How to write the perfect opening hook to your novel

in this video I'm going to look at a catastrophe that can befall you on page one of your novel and show you a way to avoid happening to you it goes like this you spend two years writing your novel you pour your heart and soul into it and then it's finished and you send it off to the agent heart in your mouth praying and she regrets she rejects it and you interpret this wrongly you you misinterpret this as confirmation of something you you always suspected at that dark secret fear in your heart that you're not good enough you're not good enough to be a writer and it was an act of presumption to even imagine you could be whereas in fact your novel was actually quite good it's just that the agent was so overwhelmed with submissions to read that she rejected it on on the basis of a rookie error she found on page one so after all that work your novel never even got red well I'm going to give you a template stolen from a rather well-known movie which you can use to avoid this happening to you so welcome to another installment in my series on how to write your novel using that most unlikely of writing implements around Oxford bus ticket thank you for inspiration we're going to take bus number three down to this place Oxford's famous Botanic Garden now over the years countless authors and writers have wandered these Lanes searching for inspiration J.R Tolkien used to love coming here and it's reasonable to suppose that much of The Hobbit was dreamed up under these these trees and branches Now The Hobbit is rather a useful Paradigm for what we're discussing here because if you remember Bilbo Baggins was sitting at home wanting to be left alone didn't want the world to intrude on him and there's a knock on the door and during the course of the evening 13 dwarves and a wizard turned up and they whisked him away on an invention in their quest to a far-off realm for Dragon treasure and in a way this is this is what we do as writers we try to capture the reader take the reader hostage on page one and whisk them away on an enchanted Journey but there's a problem is there's a massive problem and you can see what it is by a recent newspaper article I read it said that five percent of people admit that they check Facebook while having sex well I think we can all agree that there is an attention deficit or attention span deficit here isn't it attention spans are not where they used to be now this is a problem because when we start reading a novel we are like a sleeper who wakes up in a strange room we don't know where we are we're disoriented and we we need information and the writer has to provide it quickly urgently but the problem is there's a lot of it you know what sort of story is this where is it taking place what peer and what historical error is it taking place is what genre the right acid provide all this information but but the problem is that it's boring it's infant backstory information Exposition it kills storytelling Stone dead now in the old days it wasn't a problem writers could take a leisurely approach they could spend 50 years 50 pages writing backstory Robinson Crusoe spends the first few pages talking about his mum and his dad and his brother and it's a long while before we get to any shipwrecks Moby Dick begins with a very lengthy Exposition on the practice of wailing but they can do that they could do that in those days because only the leisured classes read novels and they could devote an entire afternoon to the to a certain novel they were proposed to read but those times have gone so what is the solution how do we get around this problem well the time honored way is to use what we call the hook which is to say something dramatic and exciting that grabs our attention and holds it sufficiently long for the writer to inject some information into the story a wizard turning up at your door as a hook and the funny thing about a hook is it makes backstory palatable Richard Ford's novel candidate begins first I will tell you about the robbery our parents committed then about the murders which happen later well this bit is followed by lengthy biographical details of his parents from paragraphs pure backstory the ordinarily we would we wouldn't read it but because it's been preceded by this Humdinger which promises great things to come we happily read the backstory safe in the knowledge that there's a good story in the offing the hook can be a great opening line such as this one I write this sitting in the kitchen sink or give me a dramatic Revelation such as in Jeffrey Union ID is a Virgin Suicides which where we learn on page one that five teenage girls committed suicide in the same house what can be mere linguistic flamboyance C.S Lewis Begins the novel The Voyage of the Dawn Treader with the words there was a boy called Eustis Clarence Grubb and he almost deserved it so how do you find your hook well many writers I think spend a lot of time trying to think up a great opening line or dramatic opening incident and there's nothing wrong with that but it does contain a potential Pitfall for the unwary you could be tempted to write a brilliant line that doesn't quite fit your story only spend the precious opening section trying to hammer it into shape so it does fit a better way if you can't think of a good one is to get your Hook from the novel you haven't written yet which is to say your first draft if you keep an eye opening the process of writing it you'll come across all sorts of lines and situations that will make great Hooks and they will be authentic too and organically derived from your story and not bolted on you will remember at the beginning I promised you a great template for an opening hook well here it is imagine you are writing a story about a professional poker player in the old west he rides into town where there's a high-stakes game about to begin and his horse is stolen and that is how the story begins but in the movie from which I've taken my Paradigm it doesn't begin there it begins with a brilliant hook and I'll tell you what it is straight after this short commercial break do you dream of writing a novel but never seem to find the time try this simple tip make a chart of 52 columns and 81 rows to illustrate all the weeks of your life now color in the weeks you've already had and see what is left over pretty scary right download gateway to Narnia my free 10-part email course on how to write your first novel the link is in the description below Gather ye rosebuds while he may all time is still a flying and this same flower that smiles today tomorrow will be dying well the movie is Maverick with Mel Gibson perhaps you've seen it it opens on on a rope and we hear the characteristic twisting sound of a rope under strain and we pan down a notice that the Rope ends in a noose around a man's neck and that man is Mel Gibson and then we patent down more notices that he's sitting us ride a horse with his hands tied behind his back and the Rope is attached to a tree branch above his head so clearly if the horse shies or rears then Mel Gibson will hang then we pull back a bit more we notice he's surrounded by three bad guys straight from Central Casting and one of them has got a bag containing rattlesnakes which he throws at the feet of the horse now this is already a piece of Genius in my view this is a great hook but it's what happens next which is a real tour de force we hear the voiceover of Mel Gibson saying well it'd been a shitty week for me right from the start now this is brilliant it works on so many ways and it achieves the absolute most fundal and vital task for any writer in the opening page it makes his like or care about the protagonist because it's impossible not to warm to a man who comes out with such a Preposterous piece of wit when faced with a prospective being hanged and it also leads seamlessly into the backstory because he says it had been a shitty week and then he explains his horse had been stolen and he was on his way to a poker game Etc and so not only does it grab our attention and tell us what we need to know about the protagonist but it also starts on a cliffhanger because not only do we wonder how did he get into that situation we wonder how is he going to get out of it and I think it's a wonderful hook and I would thoroughly recommend you bear it in mind when writing your novel I mean by all means see if you can come up with a great opening hook but if you can't don't worry just trust the process and start writing and let your first draft provide the hook

Channel: The Oxford Writer

Views: 5,691

Keywords: write the opening to your novel, the opening hook, a great novel hook, writing tips, how to begin a novel, how to write a novel

Id: 1UBRA2vbxAg

Length: 9min 20sec (560 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 17 2023