I’ve talked before about the opening of a story and some of the things that can go wrong with the all-drama, all-action, all-the-time “hook.” But it occurs to me that I haven’t talked much about what a hook is, or how to do it right. Hence today’s post.
Openings are important; nobody denies that. In my mother’s collection of writing textbooks from the 1930s and 40s, there are chapters and sections on the importance of the opening, complete with admonitions to hook the reader. But something interesting happened along the way from then until now.
Back in those early how-to-write books, the opening, even of a short story, was considered to be the first manuscript page – basically, 250 to 300 words, comprising several paragraphs and quite a few sentences. Over the years, that shrank from the first page to the first paragraph, and then to the first sentence. “The opening is vitally important” became “The first sentence is vitally important.” Sometime between then and now, the emphasis changed again, until these days you can hardly find a how-to-write book or blog that doesn’t advocate writing a first-sentence “hook” that’s dramatic, dynamic, and full of action.
When you stop to examine it, the assumption behind the “dramatic, dynamic, action-packed hook sentence” advice is that drama and action are The Best Way to grab the reader’s attention. The trouble is that a) there is no The Reader; there are hundreds of thousands of individuals who don’t all like to read exactly the same thing, and b) a dramatic, action-packed opening may be inappropriate for a particular book (one that, say, is chiefly about a quiet romance between a shy scholar and his introverted next-door neighbor).
But even the book about the shy scholar needs a first line. So let’s drop all the how-to advice for a minute and look at what a hook actually is.
A hook is an opening that makes the reader want to keep reading. Sometimes, this can be as much as the first chapter, but these days when people refer to “the hook,” they usually mean the first sentence, first paragraph, or the first couple of sentences/paragraphs (usually if the paragraphs are a series of snappy one-liners).
In order to make the reader want to keep reading, a hook has to do three things: 1) it has to catch the reader’s attention; 2) it has to provide a reason for the reader to keep reading; and 3) it has to do both things in a way that is true to the story, characters, and plot that follow. #3 is not strictly a property of the hook, but of the match-up between it and the story. If your opening sentence is “At full speed, the two trains bore down on each other, racing along the track toward their inevitable fatal crash” and then you reveal some paragraphs later that these are a couple of model trains and the story is a sentimental tale of a small-town Christmas in 1940, you are likely to annoy your readers so much that not only will they skip the rest of this story, they won’t pick up anything with your name on it ever again.
Drama and action tend to be eye-catching, which is why they’re so often advocated as important in a hook, but there are a lot of other things that intrigue people. Gossip, for instance – why else are there all those magazines and papers full of stories about the relationships of people most of us have never even met? Mysteries, large and small – things that seem unexpected or out of place, yet there they are. Striking personalities, whether eccentric or merely emphatic. Sometimes a build-up of details will do it, or a sudden twist of prose.
Hooking the readers isn’t about action. It’s about telling them something interesting, something cool, something exciting. (Years ago, one of my writer friends hung a sign over his computer that said “Now I am going to tell you something cool” to remind himself.) And “exciting” is not synonymous with action. People get excited when their favorite singer releases a new album, as well as when they’re on the first downhill rush of the rollercoaster. Some of us got wildly excited last year when they found the first extrasolar planet in the zone where life-as-we-know-it can exist.
The thing to remember is that even the folks who advocate the in medias res action openings aren’t advocating action because they think action is the only right way to open a story. They’re advocating it because they think that action will catch the reader’s attention and give him/her a reason to keep reading.
Too many writers hear all the emphasis on action, and forget about the reason behind it; they end up with openings describing a car crash or a sword fight that isn’t particularly interesting. They comply with the letter of the directions, but not the spirit.
Part of why they do this is that their heart isn’t in it in the first place. They don’t want to open in the middle of a chase or a laser duel, but they think they have to. And while it is very true that sometimes a story will require the writer to write about things that he, personally, finds uninteresting, one doesn’t want to be doing it in the first sentence. Because it is very, very difficult to take something that you yourself find boring and write it so that readers will find it compelling. In the middle of a book, one can manage it by embedding the boring bits in sections of stuff that one is interested in, but in the first line, there isn’t anything else to surround it with. And unless the writer is very good and very advanced, it’s going to show that he’s not terribly interested in what’s going on in the opening.
If you aren’t excited and intrigued by your first couple of sentences – if what you’re saying in them doesn’t make you want to write more, just to find out what comes next – they aren’t likely to grab your readers, either.
Yes, with a big chili pepper on top! Further, pure action openings have another level of tedium threatening them, because while the characters may be on the hot edge of losing their one and only lives, the reader is on the rather less exciting edge of picking up their thousand and first scuffle between total strangers, and their one and only life is probably too short to do that with.
Classical in medias res is
“Arms and the man I sing, who, forced by fate and haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate…”
and not,
“The Achaean’s sword stabbed murderously out of the blind fog…”
for a reason, even in an epic of battles. And my patience with the latter is worn down just a little bit more, every time another hopeful takes a swipe at me with it.
Istr Nancy Drew and some Oz books (or at least chapters within them) starting with things like
“All aboard!”
or
“What shall we get Ozma for her birthday?”
Maybe this works better in a series where the reader already knows who is likely to be speaking and what the likely context is.
‘Intrigue’ is the important word here, I feel. An action opening with a limited question (will the fugitive escape the monster? Will the good guy beat the mustache-twirling villain? has two possible answers: Yes (because he’s the protagonist, silly) and No (in which case I’m unlikely to invest in the next protagonist because they might get killed, too.) So I approach action scenes with waryness – I don’t care for those people, I don’t get a chance to meet them, I’m not allowed to make my own picture of them, and I definitely don’t care for the outcome.
Give me an interesting puzzle any day.
My favourite opening is “I remember it as if it were yesterday.” followed by the description of the blind man tapping his way down the street. (Treasure Island)
Unfortunately, it’s actually the second paragraph, as I found on a recent re-reading. The first paragraph is a total snore that I had obliterated from my mind.
The other day I went back and checked through a bunch of novels that were in the genre I was working in, (one of them was Dealing with Dragons), and i examined their openings very carefully. None of them had the one sentence action/drama opening, but every single one of them had a twist at the end of the first paragraph.
Basically, I think the idea of the super first sentence is kind of stupid. A first sentence should be intriguing, yes, but really, the smallest real item of discourse is a paragraph. Give yourself some room to breathe! What you really want is a first sentence that sets up an image or idea in the reader’s mind, and then you want the twist at the end of the first paragraph to turn that image on it’s head, or to suddenly undermine it, or add unexpected complexity. That’s what draws a reader in (or me in, apparently, since these were pretty much all my favorite books). Something obvious and basic becomes something complex and intriguing.
This clearly takes mad skill.
The astonishing first lines often are doing this as well, but many of them are just undermining fundamental linguistic (semantic) concepts or work as a broad parody of some sort of general knowledge.
YA Highway recently had a first lines contest:
http://www.yahighway.com/2011/09/results-are-in-first-lines-contest.html
and though it’s clear that the three winners are pretty awesome and very striking, they’re all, actually, the same.
“We’re all strangers who know everything about one another.”
-undermines the semantics of ‘strangers’
“Five minutes ago my name was Amanda.”
-undermines the semantics (and cultural practice) of naming
“Lizzie looked down at her hands and realized they were missing.”
-undermines the semantics of body-parts as inalienable (this seems to be a universal, it’s grammaticalized in weird ways.)
So really, if we want to break it down as how to write a good contemporary/paranormal YA opening line, pick a word and undermine it. 😀
But of course, none of these really compare to
“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink”
-I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
I find that for some authors who have built up a reputation for a certain genre you are hooked just waiting to see where they fit their world view into the story. The classic example of this was enchanted glass by Diana Wynne Jones, you knew where the story was going to go you just didn’t know how it was going to get there. So your expectation for her creativeness was the hook that kept you reading.
When I’m writing a first draft, I rarely try to make the beginning catch the reader’s attention. The first few pages usually describe a dramatic event that sets the stage for the rest of the story, but I don’t consciously do it that way, my brain tells me that that’s where to start the story, so I start it there. And usually, there’s a few paragraphs to a page before I even get to the action part, because I have to set up who everyone is and what’s going on first.
I’ve been thinking about the openings I quoted above. They both began with something immediate and concrete, but then spiraled out, zoomed out. “All aboard!” — on what, to where, who, why? All those w’s would be in the next sentence, or next.
“The French legion fell upon us with guns blazing” might spiral in, zoom in, as a squadron attacks the narrator, an old enemy attacks him, hooks the narrator’s sword with the point of his rapier….
Or an opening could continue level, at the same distance. That might be the sort that can get dull and meaningless even with fast action.
@cara, someone once said that the job of the first sentence is to get us to read the second sentence, and the job of the first paragraph is to get us to read the second paragraph….
On one of my stories, I got the advice that I should use a more exciting hook, preferably action or dialogue. I thought about it, but no matter which way I turned it over in my mind, I couldn’t find a way that suited the story as much as my first few paragraphs of informative description. I kept the description interesting enough to keep the reader reading, but I didn’t start with action or dialogue, so it wasn’t a “good enough” hook. But that suited my story, so I kept it like that.
(It introduced my characters, so that the reader got to know them, where they were coming from, and why they would do what they did . . . so when the action did start, at the end of those few paragraphs, the reader could understand the characters a bit.)
Mary, that reminds me of an interestng contrast between two drafts of “The Man from St Petersburg.” The first draft opened with conversation like this:
“Mr. Winston Churchill to see you, sir.”
“That puppy! Tell him I’m not at home.”
The later draft changed the opening to something much slower and (to me) less interesting: showing the squire looking over his peaceful estate and hoping his wife would play the piano after supper.
Menachem @ 6: I find that for some authors who have built up a reputation for a certain genre you are hooked just waiting to see where they fit their world view into the story.
That is a mighty good point, and a subtle technique well worth drawing attention to. Thank you!
Ever since getting my Kindle, I’ve been a lot more aware of openings, which now have become one maybe two screens which is anywhere between 150 to 300 words.
I find that I’m not conscious of what hooks me as much as what turns me off. Having the samples on my reader already I’m willing to give them a chance until the author does something that makes me say “Next!”
Sometimes it can be a small as a single word choice that makes me cringe, sometimes it’s the plot that doesn’t interest me and sometimes it’s a totally intangible “something is missing.”