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Exercise #701: Craft
Posted 3/3/17
Opening hooks can make or break your book. If you don’t catch the reader’s eye -- and hold it -- in those first few lines, the next author down the row will. Use those first words to drag your reader in, kicking and screaming!
A few of my favorite recent opening hooks from this group:
Sometimes I wonder if my life belongs to me or to someone else.
-- from Stan’s Exercise #21
My eyes hurt. My head was pounding. I held onto the walls and lifted myself off the sticky, foul-smelling floor.
-- from Nargis’ Exercise #698
My grandmother turned eighty-nine this month, and time’s treated her bones unkindly, crumbling them like riverbank soil after too much rain.
-- from Meredith’s Exercise #691
For this exercise, give us an opening hook or three. Make us want more!
For those of you thinking you might participate in next week’s Interactive, try to use hooks you really want to finish; you’ll have an opportunity to use one in that Exercise, if you like.
Critiquers, along with a technical review, you might note whether each hook would encourage you to read on, and why or why not.
Word limit: 100 per hook, 3 hooks maximum
Please use the subject line
SUB: Exercise #701/yourname
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