What's Your Hook?

From the three main areas – beginning, middle, ending – the beginning is the one area where many writers revise their stories several times. Why? Because they realized their ‘hook’ wasn’t intriguing enough to grab a reader’s attention. Without a powerful beginning, readers don’t have the patience to continue several pages or chapters to find what the book is about. You need to give them that essence from the start. Offering meaningless backstory or information not relevant to your plot or character’s ‘need to resolve obstacle’ you risk a rejection letter even though your story might pick up halfway.

Your hook within the beginning may be one line or a few paragraphs that frames your storyline. A good hook causes a reader to ask questions. Readers asking questions is a good thing because it pushes them to turn the page and try to find out the answers to these questions.

There are so many areas preceding this that need to be addressed – defining your character, which POV to use, the setting - but we’ll concentrate right now as one writer put it, “putting zing into your choice of words” and how to grab a reader’s interest.

Let’s dig deeper into beginnings. One question you need to ask yourself is what is the obstacle/problem your protagonist will need to resolve. Let’s take two scenarios:

1- murder/mystery: some beginnings can have either the murder happening in omniscient POV:

His hands tightened around her neck, and euphoria entered his veins. He watched her eyes bulge, the tears streaming down her cheeks, until finally a dead stare remained. Dropping her to the floor, he proceeded to wipe evidence of his presence.
He smiled at the old lady walking into the apartment complex, holding the door open for her. Retrieving a notebook from his back pocket, he crossed off Mary Lynn Ankers.

If your character is the detective, then you may begin with them on the scene of this crime. If it’s the next victim, as in The Terminator, you can connect them with the victim and her/him finding out about the murder.

2- a paranormal: your character has the gift of vision. One way to begin is for them doing what they normally do, cleaning or working or whatever else, and then suddenly they get a sense of imbalance and a vision comes to them. Or they may ‘hear’ a cry of help and look around and notice no one else appears to have noticed this ‘scream’. This is the first indication of their gift and what’s to come.

As you can see the beginning and how you start plays a major role to grab and maintain a reader’s interest. Choose wisely.