Hooks again

Ok, shameless promotional stuff first. The hardcopy paperback version of Wrede on Writing is now available, and as a promotion, the Goodreads site is doing a giveaway – five people, selected at random from those who register, will each get a free copy. For anyone interested the link is here: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/75614-wrede-on-writing-tips-hints-and-opinions-on-writing

On to the post, which is about hooks.

I come from a family of fishermen. Not the sort of truly serious anglers who spend weeks scouting out the best trout streams to vacation near, but not the sort that go out one weekend a year with a worm on a bent pin, either. And as soon as I was deemed old enough to handle sharp objects safely, I was taught that there are different kinds of hooks, and which one you use depends on where you are fishing and what type of fish you are hoping to catch. You also learn  that hooking the fish isn’t enough; you have to set the hook, or the fish is likely to get away before you can reel it in.

This applies as much to writing as to fishing. Depending on who you talk to, the “hook” is the first scene, first page, first paragraph, or first sentence of the story. I tend to vote for the slightly longer versions, but that may be a function of my inability to stop reading something, even the print on cereal boxes, until I get to some sort of finish (like the end of a page or paragraph). I cannot recall ever having read only the first sentence of a story and then skipping the rest of it.

So I am not going to talk about writing catchy first sentences. I’m talking about the rest of that first paragraph, page, and chapter.

The first thing you learn, if you fish, is that you need bait and/or a lure. A bare hook doesn’t catch many fish. In writing terms, this means that, very early in the story, you are dangling something interesting in front of the reader: an intriguing puzzle, an interesting character or situation, a problem in need of solution. It doesn’t have to be the problem, the one that’s the center of the story, but it usually needs to be something more interesting than “Darn, I have a headache and I’m out of aspirin.”

So when you’re looking at your first page, scene, and chapter, the things to ask are “What is the intriguingly unique thing about this place, these people, this situation?” and/or “What questions are raised that the reader is going to want answered?”

This is what makes opening with the hero in mid-fight, madly swinging his sword or shooting at someone, not such a great opening for most books, most of the time, despite all the advice to the contrary. The obvious questions this sort of scene raises are “Why is he fighting these people?” and “Will he survive?” – and readers who’ve read the back blurb and know he’s the hero are pretty sure the answer to the second one is “yes.” That leaves only the “Why” question, which can be intriguing if it’s handled right…but if the main character is so busy lopping off heads that he/she can’t think, it’s pretty tough to look at “why” until after the fight, which leaves the author with a relatively weak hook.

The mid-fight opening hook will work fine on the sort of reader who just wants to read about cool fighting stuff (assuming, of course, that the opening fight displays a bit of coolness). It works best, though, if the fight is unusual in some fairly obvious way, because this raises all sorts of additional questions to pull the reader in.

Opening a story with the librarian at the Mage’s Academy in a life-or-death fight with a set of books, for instance, is interesting to more people than the “standard” shoot-him-or-lop-hi-head-off fight because librarians are not usually people we think of as needing to fight to the death as part of their jobs, books are not usually the sort of opponents featured in this sort of scene, and libraries are not usually the sort of place where this kind of fight takes place. So the reader wants to know, on some level, “Is this a normal event for magical librarians, or is this unusual even here? How do you fight books? What set these books off?” and most importantly, “What else is interestingly different about this person and this place?”

The most effective hooks work on both levels: First, they demonstrate to the reader that this story is going to have cool fighting or cool tea parties or a cool murder-mystery or cool technology; in other words, they let the reader know that the story will deliver whatever the reader expects from this sort of book. And second, they give the reader a sample of the really cool thing(s) that are unique and interesting about this particular story, whether that’s something about the characters, the setting, the situation, the event, etc.

“Giving the reader a sample” does not necessarily mean spilling the beans about the protagonist’s angsty backstory or the cool plot twist on page one – but it may mean showing that she has skills (or problems) that one wouldn’t normally expect from a young legal intern in Chicago, 2013, or demonstrating that even minor things in this story won’t go the way the reader expects. The questions the writer is likely to find useful are “What is the thing that makes this teacher/city street/murder victim/cocktail party/train ride/wedding different from all the lawyers/city streets/etc. that the reader is most likely expecting to see?” and “How do I let the reader know that ASAP?”

The perceptive blog reader will have already noticed that it is all but impossible to do all that in a single sentence. Hence my emphasis on the first paragraph, page, scene, and chapter.