Setting the Hook

The Strong Fiction Start

By Mary Rosenblum

 

           

 

            The winter before he was sixteen, Pup sold his soul to the devil.  Wouldn’t you read on?  What’s going on here?  Who’s Pup?  Real devil?  Metaphor?  (This is from Ruth Rendell’s ‘The Killing Doll’) What does that first line do?  It’s a sideshow barker chanting ‘Come on in, see the monster with two heads, experience the wild wonders of the Jungle Cage…’  It promises us something strange, scary maybe, dark…exciting.  It snags our primate curiosity and yanks us right into that story.   Could you stop reading right there?

            Whether you are a big name or an unpublished writer looking for that first sale, it pays to hook those readers into your story.  Ever watched people in a bookstore?  They pick up that paperback with the interesting cover, flip it open, and read the first page.  Then they either put it back or eventually take it to the cash register.  The same thing happens in a magazine.  You flip to the story, read the first paragraph.  Then you either flip to the next story or keep reading.  And you know what?  That’s how most editors decide.  They start reading.  When they stop, they reach for the rejection slip.  Unless they are staring at ‘the end’.  Then they reach for a contract.   That hook opening gets them all started. 

            We are like Kipling’s ‘Elephant’s Child’, full of ’satiable curiosity.   We want to find out.  A good story is a cascade of questions and answers that lead a reader effortlessly along, like a stone rolling downhill.  That first line or paragraph is the push that gets the stone rolling.

 

Introducing Everybody.  And Everything

            Most novice writers tend to start their stories with backstory.  Backstory is the background – where we are, who all these people are, when is this? Now this is all necessary information, but that long paragraph or two of backstory, Mildred was seventy four, petite and full of spunk.  She  lived in Riverville.  Her parents had left her the house and she lived there with Missy, her cat.  She loved roses and the yard was full of them.  She spent hours every day caring for them, or just admiring their pretty blossoms.  Everybody in town loved her.  She volunteered at the library and kept the planters in front of City Hall looking nice.  Riverville was a small town in rural Iowa.  Most people farmed soybeans went to church on Sundays.  Mildred  helped  Bernard O’Keef, the police chief, on his cases.

            Now this is all very useful backstory.  But compare it to our ‘sold his soul’ start.  We learn a lot about Mildred…but that’s just it.  Nothing sparks our curiosity.  Nothing yells to us read this story!   How are we to know that this turns out to be a very engaging little mystery with a wonderful twist end?   Let’s try again.

            Mildred looked up from pruning her roses as Little Sam ran past, covered in blood.  

            Ah…blood?  Who’s Little Sam? What is going on?  Something, obviously!  And we read on.

 

Jigsaw Backstory

          We need that backstory!  So how do we get it to the reader if we leap into a story with both feet?   This is especially an issue if you write in Fantasy or Science Fiction or use an exotic locale for a Mainstream or Mystery story.  The answer is that you slip the backstory in, one piece at a time, as your main character does…whatever.  Let’s look at Mildred and see how much of our backstory we can slip in. 

            Mildred looked up from pruning her roses as Little Sam ran past, covered in blood.  She took a last snip from the DeAngelo because that hybrid tea needed hard pruning.  Then she set the shears down on the stone bench in front of the white clapboard house her grandfather had built for her grandmother when they settled this Iowa quarter section and went inside to wash the garden dirt from her hands.  Bernie, down at the police station, would be dealing with Little Sam.  “He’ll tell me to go back to my roses,” she said to Missy, her Abyssinian cat.  “But he always does. What would he do if I did?”  She smiled and dried her hands on the flowered kitchen towel.  “He always takes me out to dinner, after we solve the case, too.  So I suppose I’ll help him out again.”  Missy arched her back and purred loudly.  “I agree,” Mildred said.  She checked her slacks and short sleeved shirt for dirt stains and headed for Main Street and the police station. 

            So what do we know about Mildred now?  She’s probably elderly, has that cat, her grandparents built this house, so she has lived here all her life.  She loves roses.  We don’t know her size, yet, but we can guess ‘full of spunk’.  We’ll learn more about the town as she does whatever in the course of the story.  Clearly she helps Bernie.  We don’t know about the library or the City Hall planters but that can come up later.

            Our hook start told the reader ‘good stuff is in here’.  Now we can add that backstory, but it wraps around a strong backbone of action as Mildred puts down the shears, washes her hands, and heads off to the police station.   As she perhaps meets people on the way and then talks to  Bernie,  we’ll learn a lot more. 

 

The Flashback or Thoughtful Review Start

            A very common novice start is the strong hook…followed instantly by a lengthy flashback.  We start out with something that yells ‘come on in!’ and then we are flung backwards in time into the events that helped shape the character. Or we are dropped into a long, internal monologue as our Main Character reviews his or her past at length.  Now we know everything about the character, right?

              Danger here!  Readers are  building the world as they read your opening.  If you throw them into a flashback right off the bat, you run the risk that they’ll like your flashback world more than they’ll like the story that follows it.  Or, that long thoughtful contemplation of the backstory will bore them.  Your readers will feel that you violated your promise of ‘good stuff’ when you yelled ‘come on in’ and they’ll quit reading.  You can make an immediate flashback work, but it is very hard to do.  A long internal monologue about a character’s past is not the best way to insert backstory.

 

Hook and Go!

            Create that powerful hook, intrigue the reader, then send your character off on some action or other.  Wrap your backstory around that action, so as Mildred takes us along question Bernie about the bloody Little Sam, we’ll find out, through her conversations with townsfolk and Bernie, all about her town and her relationships.  Don’t try to simply ‘fill us in’.  Hook those readers and drag them right into your story.  Feed them backstory a piece at a time and let them put that jigsaw puzzle together as you build toward your climax.  Once you set that hook, don’t let them go until they hit that ‘the end’. 

            And then you have them.