Writing Tips

Beginning Your Story (Hooks, Prologues, and Descriptions)

The beginning of your story is one of the most important parts. You have drawn in readers with your cover and your description, but with a crappy beginning, it is very easy to drive them away. This chapter is about how to pull them in and get them hooked, right from the start.

Hooks: 4 effective ones to keep the pages turning

You want your story to start out with an effective hook. And no, you don't begin with "Hi, my name is..." That is super cliché, and it makes many readers click the back button.

You want to give the reader a reason to stay, and then you tell them who the characters are.

There are many different hooks, but I am going to tell you four different ones you can use that I find very effective...

1. Instant dialogue. One way is by immediately going into dialogue. Starting your story with a conversation, without speech tags (examples of a speech tag: "he said", "she asked"--written directly before or after dialogue). If you want your dialogue hook to be effective, you want it to be vague enough to make your reader curious enough to keep reading until they know what is going on.  They don't know who is speaking yet...let it be a mystery.

Don't let the reader know what your characters' names are until the names are spoken. Then you can start adding speech tags. Throughout the conversation, you can give brief details of their facial expressions and physical features, but you're still being a wee bit vague. Once the speech tags come in, you can get a lot more specific.

Don't let the vagueness last too long. If you don't inform the reader soon enough, then it has the same effect of informing them too soon. You have to find the healthy middle.

Here's an example:

"What do you want to do, just leave her here?"

"Do we really have another option?"

He huffed. "Has that ever really mattered?" His eyes were bloodshot; he needed sleep.

I looked down at her face. Her eyes were closed, and she was breathing heavily, her struggles increasing with each inhale.

"Kate..."

I looked back up at him. We both knew that there was hardly any chance that we would get her out of here, especially alive.

"We have to leave her, Reid."

Reid shook his head. "We can't give up on her. I'm not going to."

"She's going to die," I said.

"And?" He looked at me quizzically. "Her family deserves to have a body to bury."

I bent over, reaching for the spear that was protruding through her abdomen. My fingers stopped when they were only a couple of inches away; they instead curled into a fist.

"And what if we don't make it out alive, either, because we're too busy carrying her? She's dead weight," I told him.

"You don't mean that," he said.

I stared into his eyes, challenging him. "And what if I did?"

At this point, I would then begin to describe more of the surroundings, and how Reid and Kate get out of there, with or without the girl. You want to ease into the story, not throw it right into the reader's face.

2. All-caps onomatopoeia. CRASH! It's time to go right into your story with a BANG!

This hook is a little less advanced, as well as a little cliché, but it can still be effective. You start your story with a sound word, which hints at an action sequence. Maybe it's a fight scene. Maybe someone is being chased. Maybe it's the Apocalypse beginning.