Les Edgerton on Writing - the importance of the opening hook

[Brian G Turner]

I saw Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers on Page One and Never Lets Them Go by Les Edgerton recommended on another thread and thought I'd take a look.

Visiting his blog, the guy does make for some interesting reading:
Les Edgerton on Writing

What are the important elements in hooking a reader early?

To begin where the story begins. It’s that simple. A contemporary story is about one thing and one thing only. Trouble. That means the story should begin—when the trouble begins. Not the week before, not two years before, not even two minutes before. When the trouble begins. Period. And, that seems to be a difficult concept for many to master. Something has to create and/or reveal that trouble to the protagonist. That event is the inciting incident. And, that’s where stories today need to begin.
There was a time in our culture when novels could begin more leisurely. This was a time before television and movies and CNN and iPods and all the other entertainment venues were upon us. Today’s reader doesn’t have the attention span nor the interest in picking up novels with leisurely openings. That doesn’t mean stories should begin with gunfights, stabbings, bombs blowing up, kidnappings, murders, or any of that melodramatic stuff. It means they have to open with conflict—the major conflict that forms the core of the story. It can be a quiet conflict, but what it can’t be is a lengthy account of the protagonist’s bucolic life for the ten years before the trouble began. It has to begin with the trouble. Period.


When movies began, they had no structural models, so they used novels as their models. Today, it’s been reversed. Novels have to imitate film structure. Years ago, screenwriting how-to books insisted the first ten minutes of a screenplay be “devoted to the setup.” No mas, again quoting Roberto Duran. Those days are, in the words of my son, “so five minutes ago.” Films today begin… when the trouble begins. As should novels.


We read a novel for one reason. To see if and how the protagonist is going to resolve the story problem. If there’s no problem on the page, for that novel the reader is going to become… a nonreader. Count on it. Very few (and they don’t count) readers pick up a book just to encounter in the beginning a nifty shooting in an alley. If they don’t know the characters or the protagonist’s story problem, why would they care? There are a million places to see someone get shot. Just click on the nightly news. There has to be a reason to turn to Page 2. That reason is we see a character with a compelling problem—one we can relate to—on Page 1.

 

[Rivaelen]

I read Hooked several years ago and his advice really changed the way I thought about starting stories.

 

[tinkerdan]

This strikes me as odd but true yet I somehow recall that in all my reading I always start at the first page and see if it hooks me. Thats been a good fifty years now and I would think that the only difference today is that need for high energy startups which he actually seems to discourage.

That would suggest that the shift is more in the direction of there being different criteria for hook today than there was yesterday. Rather than to suggest that we didn't have hooks back in-the-day.

That means that it's not just important to write a hook but you need to have the pulse of the present day reader as a reference for the hook.

On the other hand I have to admit that I've always been easy to hook.

 

[Boneman]

Whilst agreeing in broad principle, I've been hooked by the beauty of wordsmiths, where trouble wasn't the beginning: Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay, for instance, or Name of the Wind, or The Power of One - all these drew me in by the majesty of the words, where trouble wasn't shown in the opening. It was hinted at, but that's not what Les is saying.

 

[tinkerdan]

Now that I think about it; and this could be a poor example; though I think not.

I like David Weber's Honor Harrington series a lot and it doesn't follow any of this at all.

Each book has this boring prologue I could do without but I read them. And the first book On Baslisk Station took the whole first chapter to outline the conflict that Honor was going to face. The first pages introduce Honor, her treecat, and the ship she is meant to captain. And it's mostly through the eyes of the people on the ship around her and in their heads that we get a gist of the conflict near the end of the chapter.

All those books have that format and despite that I do like them. Are they deep and meaningful literature? Probably not. In fact there is a lot about his style of writing that is unconventional.

I did not pick the first book up from a recommend and not from the blurb on the back or the cover. I hate most of the covers for those. The author's name was new to me. I did what I always do and started reading it and had to pretty much get to about twenty pages into that one before I bought it. The point is that there was enough there to keep me reading to get to the point.

That was a number of years ago, that is a certainty, but I don't feel I've changed my method of reading much if at all since then.

 

[tinkerdan]

After looking at the suggested reading I'd be more inclined to recommend something like

The First Five Pages: A Writer'S Guide To Staying Out of the Rejection Pile by Noah Lukeman

or any several books by Donald Maass in his breakout series of writing books.
(At least he uses good examples from the many authors whose works he helped publish--rather than poor examples of his own work that don't even demonstrate what the point was.)

I also have Stephen King's ON Writing
Renni Brown and Dave kings Self-editing for Fiction Writers.

Even the work of Orson Scott Card is more clearly defined.

and for that matter James Scott Bell has a stack of good books.

I'm not so sure about an author who uses the same first line throughout the entire process as his primary example. (Somehow it just happens to be his own.) And it wasn't a particularly stunning one in my opinion.

But by all means there is some standard advice we see here every day so there is that.