Hook, Line, and…
Catching readers is like catching fish: you’re not going to get very far without a hook.
No! Not that kind of hook! Put that thing down before someone gets hurt!
A hook in writing refers to the first part of your story, where you reach out from the page to grab the reader and keep them interested.
Interestingly enough, a hand emerging from a page is an effective way to do this.
Writing hooks is a skill a lot of writers struggle with. In fact, a majority of the rejections I send out are because the writer failed to deliver a solid hook, opening instead with boring description, flat dialogue, or irrelevant backstory.
The hand never emerges from the page, and off the rejection email goes.
BUT, once you learn to write hooks, your trajectory as a writer will change. It’s possibly the single biggest step in moving from amateur scribbler to established wordsmith.
And I’m going to try to teach you!
I knew I should have done some editing today instead…
As a whole, your hook brings the reader into the story with everything they need for a running start. It should present your protagonist, your setting, and a goal for the protagonist to pursue.
Sometimes you can pull it off without the setting. Sometimes you can pull it off without the protagonist. But without a goal, something for the story to pursue, the hook won’t work. The reader will swim on and find something else.
The first thing you should do is make sure your story starts in the right place. If you try to set your hook too early or too late, it may not be able to hold onto the reader, or they may become confused and abandon the story.
But, the right place is different for each story, and there’s no way to know what it is for yours without reading it.
This is why workshopping, critiques, and peer reviews are so important.
Your friends and family will take time to read something all the way through, while an editor may get a page or two in and fire off a rejection email.
It’s not personal, but the slush pile is large, and as soon as I know something isn’t going to work, I’m going to let you know.
So trust your writing and feedback partners to help you find the right starting place before you submit.
Once you have the right starting place, the next step is to nail your opening line.
I recently read an opening line so good, I almost skipped the submission right past the long list and the short list and went straight to the acceptance.
And all I’d read was the opening line.
But those lines are one in a million, lines like:
Four score and seven years ago…
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…
All this happened, more or less…
I’d bet you probably know at least two of those lines. You may just know one. If you don’t know any, I know a middle school English teacher who would like a word…
But that’s the point. When you hear these lines, and lines like it, they grab you and make you pay attention. They’re short, powerful statements that fire up the brain and prime it for thinking, engaging, and absorbing what is to come.
It’s like when a hypnotist starts in on a subject. If the hook is the snap that throws them into an altered state, the opening line is the countdown that prepares them for the snap. It may not do the job on its own, but it prepares the reader for the coming hook.
I prefer stand-alone opening lines, not connected to a paragraph or other words. Hit the reader, then move on before they have a chance to recover.
And now the hardest part.
The hook.
Moving the reader from your opening line into the story.
In a perfect world, you drop the reader into something they can’t resist knowing more about. But if you can’t manage that, you need some element of mystery, something they need to keep reading to answer, even if it’s just to know why the character is in the shower.
Your hook is not the place for exposition or description—you need action, to get the story moving and to pull the reader along with it.
If you can figure out how to pull that off, you’ll level up in your writing career, and the good news will start pouring in.