The Beginning Of The Hook
When you are distributing your work online, you don’t have a fancy cover or intriguing synopsis crafted by a professional marketing department to capture your reader’s interest; instead, you’ve got two minutes.
I’m exaggerating the situation a bit, but it’s vital to realize how important the beginning of your story is. If you don’t have a bestseller to your name or raving reviews, then a reader will judge whether you’re worth reading by the end of your first chapter – if not earlier. So, if you want anyone to read your writing, it’s best to impress them as soon as possible. You have to use everything you’ve got in your beginning. To blow your beginning is to, for all practical purposes, blow the book. If you don’t hook the reader, if you don’t stand out, you’re toast.
This is a sad fact, but I don’t think anyone will deny it. With the current hyper competition for readers, a few methods have established themselves as “good” ways to open a book – I’m using good subjectively here. What is good to get readers isn’t always going to be good for critiques or the book’s overall impression.
Probably the most common opening you’ve seen to both books and movies that is used and abused far too much is the action prologue. It begins chaotically as unintroduced characters burst onto the scene, fighting, doing something important, dieing, anything intense. This continues for a bit and some small climax or conclusion is reached, and the scene fades to black. If this is a movie, the text “Five years later” usually pops up about this time.
This definitely catches a readers interest, but it has its problems. Usually this is because after the prologue the author switches to a rather slow exposition. I’m sure you have picked up a book that began with guns blazing only to bore you to tears fifty pages later with the story of some character’s trip to the grocery store. Hooking a reader at the beginning is not a guarantee.
If you do chose to have the Hollywood action movie prologue, it’s important that you stick to the middle. Don’t get too carried away and make sure you link the prologue with your inevitable exposition in a compelling manner. Don’t forget that if you have a fast paced beginning, your readers are going to expect more in a similar vein.
Maybe it’s best to ditch this method all together and stand out differently. Try something weird, do something bizarre, anything to stand out. Writing is often defying the norm and doing the unexpected. With a different opening you don’t have to worry about your readers settling into some per-expectation of what will come, and this can keep them reading.
I don’t mean to say your beginning is some throw away designed only to attract readers, that would be contrary to the spirit of writing, but remember that you can write a great book, an amazing book, but if it doesn’t sell itself then it probably won’t sell at all.
I want to point out that action != excitement. Some people are the assumption that that stuff is interesting. It’s not. It can be, but generally it’s not the most exciting part of the book, nor should it be. If it is, you have failed.