point with the least amount of work? Or which one(s) will be the most fun to play with, even if they’re going to be a whole lot of work to get moving?” and “Of the stories that appeal to me and that I think I can get moving, which one(s) does my agent think she can sell most easily in the current market?”

That usually whittles the list down to one or two titles, at most, and if I still can’t decide, I flip a coin.