Catch your reader by the gullet
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” A Tale of Two Cities. Charles Dickens
Those are opening lines of two of the greatest novels ever written. They instantly grab attention and persuade you to read on. It’s called the hook—you catch your prey with a hook and never let go. To extend the hook analogy to writing—you hook the reader into curiosity from the word go and just never let go.
In The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) James M. Cain wrote this as the opening sentence: “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.” That’s it. Cain throws his hero Frank Chambers off the hay truck and we are thrown headlong into Chambers’ world immediately.
British scientist and ferocious advocate for atheism Richard Dawkins wrote in his book Unweaving the Rainbow: “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.” Who wouldn’t want to find out what Dawkins is talking about? Dawkins has you by the gullet and he isn’t about to let go.
In my writing skills programmes, I spend plenty of time—perhaps even an inordinate amount of time—on the importance of the hook to the writing process. That’s because it is the heartbeat of all forms of writing: a novel, an essay, an article, a news story, a blog, et al. I have long been an advocate of the hook-based writing style in which you could spend as much as sixty per cent of your time finding the right opening paragraph. Without that riveting opening you might as well delete whatever it is that you are writing and go do something more worthwhile—like a snooze.
So, many writers cogitate and agonise over that opening line. They will write that opening sentence first, and only when they get it right, will they have that feeling of comport that they have something that they can now build upon.
Stephen King, who has published 63 novels and upwards of 200 short stories, says he sometimes spends months, even years, to write opening lines of his books. Imagine someone as prolific as King agonising over his opening line over weeks and months. Here’s what he said in an interview to The Atlantic: “An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.”
A good hook is also a clever introduction to the writer’s style. Cain’s ‘They threw me off the hay truck about noon’ shows that the writer’s narrative style is simple and lean. “What a beautiful thing,” King said in The Atlantic interview, “fast, clean, and deadly, like a bullet. We’re intrigued by the promise that we are just going to zoom.”
The hook isn’t peculiar to writing; in music it’s a catchy chorus or a repeated instrumental passage that gets you by the proverbial throat. In popular vocal music it’s the singer’s voice. You recognise, and love, Frank Sinatra’s voice instantly and every time to buy a record you want the warm, embracing tones of the Sinatra voice to wash over you.
A writer, likewise, can establish that hegemony with a distinctive style of writing and the opening few lines is where it all happens. In that sense your writing style, your opening lines, your story and your narrative style are like your own smirch.
