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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33010
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

> Let me tell you a story. Go on, pull up a chair and siddown. Atta boy. Now, where was I? Ah, yes. Let me tell you a story. A tale really. Happened to me back when I was a wee liddle thing but a handful of years old. Had my ma tell it to me over and over, 'cause I don' really 'member it myself.

Don't try to hook anyone. Don't use techniques to draw them in. Because what hooks one, will turn another off. What you need to do, is understand who your target audience is, and understand what they are looking for.

If you're writing an erotic tale, then there needs to be the promise (a promise kept) of steamy bedroom play (bedroom being optional, because the kitchen and/or forest's grassy floor will do just fine).

If it's a romance, you need two people who want to be together.

That's why 'setting' can be a hook. If you are writing Sci-Fi or Fantasy? Setting and scene is the best hook. Why? Because the target audience is trying to get away from the mundane, so showing them something fantastic?

Standing on the bridge of your new ship, gazing out at the planet you just left as the line of sunset slowly eases across the lazy orb passing beneath you?

Or standing on a hilltop, gazing down on dragons swooping down and stealing cows from your family's farm?

Readers who choose the genre for the fantastical sense of other would love it (even if some jaded readers have seen it a thousand times and roll their eyes).

A hook, in this sense, is nothing more than showing your reader:

I know what you want, look, here it is. If you want more of this? Keep reading.

And what that something is depends on your reader, or how you offer them what they didn't think they wanted.

So really, in order to tell you what a hook is, you need to tell me what story you're writing, and I'll tell you what hooked me. For some, it's setting, for some it's the premise (I've been hooked on bad stories, simply because I love what it was meant to be).

But you know what hooks me every time? The voice. Not the scenic descriptions, not the plot, not the characters. Just the way things are told. How melodic it all seems to be, how the words roll off the page and burn directly into my mind, just for how they were written. That magical balance of the tone used that compliments the POV character in such a way that I believe this (likely) fictional person in a (likely) fictional world is telling me their tale.

Hence, why I opened with a character I'm sure you imaged was elderly, likely not highly educated, and has this story to tell. You don't know what the story is, but if you like listening to your grandparents telling you stories from their past, from their childhood? Then you want to know. You want to know if there's cookies on the table, if there's water being boiled for tea or coffee, if there's something you remember from visiting your grandparents.

And if you weave your story right. If you capture the essence of what people loved about listening to those old stories. Then you don't need a hook. The story is the hook, and it's all you'll ever need. As long as you understand what your reader expects to find, so you can consciously go with that, or against it.

Original score: 3