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1. Know Your Audience. One of the key steps to take before you can effectively ‘hook’ your reader into your narrative is to determine who this reader is. In other words, who is the target audience for your novel or short story? In the early phases of planning and writing, this can be a particularly difficult question to answer.
- Story Hook Examples
- How to Write Good Hooks For Stories
- Ways to Write Hooks
A literary ‘hook’ in a story promises intrigue, entertainment and answers to the questions it raises. Far from the trickery of a bait and switch, a hook gives a true sense of what your reader can expect of your story’s pleasures. A brilliant hook also also grabs a reader’s attention from the get go, to encourage them to read on. A hook can also sho...
Great story hooks do one or more of the following. They: 1. Build urgency 2. Prompt pressing questions 3. Involve intriguing contexts 4. Introduce striking voices 5. Show a glimpse of a vivid world 6. Imply past or future conflicts 7. Build narrative tension 8. Share relevant backstory 9. Set the story’s tone Let’s explore each of these ideas in br...
1. Build urgency
A girl running for her life; a dead body lying in a swamp; a crowd gathering to point into the sky. Each of these actions or images create a kind of urgency that hooks a reader into the story. The reader wants to know why a girl is running for her life. We need to find out who murdered Chase Andrews. We want to know what the crowds are staring up at in Let The Great World Spin (an urban tightrope walker). To build urgency in your story’s hook, you could: 1. Describe an action with a time limi...
2. Prompt pressing questions
Good story openings include meandering beginningsthat take time getting to the point (this is especially common in literary novels that do not necessarily require the brisk pace of a thriller). Yet even if your story opening is gentler, more tone-and-mood-setting, a question hook, rather than full-tilt action, how can you prompt pressing questions, creating elements of a hook? In the opening hook to Anil’s Ghost, for example, we wonder what evidence is being sought that could be ‘lost again’....
3. Involve intriguing contexts
The best story hooks don’t only grab our attention. They tell us (often in a highly compressed way) a lot about the world we’re about to enter. Why we’re in for a good story. We begin to understand aspects of context such as place, era, scenario and situation. That a wartime city is about to be evacuated, for example (All the Light We Cannot See). Or that there is a wedding party, somewhere in the periphery, that may be relevant to a character’s current situation (The Invisible Life of Addie...
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There are five major types of hooks: Question hooks. Anecdotal hooks. Statistic hooks. Quotation hooks. Statement hooks. Question Hooks. Questions provoke thought and beckon readers to find answers. “Have you ever wondered what makes people truly happy?” This type of hook engages readers by directly involving them in the narrative. Anecdotal Hooks.
One way to deliver is through a narrative hook. But what is a narrative hook and how can you write a hook to captivate readers? The purpose of a narrative hook is to pull your reader through to the next page, paragraph, or sentence where you’ll have planted another hook to keep him going.
- Remember that your first impression is your title. Sometimes we think that the hook only refers to the first paragraph of your writing. The truth is, the title is usually the first thing that the readers see on the page or on the cover of the book.
- Drop your readers right into the heat of things. Writers use the term in medias res to refer to the strategy of starting your story right in the middle of the action.
- Play with emotional strings. Another way of hooking your reader into your story is by using the power of emotions. Readers are human beings with feelings, and if you can draw them in to a scene that they can relate with emotionally, chances are, you have their attention.
- Start with a controversial statement. When you open with a statement that catches your reader by surprise, it’s like offering them a challenge. Your reader will then continue reading to see how you can prove your statement.
Apr 3, 2022 · 6 Examples of Hooks in Narrative Writing 1. Descriptive. A descriptive hook in narrative writing uses imagery to create a picture in the reader’s mind. A descriptive hook in narrative writing sets the scene, tone/mood, and places the reader in the setting; find how to teach this hook here.
Aug 9, 2016 · Begin at a pivotal moment. Add an unusual situation. Add an intriguing character. Conflict. Add an antagonist. Change emotion. Irony and surprise. Make People Wonder. Dread Factor. Keep narrative voice compelling. Now, here is the essay separated by each element so you can see how to incorporate into your own story: A Summer Place by Ann Garvin.
