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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/32985
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/32985
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I hate the word hook (in this context, it is useful for talking about fishing). It implies some kind of violent capture (fishing again). Who wants to be hooked? Fish? Drug addicts?

The problem with the word it that implies a kind of sudden and intrusive attachment. That leads writers to suppose that their lead has to involve some immediate high stakes action. But usually those openings fail to "hook" the reader.

I look at it this way. A story is an experience. A reader picks up a book hoping that it will give them the experience they are looking for. It is an excepted part of the story experience that the story starts in "the normal world" from which the hero will be summoned by the call to action. So logically a book opens in the ordinary world. Examples of this include the Shire in LOTR and Privet Lane in HP.

But there can be no violent hooking of the reader in the presentation of the real world. By its nature, the real world is not in a state of disturbance when the story opens. That is to come when the call to action arrives. And if the call to action arrives too early, the story won't work because we will not understand what is a stake for the hero when the call to action calls them away from the normal world. We won't understand what attachment cause them to resist the call to action. The normal world matters.

What then attracts the reader when they open the book and start reading about the normal world? I think a much better way to think about it is a promise. The opening of a book should give the reader a promise of what is to come. If the story is an experience, it should open with the promise that it will be the sort of story that the reader wishes to experience.

And I don't think that promise is one particular thing, one "hook". I think it is everything, the totality of the experience that the book presents in its opening pages. This will usually be the experience of the normal world, but different kinds of stories have different kinds of normal worlds. The promise it about establishing the kind of normal world in which the kind of story the reader wants takes place.

The normal world is also the foundation on which we establish what the character wants. The story ends with the return, so in a sense, what the hero wants is either the return to the normal world, or a return to a transformed normal world. The hobbits return to the Shire, but a transformed Shire. The hero seeks either restoration or transformation of the normal world, and so we cannot understand what they want except in terms of the normal world in which their story begins.

Where then must we begin? With the promise of the normal world, and thence to the transformation or restoration of the normal world that drives the hero.

Original score: 7