You do need to clear a pretty high bar to impress an agent, a publisher, or a reader once you get published. The opening pages are a really, really important part of this. Adding some character relatability and a little bit of conflict goes a long way in hooking a reader.

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transcript for ways to hook a reader

Hi, this is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. Today, I'm talking about ways to hook a reader.

So, this has a lot in common with some of my talks about the first couple of pages, opening your novel, first chapters. I also teach a webinar on Writing Irresistible First Pages in which I workshop people's first pages that they submit beforehand. It's completely free. I would love for you to join me. You can find it on goodstorycompany.com under the... There's an Events sort of dropdown. We go into a lot more detail. So, if you like what you hear here, please check out that webinar.

So, ways to hook a reader, the opening pages, really, really important. You're not just hooking a reader eventually when they're sort of browsing, you know, through your Kindle book or through the book at a bookstore, but you do need to clear a pretty high bar to impress an agent, impress a publisher when you're in the submission side of things before you even get published. So, the first pages really do live up to the level of importance that a lot of people ascribe to them. That being said, you can always sort of finesse them, revise them, work on them over the course of writing your story. You don't have to nail it kind of like, you know, you're typing the beginning and then something brilliant is expected to pop out. You have a lot of time to really finesse.

I think that character relatability is going to be a big way of hooking the reader. We care about characters who want something, who are striving, who have maybe just experienced some conflicts. So, these are all elements to work in. If a character has a need, if they have a want, if they have a deep longing for something, if they're really striving towards something, that's really, really important to get down on the page. So giving a sense of what your character wants and needs, they could be different. We could get into the psychology behind their want and need a lot later in the story. But just making them striving towards something is really relatable, is a great way to hook somebody.

A little bit of conflict goes a long way, especially in the opening. Ideally, you're opening in action, in scene where, in a present moment, something is happening and there's a little bit of friction, whether it's a fight with a parent, whether it's a fight with a coworker, whether it's, you know, a big work assignment being handed down and the supervisor is saying like, you know, "I don't know if you have the chops for this but I'm gonna give it to you anyway." You know, anything that opens with some anxiety, some potential for the character to fall short, and this open-ended question of, you know, "I really don't know what's gonna happen with this character in this situation." So, we should see them somewhat in their normal, and then very quickly, something comes around the corner that takes them into a potential abnormal, a potential unknown. So that creates tension, that creates conflict, that creates, you know, like emotional struggle within the character, and usually, that is a great way of hooking the reader.

Voice is another way of hooking the reader. If it's just very digestible and if your writing is snappy, if there's humor in there, if there's really sharp dialogue, if there's beautiful description, you know, this is where you look toward your category for some of the expectations there. So, if you're aiming for a literary fiction piece, then the beautiful setting may be a sense of theme, a sense of foreboding that you can create with your lyrical prose is sort of the expectation, and that's something to lean into. Readers that are looking for a literary fiction piece, they will really want to revel in your wordcraft and so, you really want to show off your wordsmithing chops there. If it's a romantic comedy, dialogue, humor, fun characterization, a very contemporary voice, those are the things that tend to play well within that category.

So, you have to keep in mind the expectations of your category, of your tropes, of reader expectations when you are opening anything because that will be a really easy way to tell them like, "Hey, you are going to have your expectations met. I know the rules. You know the rules. Let's play the game." Rather than, you know, if it's something that is very category bending, if it's something very unusual, that can be a hook for your beginning as well because a reader shows up expecting X but they get Y instead. And that creates a little bit of intrigue for your opening. But I would say character, giving us a sense of what the character wants and needs, giving us a sense that the character is about to enter some conflict starting in action when we have a specific moment, a specific present time. We're not floating around in limbo. We're not philosophizing about the themes of the novel. These are some of the openings that I see over and over and over again, where it's like... I kind of talked about this on my novel opening video that I posted a little while ago. But it's like this long meditation on, you know, life has changed. Most likely, least when you expected, change comes a-knocking, you know. And it's just this big sort of theme-stated moment but we don't want that at the very beginning. We want things that plant hooks in the reader, and these are some ideas.

I'm going to continue the conversation over in Good Story Learning, our membership website where we have a ton of videos, a ton of printables, and resources for writers of any category, any experience level. It's just a lot of one-on-one teaching and conversations exactly like this, so I hope to see you over there.

My name is Mary Kole. I hope this was helpful...Good Story Company, and here's to a good story.

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