On Intro Hooks

Wisdom from the Comments, provided by John Van Stry

Sometimes you can fish the damnedest things out of the comments…

I shared a friend’s post on Story Intros from a Psychological POV (Psychology for Writers), and picked up the gem below from John Van Stry.

I grew up on classic SF and pulp reprints. Astute — or even just frequent — readers will know by now that I’m a big fan of good story hooks, and John makes some great points concerning them.

Make sure you drop by HIS substack and subscribe, the man is an amazing writer.

Story Hooks

By John Van Stry

Intros are important, so important that they have a name for them, as you probably know it’s called ‘the hook’. Apt name that. I learned a lot about writing hooks from an English teacher who had a journalism degree and taught us all about how to write a news article. The first paragraph had to have a compelling ‘hook’ to get you to read all of it. Your job required it. It was more important than anything else in the article.

Pulling apart the hooks of stories in the newspaper will give you a fair bit of insight as to just how they’re done. Yes, they’re short, but if your hook doesn’t start in the first paragraph of your book, you may just lose a sale forever.

The biggest thing with a hook is that it has to be memorable. There have to be things that stand out. A big word or two used in an interesting way. A clever turn of a phrase. An engaging action. An engaging person. An enigma that must be solved. In many cases that opening to your story may have nothing at all to do with your story. Though you do want it to provide some sort of insight - to either the character, a tradition, a practice, or something about a time and/or place. You also want to use it to try and set the pace.

Writing good hooks takes practice, and it takes some time. I have more than a few novels out there where I didn’t write the hook until I was at least a third into writing the novel. Because doing something in your hook, or immediately after you set it, that comes back sixty or a hundred pages later to be important can really help with writing it.

Remember, you don’t have to write the story in order, and you don’t have to write the hook until you have a better understand of the story you’ve sat down to write. Some stories flow naturally forward from a great opening. Some stories flow backwards from a great ending. And some are like a bowl of spaghettis thrown against the wall.

Lately I’ve seen people pull out the beginning of ‘The Dawn Treader’ as an example of a great hook. But here’s the thing, it’s not. Not really. It’s a good opener and a good hook, but until someone reminded you of it, did you really remember it? I didn’t, and I’ve read that book at least three times. As a hook it relied on you already having read previous books in the series. You read that opening statement and it’s the same as settling into your favorite chair - you know you’re going to be comfortable because you’ve just been reminded that you know what to expect.

The Sherlock Holmes introduction however is much better and much more, because you’re being introduced to the man whom the entire series is going to be about for the first time.

Which leads into the most important aspect of hooks and intros:

They are Genre Dependent. The Dawn Treader intro is a children’s book, and has to be quick, and has to say something in that first line to grab a child’s interest and pull that child forward. Sherlock Holmes however is for the older, adult mystery reader. So it’s got a lot more ‘time’ to set the hook, and needs to find a way to be engaging that those who have picked up that genre story will find interesting. Hence the warnings, then descriptions, and the feeding of clues about the character. You could almost say you’re getting a mini-mystery complete with ending in the first couple of pages. Which draws the reader in and on.

Action and adventure stories also have their unique way. They start off with an action, or several actions. They just get right into it. You are immediately there. Or something is happening now.

So every introduction or hook that you create has to fit within the bounds of the genre is which your story lies. It needs to confirm to the reader that yes, that spaceship on the cover means that this is a book about spaceships. Or that this is an action novel. Or a thriller, or a romance, or … I’m sure you get the idea.

Last but not least is the hardest thing one can do, and that is to be unique. To start off with a hook that is odd and not easily understood, but which leaves the reader with a hint that something is not quite right with the beginning of the story, so they read on to find out more. Those are the harder and more challenging to write. Sometimes I suspect they’re just sudden inspiration, other times I suspect that they’re from experience and serious planning.

On the other hand the hook to Mercedes Lackey’s first novel has to be one of the most common and overused tropes in existence. Yet it was written in such a way that you still continued on, out of sheer curiosity as to how could someone write something that’s been written so many times before, and yet make you enjoy it. So don’t feel like you have to be unique. (Or maybe in her own way she was - by using something that had been overused almost to death).

But to return to the point of this overly long response, it’s not in the psychology of the person you describe, it’s in the description. It’s in the way we are told about a character-if our intro is going to be an introduction to a character-far more than it is about that character.

‘The trick, they say, is all in the telling.’

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