Welcome back to our HOOKS discussion! We’ve been talking about the elements of a great HOOK – using the acrynom SHARP:
S= Stakes (Public or Private)
H = Hero Identification (or Sympathy)

A stand for ANCHORING! Or, using the journalist inside to create place!

I can’t stress how important it is to anchor your reader into the scene. So many books I’ve read recently start out with dialogue or action, and they leave out the where, and when, and even to some extent, the who. You want your reader to know where they stand in a book, what the world is, who the players are, and to some extent, why they’re there. Here’s the novelist’s twist, however: you want to use these elements to anchor your reader in a way that captures the mood and framework of the book. This is where your journalism training comes in. By the end of the first paragraph, and for sure the first scene, you should have anchored your character into the scene by using the five W’s. Who, What, Where, When and Why?

Here’s a sample scene from my book Flee the Night. This is the first few paragraphs:

The past couldn’t have picked a worse time to find her.
Trapped in seat 15A on an Amtrak Texas Eagle chugging through the Ozarks at 4:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning, Lacey . . . Galloway . . . Montgomery—what was her current last name?—tightened her leg lock around the computer bag at her feet.

*****
We know where she is, when it is (4am Sunday morning), Who – Lacey, who has fictitious last names, which raises the element of mystery. We can also suppose that a person who has this ailment might be on the run, What – is guarding her computer bag for some reason.

These are 4 of the 5 w’s.

*****
(the scene continues…)

She dug her fingers through the cotton knit of her daughter’s sweater as she watched the newest passenger to their compartment find his seat. Lanky, with olive skin and dark eyes framed in wire-rimmed glasses, it had to be Syrian assassin Ishmael Shavik, who sat down, fidgeted with his leather jacket, then impaled her with a dark glance.

*****

The 5th W – Why, is addressed here – she’s afraid because she sees an assassin who knows her.
Note the words I use to create fear:

Trapped. Chugging (can you smell smoke?), Locked, dug, impaled. These words give a sense of doom and set the mood of the paragraph.

Well used, the 5 w’s can evoke emotions, and give us a feeling of happiness, or tension, even doom in the scene.

Try this:
1. What is the one emotion you’d like to establish in this first sentence, paragraph, scene?
2. Using the five 5’s, what words can you find for each category that conveys this sense of emotion? Use these in the crafting of your first paragraph.

Anchor your reader in the scene…and they won’t be able to put the book down!

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