The All Important Hook

With the hundreds of thousands of books that are published each year, it is essential for a writer to use every tool in his arsenal to make his book stand out and be read. Putting aside (for the moment) the basic tools of plot, characterization, setting and dialogue, I would like to take a look at that clever tool, the hook.

The dictionary gives a great definition of a “hook” as it relates to writing. It is this:

“Something intended to attract and ensnare.”

Types of Hooks

When you are querying an agent, you need a hook in your query that will make them request a partial/full submission.

You will need a hook on your jacket cover to entice the reader to purchase your book.

Within the book itself, the hook serves to seize the reader’s interest and pull them into the book.

Your hook(s) can be at the beginning of a chapter or the end of it. Personally, I find that the best hooks are in the opening pages, more specifically, the opening lines.

An Opening Line

My favorite “hook” still stands out in my mind to this day is this opening sentence from Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin:

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off the bridge.

Immediately, I wanted to know more. Why? What happened? Was someone else involved? In other words, I was hooked. And I sat down with that book and proceeded to get sucked in.
Here are few other examples:
From P.D. James’s The Private Patient:

On November 21st, the day of her forty-seventh birthday, and three weeks and two days before she was murdered, Rhoda Gradwyn went to Harley Street to keep a first appointment with her plastic surgeon, and there in a consulting room designed, so it appeared, to inspire confidence and allay apprehension, made the decision which would lead inexorably to her death.

From Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking:

Life changes fast.

From Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca:

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

From Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Angel’s Game:

A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story.

From Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea:

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

From Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway:

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

The Page Turner

In the mind of the reader, a good hook can produce wonder or confusion or contradiction or interest or all of the above. A good hook will make the reader wonder, question and care. Most of all, it will keep the reader turning the page.