Tip #1: Write your scene first and then find your hook.
Start with a conflict. Maybe you’ve seen this piece of advice once before (or many, many times), but what does conflict really mean when it comes to fiction? And do you really need conflict in your opening paragraph? Can’t it wait until later after the story builds up some momentum?
As you probably know, a story without any conflict at all isn’t really very exciting. But at the same time, not every novel or short story is action packed, so you’re not going to have a fight scene. Sometimes the story revolves around a main character who has a pretty boring life…up until they get sucked into some magic portal, crime spree, or family drama. So what are you supposed to do now?
Well, here’s what I suggest. You write up your first scene or chapter. Why? Because, while you’re doing this, you’re finding out all sorts of things about your character, the setting, and any other characters who will be interacting with your main character.
Once you have a somewhat developed scene, you can go back and look for your story hook. In almost every early-draft manuscript that I work on (including the one’s I’ve personally written), the hook is buried down below in the scene. All you need to do is find it and rearrange things to bring the hook up to the top.
Tip #2: Know what to look for.
Okay, let’s say you have your first scene written. You know a lot about your story and character now. You know you’re supposed to look for a conflict and move it to the top. But maybe you’re still stuck. You’ve highlighted some interesting sentences that could be hooks, but are they the best fit?
Well, let’s pause and look at the types of conflict to see which one stands out in your scene.
Interpersonal conflict
This can usually be found in any story with more than one character (human or non-human). You can definitely start your scene off with an argument or a physical altercation of some sort—if that’s the kind of book you’re writing—but you don’t have to, and forcing this to happen in a book where it just doesn’t fit is a bad idea.
Instead, you can find all sorts of interpersonal conflict between people just by placing them in a scene together and giving them different goals. If these goals are not compatible, there is a natural sort of friction, and your story will immediately be more interesting than a story in which the characters agree about everything. Meh.
Example: Your character wants to leave work early, but a new customer comes in five minutes before closing. Your character has to be polite, but the customer has a million questions, or maybe they just shop really, really slowly (have you ever been there?).
There’s no actual argument. In fact, everyone is being really nice, and one of the characters is quite content. But if you write this scene well, the reader will feel the tension building up. There is a conflict because the characters have different goals, which leads to stress in the main character.
Exercise: Now, challenge yourself. Imagine if you flip the scene and write it from the perspective of the happy customer. They’re excited that the store is still open. Can you still fill this scene with conflict. Certainly. You can show the employee’s irritation in other ways, such as dialogue, body language, actions, etc. Or you can move the conflict to the customer. Maybe the customer is slow to shop because they are in no hurry to get home, and they are just happy to have another human to socialize with after a long stressful day working alone. Or they have kids and finally get to talk to an adult. Or they have a romantic interest in the employee. Anyway, you get the idea.
Internal conflict
Maybe your character’s tension stems from within. This can come in many forms, but cognitive dissonance is an interesting conflict. Maybe your character is an extrovert, but they have taken a vow of silence. Maybe they want to be a famous singer, but they sabotage themself, because deep inside, they don’t think they deserve to be successful. Or maybe they fear failure. Or maybe they are afraid they might have to give an interview and they don’t do well with improvisation.
Exercise: What does your character struggle with the most? Do they encounter this later in the story? Maybe they encounter a smaller version of this in the first scene as a way to foreshadow the larger conflict later on.
Excellent. Now that you’ve identified the conflict and are developing it as the theme of your first paragraph, you can rework your first sentence to draw in the reader.
Tip #3: What types of opening lines can work as good hooks?
There are a few different ways to start a scene or chapter.
Dialogue
You can start with a line of dialogue. If it has a bit of mystery to it, the reader will keep going to see what happens.
Example: “Did you bring the net?”
Thoughts
Like dialogue, thoughts can contain an air of mystery, but it works just as well if you show the character’s conflict, either internal or external.
Example: I’ll go over there and talk to him. So what if he invented the first ever stable wormhole? He’s just a regular person, right?
Action
Again, this doesn’t have to be a huge action scene. It can be small and subtle, and still be just as powerful. Action just means getting your character started on their journey through the story. It can begin with a small movement, then a bigger one, and then an even bigger one. Your first action can lead to a chain reaction of other events. Or it can tell the reader a bit about the character’s emotional state.
Example: She twisted the damp cloth over the basin, squeezing out the excess water, then placed it on his forehead.
Well, this starts as a small action. But it tells the reader the character as taking care of someone who is possibly ill. There’s a conflict and a mystery, because we don’t know the nature of the illness or even the character’s relationship to the other person. Is this a child, or an aging parent or maybe a fellow survivor in a zombie apocalypse? We don’t know unless we keep reading.
Emotion
This works well on its own or in combination with the other approaches. It’s like a thought, but a bit more indirect, so it deserves its own category.
Example: He was glad she was dead.
See? Simple. Effective.
Setting
This is a tricky one, but I’ve seen setting used quite well in stories. You’ll need to watch out for infodumping if you are trying to describe too much too soon—I’ll discuss this in detail in another post—but you can absolutely work conflict into a setting and use it for a story hook if you do it well.
How do you work conflict into a setting? Even inanimate objects can tell you something. Detectives can look at a setting and use details to figure out what happened in the past. You can help your reader do this too.
Example: The shoe dangled from the ceiling fan for three rotations before dropping to the plush carpet below.
Steamy romance? Scene of a fight? Crime scene? Out-of-control party? Or maybe the kids were just a bit rowdy during playtime. (I gave the shoe an action (bonus point!), but the shoe could also be static, to create a different vibe.)
Tip #4: Don’t trick your readers.
Okay. You have a great story hook. You included all the elements from the previous three steps, and the hook is amazing. Yay!
Your reader is immersed in the scene and loving every word. Then they get six paragraphs into the story, and…
You switch to a different character. It turns out the character in scene one has absolutely nothing to do with the story.
Maybe the purpose of the first scene is to show the victim getting murdered and then you cut to the main character who will be investigating the crime. That’s been done, and it works because the reader understands it’s a mystery.
Or maybe the opening scene is used as foreshadowing, background for the main character, or some other deeper reason. That works; writers do this all the time.
But…if you find yourself writing about one character and then they end up just disappearing or becoming the minor character, then the reader might feel cheated.
If your space opera opener suddenly turns into a werewolf romance, readers might get a bit confused. I suggest looking at genre conventions first. What works in a cozy novel won’t work in science fiction or romance. Naturally, your book can fit onto more than one genre and include elements from both, but those elements need to work in tandem (werewolves in space? Sure, why not?). The story shouldn’t just switch suddenly without warning to the reader, though. Surprises are good, but avoid the bait-and-switch.
Tip #5: Avoid the cliché
Is your character suddenly jolted out of sleep by a horrible dream? Or maybe they are looking in the mirror as a way to describe themselves. Oops. Yes, these things do happen in books. That’s what makes them cliché. But once something becomes a cliché, it’s time to switch it up. You can either come up with something else, use it ironically, or put a spin on the cliché to make it more original.
How about another example?
Let’s stick with the mirror cliché.
Original:
I stared into the mirror as I shaved the brown stubble from my chin. My emerald eyes glistened under the bright bathroom lights. My six foot four, muscular frame hid the fact that I was no longer able to do the same heavy labor as my younger coworkers. I looked down at the surgery scars on both knees. I was getting old.
Rewritten:
I pulled the razor through the shaving cream, watching as each clean stripe appeared on my cheek. The bright bathroom light flickered out for a moment, before settling into some dim compromise between light and dark.
I sighed, leaning closer to the mirror to see better. The muscles of my back spasmed with the movement and I winced. This in turn led to a dot of red appearing next to my lip.
I really need to find a new job and get out of this dump.
The first example centers around the character’s physical characteristics. Height, hair color, eye color, etc. The second focuses on the conflict. His crummy home, his painful back, the overall state of his emotions. The reader can still get enough information from the opening paragraph to picture the character. The rest can be sprinkled throughout the story later on, and some of the details don’t really matter. Do you need to know the character has emerald eyes? Only if we need this to recognize him as an alien, lost prince, or supernatural creature. Or maybe the murderer happens to have emerald eyes. But otherwise…well, you get the idea.
Bonus Tip (That’s right, I promised 5, but I’m sneaky.)
Tip #6: Revisit your hook after you have a completed manuscript.
Once you finish your novel or story, go back and look at the opening scene again. Does the chapter hook still fit the tone of your novel? Does it match the style and theme of the story? Does it accurately reflect your main character’s personality? Or does it feel gimmicky or out of sync? By revisiting this part of your book, you can tweak the story hook to better reflect the goals and vision you have for your novel. Maybe something of interest has revealed itself in a later chapter. Or maybe you realize your story has come almost full circle, and you can reword your hook to complete the pattern that has emerged.
Every story is different, of course, and maybe you have your own unique approach already, but these tips are a great way to help strengthen your opening scene. The aim is to draw the reader into the story as quickly as possible, while at the same time, giving them an accurate sense of the type of story they are about to immerse themselves in.
Happy writing!
