Does Your Book Live Up to the Hook? by Victoria Chatham

Our Round Robin topic for May asks: Has so much emphasis been placed by other writers advice, publishers, reviewers, etc. on authors to have a spectacular opening page/1st chapter that the rest of the story sometimes gets left behind? What are your thoughts and experiences with this?

I found this question to be an interesting premise. As a new author, now an unbelievable twenty years ago, it was almost pounded into me that I had to have that opening hook if I was ever going to catch an agent or editor’s eye. Back then I didn’t have a clue what a hook was. To a certain extent, I still don’t. What might catch my attention and pique my interest may be totally different for someone else.

This theory is proved every time I read Ray Rhamey’s Flog a Pro blog on the Writer Unboxed site. If you are not familiar with WU or Ray Rhamey, take a look here at http://tinyurl.com/m4hh2u3. I am often caught out by what I find appealing and worth reading, only to have Ray flog it and then in the very next blog it will be vice versa. Equate the hook, if you will, to how long is a piece of string? The answer to that is infinite and variable, depending upon its purpose or your interest in it.

Good advice from a tutor in one of my early writing classes was to just write the damn book. As she explained, the first draft is all about getting the story out of your head and onto the page in all its messy, sometimes illogical, glory. Anything can be fixed later and, as Nora Roberts says, you cannot edit an empty page. Every writer has their own process, but getting hung up on that first line or chapter can waste so much time. For some authors, it is such a debilitating hang-up they never get their book written.

I cannot remember the name of the author who advised starting and finishing every page with a hook.

I’m not sure that I agree with that, but I do try to honour the promise of those first few lines and begin and end each chapter by continuing that promise. It’s all about intriguing your reader enough that they want to keep turning the pages and if you can offer a reason for them to do that, they will. It may be a line of dialogue, or a character’s thought or suspicion, or even setting a potentially spooky scene which I have heard referred to as the empty elevator scene. The doors open. No one is in the elevator. The character hesitates. Why? What has raised his or her suspicions?

Satisfying a reader’s curiosity and expectations is what we, as writers strive for. Promising something with a brilliant opening and then failing on that promise is simply cheating that reader.

I’m sure others have plenty to say on this subject, so please visit these fine authors to see if you share their views.

A.J. Maguire  http://ajmaguire.wordpress.com/
Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
Dr. Bob Rich http://wp.me/p3Xihq-YV
Anne Stenhouse  http://annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com/ 
Helena Fairfax http://www.helenafairfax.com 
Marci Baun  http://www.marcibaun.com/blog/
Victoria Chatham http://victoriachatham.blogspot.ca
Rachael Kosinski http://rachaelkosinski.weebly.com/
Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/
Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
Rhobin Courtright http://www.rhobinleecourtright.com