Hooks. Again.

Now that Karin Tabke’s First Lines contest has whetted your appetite for coming up with a finely crafted hook for your novel, I thought it’d be apropos to review a topic we’ve covered muchas around here (and here). Why? Because, in the inimitable words of Sol Stein, “If you want to be published, you need to come up with a good opening line.”

Some writers subscribe to the ‘ease into it’ sort of hook. John Cheever and Gore Vidal are masters at the subtle hook. I don’t like taking chances, though. I say clobber them over the head with a good line. You can worry about the subtlety later. As in, once they’re reading your story.

My definition of a good hook is one that raises a question or begins with change. In The Rosewood Casket, Sharyn McCrumb starts off with a doozy: On the mountain, a child was crying. Okay, how can you not read on?

Or William Lashner’s A Killer’s Kiss: They came for me in the nighttime, which is usually the way of it. Who came for him? The mob? Bedbugs? Aliens? The question’s been raised. Now you have to keep going to find out.

I’m going to share a few links I’ve bookmarked having to do with hooks. Here are a few of my favorites:

Barbara Dawson Smith’s Writing Hooks

Kat Feete’s Writing Hooks (Not Crooks)

If you’re missing a little snarkitude, here’s a classic from Miss Snark

A screenplay version, by Gina VanName

Good luck and happy fishing!

Kathleen Bolton

Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She writes under a variety of pseudonyms, including Ani Bolton.

She has written two novels as Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter–both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President’s teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins, and Tamara Blake, for the novel Slumber.

staging-writerunboxed.kinsta.cloud