“One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. In the first paragraph, you solve most of the problems with your book. The theme is defined, the style, the tone. At least in my case, the paragraph is a kind of sample of what the rest of the book is going to be.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez…who won the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature (100 years of solitude which sold over 10 million copies.) wrote that. I have it taped to my computer monitor, to remind me of the impact and the importance of that HOOK paragraph.

Today, briefly, we’re going to talk about the HOOK.

What do you do when you pick up a book? Probably read the back cover blurb, and then open to the first page. Then, you have approximately 10 seconds, one-two sentences to capture your reader. A reader is looking for creative writing, a question that piques their interest, someone they can relate to, a setting that interests them, and a story that can match the value of their time. That’s a lot to put into the first sentence, or even the first paragraph!

But it can be done….especially if you make it SHARP.

What do I mean by that? They all contain the 5 elements that will hook your reader into continuing the story:

Stakes – Make the big, scary and intimate
Why does it matter? This is the question every reader is going to ask themselves, if not verbally, then underneath it all, as they’re reading. Why, indeed, should I spend my time reading this book? Stakes can be public, (as in, affecting society, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Hunt for Red October, or even Erin Brockovich), or private (as in some of my favorites: Frequency, Cellular, or even the poignant Somersby). The important element is: if the stakes matter to you, they’ll matter to your readers.

Hero/Heroine identification — Creating Sympathy and creating connection with the reader.
We’re only going to read a book about someone we can, at least remotely, relate to. Someone we at least a little understand. Maybe they don’t live in the same culture we do, or they lived two hundred years ago, or maybe they’re from another planet, but if they care about the same things we care about, or if they find themselves in a situation we might find ourselves in, then we can identify with them. Creating that piece of identification at the start will give your reader enough of a connection to continue on to let them into their lives.

Anchoring – So many books 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. And you want to do it in a way that helps your reader capture 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?

on the Run — Start in the middle. Dwight Swain, in “Techniques of the selling writing: says that “a good story being in the middle, retrieves the past and continues to the end.” Your first sentence hook should be something that begins in the middle of an action.

A good hook already has your character in the middle of the inciting incident, or at least prefaces it with foreshadowing. It is a blip in time in the middle of that incident that zeros in on the character and gives us a glimpse at his life and why this situation is important.

Problem (Story Question) — This last element is probably the most important in creating a hook – the Problem, or identifying the Story Question.

The story question is the one thematic question that drives the book. Will Richard Kimball ever find out who killed his wife? Frodo be able to destroy the ring? This question permeates all the decisions of the hero and/or heroine throughout the story, and needs to be hinted at in the sentence, in the first paragraph, and in the first scene.

These are the elements of a great hook. Now – how to put them in?

Again, take out your multi-colored hi-liters and see if you can identify each of these elements in your hooks. Go to Voices and submit your hook, and see if your fellow Voices can pick out your elements, and if you have any questions, Rachel and I will be popping in now and again to offer suggestions.

Plus, I’ll post a HOOK of my own, to show you how I used all the elements!

Next week, we’ll be having a HOOKS contest, so you’ll have all this week to work on them!
Happy fishing!