Make Sure Your Story Hook Doesn't Give Readers Whiplash

One of the oldest pieces of writing advice out there (and one that I've given myself on this very platform) is to make sure you open your story with something to hook your audience. You want them to be immediately interested and invested, struck by what hits them on the first page. Put another way, if this is not the most interesting part of your character's life (or at least the beginning of that interesting part) then why are we starting here instead of somewhere else?

However, it's all too easy for us to be dishonest with our story opener. To slap down something we think will generate a lot of engagement and interest, but which really isn't reflective of the narrative going forward. And there are few things you can do that are more guaranteed to piss off your audience than that.

Just gonna take this down a bit...

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Now then, let's get to it!

Don't Open a Vegan Meal With a Steak

Let's say you had a delicious vegan meal prepared. The courses were filled with unique spices and styles, making use of breads, fruits, spreads, nuts, and more. But you wanted to start the meal with something special... something that really draws your audience's attention. So you open with a medium-rare steak, prepared right at the table, the scent and sizzle of the red meat filling the room.

That sounds absurd, right? Because sure, there may be some people who are down for both of those things, but if someone is a vegan then the intro is going to turn them off before they get to the rest of the meal. And if someone is there for more tasty meat, chances are good they're going to be disappointed by what comes after the steak. So why the hell would you do that?

It's not a great look, is what I'm getting at.

Sadly, this same logic is something that a lot of writers will do to hook their readers, who will then feel they were lured in under false pretenses.

An example of from Writer's Digest is a story that opened with a pulse-pounding, adrenaline-pumping car chase. It was engaging as hell, no doubt, but it also created certain expectations within the reader. Which became a problem after the introductory hook, because this story was a romance about a woman falling in love with a doctor, and there wouldn't be any further action scenes going forward.

A hook is definitely important, but it also needs to be consistent with your narrative. You don't want to have a high-fantasy opener that turns out to just be a dream, and this is actually a book about a girl trying to get along in a new high school if that sword-swinging dream sequence has nothing to do with the rest of the narrative. You don't want a high-octane shoot out in a club to lead into a quiet, meditative story about a man going into the woods to find himself. These are teasers that don't match the tone, genre, and expectations of the rest of the story you're trying to tell.

Could someone make those examples work? Sure, you could. But to make them work you'd need to work them into the narrative in a meaningful, organic way. You'd have to cover the seams, and make the whole story feel like it was all of a piece, rather than like you took two different books and stitched them together because the intro you had wasn't engaging enough.

First Impressions Are Important

Think of engaging your reader like a job interview. What impression do you want your story to give, and will it follow through on that impression? Because if someone is looking for a hard-hitting detective story and a novel shows up with a gritty murder investigation, but then once it's been hired devolves into a messy relationship drama with no investigation going on, readers are going to feel they were lied to during the interview. And those who were looking for a messy relationship drama likely passed on the book because it came to the interview smoking an unfiltered cigarette and wearing a rumpled trench coat with a 5 o'clock shadow on its face.

Be consistent, and don't give flash you can't back up.

With that said, I wanted to give an example of an introduction that I felt moved smoothly into the following book. Because "Profanity Heralds Discovery" is the introductory fiction for Silkgift, the City of Sails. And I think it sets the tone of the place nicely, while giving readers an introduction into what they should expect going forward.

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