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How do you hook someone in?



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Sat Feb 17, 2007 12:21 am
Emerson says...



How do you hook someone into a story?


simple. Conflict. That doesn't really mean ACTION, ACTION, ACTION! But, conflict. And, rising and falling conflict is always fun. Get a character, put them in a problem, try to get them out.

Once you have the conflict, you have to make the reader care about the character. If we don't care about the character, why should we read it? You want to bring out traits and/or anything that can help us relate to your character, feel like we have been there before, and have us know that we want to figure out what is going to happen.

Wow, this a very brief explanation XD Not to mention, this would only work on character-driven plots. (Although the argument always is, is the plot driven by the characters, or the characters by plot? something like that...)

Hope this helped....
“It's necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
  





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Fri Feb 23, 2007 12:58 am
Meep says...



Like Zen & Claudette said: tension and action. You can start by introducing characters or whatever, but don't make it a laundry list. Introduce them through their actions and interactions with others: interesting characters are what keeps me reading a book.

Rodman Philbrick wrote:I never had a brain until Freak came along and let me borrow his for a while, and that's the truth, the whole truth. The unvanquished truth, that's how Freak would say it, and for a long time it was him who did the talking.
-Freak the Mighty

That's how my favorite book starts, as an example. I know when I started reading the first time, I wanted to know what the narrator was on about. Who is this Freak kid, and why does he say things like "the unvanquished truth"?
Etc.
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