BY MCKENNA GARDNER
See? I can even catch your attention in a title. How do you draw a reader in with one word? One line? One sentence? One paragraph is pushing it. You better have them sucked in completely by then. Otherwise, unless their friends recommended your story, you may lose your reader forever.
What not to do:
1. Don’t pen your tale with someone waking up, or dreaming. If I have seen this a hundred times, it’s likely your readers will have, too. Don’t justify it with the fact that yours is the best dream, or extremely vital to the plot, or that something happens first thing in the morning and so you must show them waking up to create time and setting.
If your inciting action begins first thing in the morning, show your character putting their shoes on in their own weird style, or brushing their teeth while avoiding eye contact with themselves, or jumping in the freezing shower because they like it that way. Show me something unique. Something interesting.
If your dream plays such an important part in the plotline, I will daringly suggest that your plot is not strong enough if it cannot be sustained without entering your character’s subconscious.
2. Begin with a long explanation. Readers want to discover things little by little over the course of a long, exciting journey. Work your “world” into the details of the characters’ settings, words, and actions. Prologues are being frowned upon these days, and that’s partially in part due to their explanatory nature. Lose the exposition. Lose the background story. Just get the plot rolling and the story will tell itself.
3. Use gimmicks to entice the reader. Not only will they feel cheated when they realize what you’ve done, but they’ll be deceived about what sort of story they’re dealing with. For example, if you open your novel with an intense battle scene, where the character is swinging their mace as swiftly as their sword, and then you find out your real character is the boy playing the Dark Ages video game that his mother just shut off, that might seem misleading.
If your suspense seems to come out of nowhere and doesn’t apply to the rest of the story, leave it behind.
What to do:
1. Make the reader ask questions. Think of this opening line from George Orwell’s 1984: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Or L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Or Toni Morrison’s Paradise: “They shoot the white girl first.” All three make you wonder what in the world is going on.
2. Provide a sense of tension. Is there an urgency involved? What’s going on right now that is abnormal or about to go south? Take Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, for example: “The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.” Or Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans: “Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”
3. Set the stage for genre and voice. If you are working in YA, make it sound YA. Your reader wants to also “hear” your voice right from the get-go. Take these strong voices, for example. C. S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Trader: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Or Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: “You better not never tell nobody but God.” Those are voices that paint a picture and set the stage.
All this being said, are rules meant to be broken? Sure. But you had better do it well enough that you’re willing to bet your readership on it. And in my opinion, if you can break a rule that well, you should probably write something even better without needing to prove a point.
So! Get writing! Practice this craft. It takes skill to be the best hooker!
Managing Editor McKenna Gardner hones the tricks of the trade from her home in Arizona, where she lives with her husband and two daughters. Her latest project, Tomorrow Wendell by R. M. Ridley, Book 1 of the White Dragon Black series, was released in June, 2014.