Now here comes what most will say the most difficult part of writing a book; the "hook". Something that will keep the reader interested in where the story is going in the first few sentences. We all learned how to do this when we were writing our essays, and now it's time to put those skills to the test on an original work.

Some people say the hook should be in the first sentence, something that grabs the reader's attention and keeps it in a chokehold until they're too deep to go back. Others say it should be within the first two to three sentences of the book, that way you're not forcing a crazy and out-of context situation into the reader's brain. Then you have people who consciously choose to NOT have a hook, or do something that contradicts the traditional idea of a hook. 

I'll be showing you ideas of hooks from famous authors, and pointing out what makes them special. Then, I'll be sharing my own hooks and teaching you how to build your own. 

Example One: 
First up, we have Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's "Good Omens". 

"It was a nice day." - God

Now this is probably a bit of a shock considering how much of a cult classic this book is and the absolute CHOKEHOLD the show has had on Tumblr the past few years, but there's actually a good reason for the start of this book being so...normal. 

Neil Gaiman is quite active on social media and gave an explanation as to why he and Terry Pratchett chose this opening for the book, which is much better explained by him than I probably could. The quote reads as follows:

"The original opening of Good Omens was "It was a dark and stormy night." And then we thought "It wasn't a dark and stormy night." was a better take on it. So that was where the book started for a long time. And so when we decided to begin it earlier, in Eden, we wanted another line that described the weather, and "It was a nice day," seemed like an excellent one. Bland and innocuous and a line that breaks every single rule about what you're meant to do with your first line. (Grab your reader by the lapels! Hook them in the throat! Never let them go!)". 

In creating a seemingly bland opener, Neil Gaiman relies on the reader's assumption of the rule of thumb in creating an interesting hook by openly opposing it. This tricks the reader into assuming the innocuous line is the interesting and attention-grabbing hook, or it grabs their attention regardless because of how nonchalant it is. 

Either way, they clearly succeeded, seeing how much of a comeback this entire franchise has made over its thirty years of existence. #IneffableHusbands.

Example Two:
Next is Stephanie Meyer's "Twilight" (the first book). 

"I'd never given much thought to how I would die---though I'd had reason enough in the last few months---but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this." - Bella Swan

Even though "Breaking Dawn" is almost universally acknowledged as the worst thing to grace our common era, I can recognize that Stephanie Meyer has talent as an author and the ability to cultivate a strong following of readers, hence the chokehold this series had on the 2010s. 

Her hook is very classical in a sense; it forces the reader to ask questions that the story has yet to answer. Somebody's dying? Why are they dying? HOW are they dying? What reasons do they have to imagine themself dying? How did they get into this situation? What led them into this situation? Did something happen to them? 

The surplus of unanswered questions makes the reader immediately want the gratification of finding an answer. It's what draws us to the town of Forks, what makes us wary of Edward and his family, and builds an entire world that we can inhabit before we come back to where the opening left us. That being said, the rest of the series after the first book is flamin' hot garbage, but sometimes a first installation is enough to guilt us into reading the rest (more on that later). 

The way Bella explains her predicament is shrouded in an air of casualness, choosing contemplative words like "I'd never given much thought [to it]", or "I'd had reason enough" to set the tone of an intelligent and well-read narrator, or a narrator recalling a past event from the future. We want to know why she is so devil-may-care about death, if she'd always been that way, or if this has been a new development and this is where the story takes place.

It's a delicate balance between giving the readers enough to work with without spoiling the events of the books that she masters, forcing us to dig deeper and read for the answers. In short, pretty much a Grade-A example of writing a hook. Never thought I'd say anything about "Twilight" being perfect in my lifetime, but here we are!

Example Three: 
"Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much." - Narrator

Now this, if you haven't been living under a rock or are newly evicted from the uterus, is an opening that most people will be at least vaguely familiar with. "Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone" (or "Philosopher's Stone" depending on where you're reading this from) is one of the most well known books in one of the most well-known book series of all time. It's consistently been a bestseller in its fields and even beyond it, appealing to children and the adults who grew up with it in the later novels. With all that said, let's dive into analysis. 

Immediately, we get introduced to some important characters; Mr. and Mrs. Dursley. If they weren't important, they wouldn't have been addressed up-front in the very first chapter of the very first book of a long and popular series. This puts emphasis on their place in the story and pretty much puts a glowing neon sign above their heads saying "Look at me! I'm important! Chekov who?" 

The second smoking gun (hahaha, literary jokes) is the tone the opening line takes. It's a sort of haughty, aloof way of speaking. "[They] were proud to say that they were perfectly normal"; it says so right in front of us that they're proud, and the addition of the "perfectly normal" adds extra emphasis on that high-and-mighty attitude. They're perfectly normal, yes, and they're very proud of their ordinariness. The "thank you very much" is just the cherry on top; these people sound like absolute assholes.

The exact language aids itself as well; why are they so fixated on "perfectly" normal? Isn't mediocre normal enough? It alludes to a standard of normal that they constantly try to maintain, which if we read a little too far into it could mean that they are suffering from trying to appear normal, when in fact they are not.

We'll be jumping into tone as a whole in a later chapter, but for now, let's leave it at that. 

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Here are some of our overarching targets that we can find among this collection of literary hooks: 

- Introducing an important character in some form or fashion, from either first person (the narrator) or third person.
- An opener which leaves the reader with questions that have yet to be answered, and assumed to be answered later on in the novel.
- Setting a clear and distinct tone that may or may not carry on throughout the entire novel.
- Giving a setting, or at the very least a part of the setting, and potentially a time period.
- SLOWLY introduces the reader to the plot of the novel, with or without alluding to what will happen later on.

This is a pretty good list, right? Well, yes, but remember that a lot more authors published a lot more books by following different rules, and other times straight-up ignoring them altogether. At the end of the day, write something that you would want to see in a novel. What gets you hooked on reading? 

....also don't plot dump. That's pretty big.