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- Begin at a pivotal moment. We were people who had Mediterranean ancestors, dark hair, dark eyes, tan skin, and everyone else in White Pine looked very Scandinavian; we became the town’s diversity—before diversity was a good thing.
- Add an unusual situation. I coped by being careful and good and funny which was like an invisibility cloak in high school but as much as I tried to blend in, my older brother Ray stood out in the most threatening way possible for a good girl and that was as a bad boy.
- Add intriguing characters. My father was and is best described as an intense, idealist with a steel girder of a work ethic and a charm that wears thin under the gun of his laser focused attentions.
- Conflict. Outside the restaurant, just before swinging the door wide and walking inside my Dad would stop us and say, “Now remember everybody, this is for Mom.
- Know Your Audience
- Know The Purpose of Your Narrative
- Use Unusual Imagery
- Hide A Piece of Information
- Start in The Middle of Action
- Present Philosophical Statements
One of the key steps to take before you can effectively ‘hook’ your reader into your narrative is to determine whothis 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. The Advanced Fiction Writing website advises...
What makes a narrative gripping are the profound or innovative messages it seeks to convey to the reader. Therefore, it’s helpful to incorporate an essence of your narrative’s message within the ‘hook’. By doing this, you’re able to immediately immerse your readers into the core of your narrative, as well as encourage them to read on and to uncover...
Another feature of an effective hook is its ability to evoke imagery so strange or so beautiful to the tongue that it simply can’t escape the reader’s attention. George Orwell’s novel 1984is an excellent example of this. In one simple phrase in his exposition – ‘the clocks were striking thirteen’ – Orwell is able to instil within the reader that so...
A hook that conceals specific pieces of information from the reader can work hand-in-hand with unusual imagery to create suspense and arouse curiosity. Writers Dennis Jerz and Kathy Kennedy give a great exampleto highlight this point. They compare two sentences that say essentially the same thing in different ways: 1. ‘I heard my neighbour through ...
One of acclaimed author Kurt Vonnegut’s advice on writing short storiesis, ‘Start as close to the end as possible.’ Why, you may ask? Picture this scenario: Anna wakes up, has breakfast, receives a phone call from her friend asking her to come over and decides to bike ride to her friend’s house. However, on the way there, she encounters a cat stuck...
The advantage of imparting some kind of refreshing philosophical muse in your hook is that you add the element of innovation to your narrative. In doing so, you also embed greater nuance into the meanings contained within your novel or short story. Contradictions and paradoxestend to have a philosophical undertone to them, so, when used astutely, t...
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How do you hook a reader into a story?
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How do you write a story hook?
How do story hooks work?
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- 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.
- Prompt pressing questions. Good story openings include meandering beginnings that take time getting to the point (this is especially common in literary novels that do not necessarily require the brisk pace of a thriller).
- 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.
- Introduce striking voices. We tend to think of hooks strictly in terms of ‘Plot’ with a capital ‘P’. Yet a hook is just as often made from an inviting (or compellingly repulsive, in the case of an anti-hero) ‘who’.
Jul 31, 2023 · The manner in which you craft the narrative hook will depend on several factors, not the least of which is genre. And there's more than one way to grab the reader's attention. Tip 1: Present High Stakes. You may have noticed that the first three narrative hook examples shared above have to do with death.
- Startle The Reader With Your First Line. By using a startling or intriguing first line, you can take the reader by surprise and get them excited to delve into the story.
- Start With Action. This is probably the most common way to get a reader engaged with a story right away. Of course, there are varying degrees of action and not all involve high-speed chases or explosions.
- Form An Emotional Connection. If you can’t drop your reader into an action scene, consider hooking them with an emotional one instead. Showing a character’s intense emotional response will help the reader connect with them on a sympathetic level, and this type of connection will lead readers to be interested in what happens to that character for the rest of the story.
- Begin At A Life-Changing Moment. Another great technique is starting with a life-changing moment for your protagonist. This is usually a moment that thrusts the character into the story’s conflict, aka the inciting incident.
3. 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. This means that you have to be intentional in making your first scenes ...
One of the most powerful ways to write a hook for a reader is to ask them a question. Now, this style of hook doesn’t necessarily work with every POV or narrative style, but when it works, it works. That’s because it encourages the curious reader to keep reading to find out the answer.
