Young Writers Society

Consider the Idol Panel which is exactly what it sounds like. Writers submit their first page to be read out loud to a panel of three agents. The agents shout "stop" when they would cease reading. The first page. Readers are just as fickle. Imagine your own book shopping experience. Have you ever just browsed the shelves, and just picked a book off the shelves at random? How far did you get into the book before you decided to wanted to buy it? Chances are, you know when you don't want to buy it before you know you want to.

For some perspective, go to a self-publishing site like Smashwords, somewhere that lets you read the first few pages or so of the buyable material. Start with the newest submissions, and read the first few pages of the first entry. Carefully note how far it took you to decide the book wasn't for you. Now do that with the second entry. Then the third. And so on and so on. Then imagine your decision also costs tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Suddenly you have a lot more sympathy for the editors and agents who do this every day, right?

My point is, you don't have much time to make a good first impression. That's why everything down to your first sentence has to be as perfect as you can make it.

Note: Just like any "writing rule" this is not necessarily a hard and fast rule. You can find books that have very slow openings and are best-sellers. However, it's generally in your advantage to try and create a good hook.

A hook is something you've undoubtedly heard before. The opening has to hook the reader into the story, making them read further. There are three main kinds of hooks that I, personally, see all the time in books. There are, of course, many types of hooks, but these are the three most prominent I've noticed.

The Action Hook

One of the most common pieces of advice about a good scene is to arrive late and leave early. Meaning, you start when the action does, and end just before all the characters are milling about organizing rides home and wondering how they'll split the bill. This advice is meant to keep the pacing up in scenes, and it works just as well when applied to your story as a whole.

The action hook is often taken quite literally. It's a common trope in movies, especially, where we open to a car chase or a gun fight or what have you. But literature doesn't have car chases because that's a visual thrill, and is quite boring to read about.

That's one of the common misconceptions of the action hook, or the "start with the action" advice. Action doesn't mean action movie; action means progress. The action hook is about starting with conflict right from the first paragraph. It doesn't have to be the main conflict of the story, and it doesn't even have to be big conflict, but it's something.

Note: while not every opening has to have conflict (as I will soon show) conflict is arguably the most important driving force behind plot. When I talk about hook, I mean the first line or paragraph. So your opening line doesn't have to have conflict to be effective, but we should get some sense of conflict by the time we turn the page.

The Tone Hook
Maybe your story isn't the kind of one where conflict happens right from the very first line. If the Action Hook is the jumper who hits the ground running, then the Tone Hook is the one who looks up to see what the weather is like first. The tone hook is a good hook for letting readers know what they're getting themselves into by reading on. The tone hook is an excellent way to let a reader know they're in a comedy, or a tragedy.

So those are effective for establishing tone in terms of comedic, or lighter material. The same can be true in reverse, though; it's just as easy to establish a darker, dreary tone if you'd like. Trying to write a Tone Hook can lead to one of the biggest mistakes in openings, though but I'll get to that later.

The Intrigue Hook
This is self-explanatory. We turn pages because we want one of the following questions answered: Who, what, where, how, or why?

Who killed the butler?
What is the secret to the universe?
Where is the holy grail hidden?
How will Harry Potter get himself out of this one?
Why did the man jump out of the plane?

You probably recognize these. Anything where you can end the question with "...find out next time" is probably intrigue.
(I didn't add "when" because that implies the characters are just waiting around for something to happen, and that shouldn't be your conflict. Additionally, in terms of plot, "How" is arguably the most important, because all conflict with an active protagonist boils down to "How will ____ achieve his goal?")

Like the Action Hook, you don't necessarily have to give us the main intrigue right in the first sentence. But we should be asking ourselves something. The Intrigue Hook is the jumper who sees an explosion in the distance on his way down, and sets out to find the source of said explosion and figure out what caused it as soon as he steps foot on ground again.

It sounds extraordinarily easy. But, of course, it isn't. There's a very fine balance between intriguing a reader and just confusing them. I've read many stories that open with absolute insanity that makes no comprehensible sense because the author was trying to get us to keep reading by making us ask questions.

It's very subtle, but there's a difference between "Why did this character do that?" and "Why did this character do that?" One ends with the page turning, the other ends with the cover closing.

It also goes without saying that of course your hook can be more than one of these things at once, and possibly even all three.

The payoff to a good hook
Having a good hook is one thing. It'll get the readers reading. But if what they find after the hook isn't just as good, they're going to lose interest. You can have a perfect hook and still lose your reader.

Remember how The Action Hook is someone who hits the ground running? A good payoff will see that person either keep running, or slow to a walk. A bad payoff will find that person trip and fall on his face.

The Tone Hook is also good, but the payoff has to go somewhere else. No one will stay interested enough in your story if you've spent the whole first page establishing tone. Technically, you should be able to establish tone in one quick sentence since we're all amazing writers, so this shouldn't even be an issue.

The Intrigue Tone, though, can go two ways. Either it can delve deeper into the rabbit hole, so to speak, and deepend the intrigue, or it can work towards solving the intrigue. This is contextual. If you're writing a detective story, a good hook might be to start with the murder--the payoff would then be the continuing stalking of the victim or something--or you might start with the detective at the crime scene, and the payoff would be him investigating. The most important thing, though, is that you keep the intrigue. If you open with an interesting line, and then completely turn into boring story unrelated to the intrigue, your reader will forget about the intrigue that kept them reading in the first place, and will get bored.

There are also a few things that an opening needs that the payoff has to establish. The first is character. Conflict is very difficult to have if there are no characters to perpetuate it. The character(s) established in the payoff does not need to be the main character. It doesn't even have to be human. At the simplest level, anything that takes part in the conflict is essentially a character. If your story is about a man sailing against a storm, the storm is, in a way, a character.

Setting is also an important thing to establish. Remember, the reader is jumping out of a plane and into your story. If there's no setting, there's nothing to ground them in the text. Is this a contemporary novel? A medieval fantasy? A space opera? Are we working with current technology? Is the character well off? These are questions pertaining to setting that are important to establish as soon as possible. Note: You don't have to establish much, just give something for the reader to grasp onto.

Setting and character are also important to establish subtly.

Finally, the mistakes while writing hooks
There are several common mistakes I've seen in openings; these mistakes will often lead me to put down the book or story I'm reading because they just don't have a good hook or payoff.

1. Common advice is to introduce your character and setting as soon as possible. This is good advice, as without either the man jumping from the plane is just falling without any ground to land on, but it's not a substitute for a good hook and payoff. Once again, you need conflict to drive a plot--a character isn't interesting if it isn't doing anything.

2. Expanding on that, don't open with setting unless it applies to one of the three hooks. If we wanted to look at a pretty landscape, we'd look at pictures, not read books.

3. Don't write about weather for weather's sake. Weather is boring, and does nothing. The Tone Hook can often fall into this trap, as pathetic fallacy is commonly used to establish tone. But if you're just describing the weather for the sake of setting, you've lost your audience.
Note: it is possible for the weather to be a good hook if it's, say, raining piranhas. That's action, and intrigue rolled into one (and perhaps tone). It's key you really consider if using weather is appropriate or not.

4. The Intrigue Hook is very effective when it's pulled off. However, it's possible to go overboard with it and miss the mark completely

5. Opening with dialogue is often ineffective, largely for the same reasons as above. Since we don't know who's talking, it can be hard to care about what they're talking about. The significance of what they're saying can be lost on us. And until we have some sense of setting and character, they're just two voices floating around a white void. Not very interesting.

6. A certain level of intrigue is required in every opening, just as there should be conflict and tone established in the payoff. Remember, your book is one of the millions blending in on a bookshelf or online catalogue. If you can't establish by the end of the first page what sets your book apart from the others then you're less likely to catch a reader's attention. What sets your story apart can be anything from character, to tone, to conflict, whatever. Just get something in there.

7. Opening with a question. Never open with a question. It's very trite. It's a bit pretentious. It also usually leads to issues of you just smacking the reader in the face with the moral you're trying to get across. The reader's should be the ones asking the questions, not the writer and narrator. Something like "what would you do if you only had a day to live?" is also an extremely cheap hook, one that doesn't hold up as well as if you had even just said "Jane Smith dropped the letter warning her she only had a day to live."

Continuing with the most basic of advice, the one piece that everyone hears when they start writing, and even professional authors struggle with. This is the benchmark piece of writing advice that, if followed, will improve your writing tenfold. But what exactly does it mean?

Showing versus Telling has always seemed to me to be a matter of how you establish information. At it's basest level, you've shown information if the reader is able to interpret it themselves, but you've told information if you've established that information yourself by addressing the reader or through exposition.

Now, telling has it's place; the rule would be better titled "When to Show, When to Tell" since both are valid forms of information establishment and, as I'm about to argue, it's impossible to not tell at all.

But why is showing better than telling? Basically, it's more engaging. If the reader is coming to conclusions on their own, they are more involved with the text, which means they'll be more immersed. Telling, conversely, has about the same level of engagement that a history or science textbook might, and is half as interesting.

Another way of looking at it is the difference between visual and oral storytelling. A visual story, one that you read, relies moreso on showing to be good. There's time and room to let the reader come to their own conclusions, and that's part of the fun. An oral tale, on the other hand, will be shorter and more direct--whether it's a fable or a joke you're telling at school--so you have to tell a few things. That's why fairy tales, their origins in oral tradition and emerging from an era where telling was the preferred mode, tend to tell more than show--we're told someone is a virtuous beautiful princess because there's no time to show us through other actions, and that'd be boring anyway.

So how do you go about showing over telling?Well, let's look at an example.

Bob was angry.

This is telling. This is the narrator telling us that Bob is angry. Compare that to the following:

Bob kicked open the door and punched the wall, growling as he did so, his face turning a deep shade of red.

Here, the reader can figure out that Bob is angry from the actions he takes. That means this is showing. By expanding on the information, and writing it as part of the scene, I've turned telling into showing. Here's another example:

Bob was not good at hitting on women.

Compared to:

"Hey hot stuff," Bob said, winking at Susan. "How'd you like to go to my room and see what happens?"

In this example, I've used dialogue to show the reader just how bad Bob is at hitting on women, rather than directly telling them he's bad at it. Note, however, that I didn't just go this route:

"Bob is so bad at hitting on women," Susan said.

This technically could work, but it risks getting into As You Know territory, which is where one character delivers exposition to another character that both characters are obviously already aware of, and its only purpose is to fill the reader in on that exposition. This is clumsy writing, and looks rather ridiculous. There's also just less engagement to turning the telling into an exact dialogue quote, rather than something more interesting like the first example, so you should try and be a bit more creative with it.

However, you'll notice that these examples still have telling. The narrator is telling the reader what Bob is doing. It's telling us Bob kicked open the door, and that he punched a wall. That is why I see showing not so much as an alternative to telling, but a way of using telling to create an illusion of showing. Therefore, telling is unavoidable, which means you shouldn't beat yourself up too much over it, and you should be careful in critiques when you accuse people of telling.

It also means it's quite tricky to decide when you're telling too much, which is why so many authors have a problem with it. If everything is telling, it becomes less a matter of identify the telling and changing it to showing, and instead grows into figuring out where in the telling you could be showing more strongly.

There are some things you'll want to tell. Maybe it's a passage of time you want to skip over, or an unimportant detail that would only kill the pacing of your story if you included it. In these moments, it's perfectly fine to go into telling.Telling is okay, if you know why you're using it.

So, on a scene level, you need to decide what you're going to show as a scene and what you can just skip over, with exposition or not. This is where you have to have skill--you need to decide what you want to accomplish in a scene, and what you can accomplish in a scene, and what you can cram in there to keep the story moving, develop character, and keep the reader hooked all at the same time.

On a sentence-by-sentence level, you should probably be aiming for showing any time you can. One helpful tip is to look for the word "was" if you're writing in past tense, or "is" if you're writing in present tense. These, such as with the example above, often lead to instances of telling, so keep an eye out.

Really, the only way to catch all instances of telling is to comb your writing line-by-line, word-by-word and deciding how exactly you're going about establishing information. It is, unfortunately, one of those problems that you can only really solve with awareness. Learn how to distinguish showing against telling, and then recognize that in your own writing.

Filtering is one of those harder things to catch, and harder to understand why it can be an issue. Ultimately, filtering is expressing the story or details through the feelings of the character. I know what you're thinking: that's exactly what a story is. But I mean this is a sentence-by-sentence basis. So, for example, if I was to say "Bob felt the wind on her face" I'm filtering, because I'm telling the reader that there's wind through the knowledge that Bob feels it.

Filtering, naturally, has its place, but it can distance the reader. The more steps there are to experiencing that wind themselves, the more disconnect they'll have from that detail. Maybe the important thing here is that Bob can feel the wind at all--maybe he's just undergone nerve-surgery to get feeling back. Then telling us he's feeling it is important. But if you're just trying to establish that there's a breeze, then you're trying to immerse the reader into the setting, and you're not doing that as effectively if you filter it through Bob's perspective.

Fortunately, filtering can be rather easy to edit, once you know to look for it. For example:

Bob felt the breeze on his face. He saw Sarah and Jane coming up the hill.

This is filtering, and, assuming the reader knows we're in Bob's close perspective, could be changed to:

A breeze rolled in. Sarah and Jane made their way up the hill, towards him.

The same information is established, but now the reader experiences it directly.

If you're writing in first-person perspective, or a very limited third-person perspective, filtering is especially unnecessary because the reader comes to understand that anything that is pointed out is within the main character's scope. If, in the first person, I say "I felt the wind blow on my face" I'm not writing as strongly as if I said "the wind blew against my face."

Again, it's about connecting to the reader through direct prose. In the first instance, the reader just knows that the narrator can feel wind on their face. In the latter, the reader feels the wind themselves.

A story is, practically by definition, an overcoming of conflict. Which means if you want to have something readable, you're going to need at least one conflict. But probably a lot more. Maybe you think you can get away with writing a concept novel that has no conflict, but if you're reading this guide then you're probably wrong. Don't be so full of yourself.

There are several kinds of conflict, and the most prominent ones are:
Man VS Man
Man VS Nature
Man VS Self
Man VS The Unknown (I'm cheating a bit and lumping a couple smaller ones into this category).

In these cases, Man is a universal, which means it refers to women and animal characters as well.

The first step to creating conflict, and an interesting character, is deciding what a character wants. Often, a stronger character will have more than one motivation. You might find it easiest, until you get more comfortable with developing characters, to give them two conflicts: one that has stakes on the global scale, and one that only has personal stakes. Stakes, if you do not know, are what's at risk should the main character not get what they want--i.e if Bob doesn't stop the nuclear reactor, all of New York will explode; or if Bob doesn't get home in time for dinner, his wife will decide to leave him.

Man against man is exactly what it sounds like. It's the protagonist against a character that is called the antagonist. Note: Protagonist and antagonist don't exactly mean "good guy" against "bad guy." Instead, the protagonist is the central character of your story--whether he fits the traditional heroic archetype or is an evil overlord figure--and the antagonist is the character or characters who stops the protagonist from accomplishing their goals.
I also lump Man VS Society into this one, as it tends to be larger-scale man vs man issues such as oppression, prejudice, indoctrination, what have you.

Man against nature is also what it sounds like. The antagonist does not come in the form of a person, but in an element of nature, whether that be a dangerous animal or a natural disaster or just plain old nature (since it's pretty dangerous when it's just sitting there).

Man against self is where the more personal crises come into play. The only thing keeping the protagonist away from his goals are his own personal conflicts, whether that be something like overcoming a disability, depression, disease, etc. etc.

Man against the Unknown is how I'm lumping in Man VS the Supernatural, Man VS God, and Man VS the Fantastic. These all generally deal with the same theme of man trying to overcome something greater than himself that he cannot understand fully, although they tend to bleed into the other three genres (for example, if a man's fighting vampires that might be more Man VS Man, and if a man is questioning his faith that can be seen as Man VS Faith.)

Anything you write doesn't have to stick to one of these basic categories, obviously. They can bleed into each other. And this isn't really how you go about planning a conflict, it just tends to be something archetypical that plots ultimately fit into.

So you can see how multiple plot conflicts can work together to great effect: Usually, no matter how separate, they'll come together in some way at the end. Either the main character has to make a choice between his two goals--like Bruce Wayne--or else only be achieving one goal can the protagonist achieve the second. And, of course, these conflicts are not limited to just two main ones. Feel free to have as much conflict as you want, as long as you can control it and bring it all to a satisfying conclusion.

Essentially, the sooner you can introduce conflict into your story, the more likely your reader is to be interested and to keep reading. Your first page--and, some would argue, your first sentence--should have a recognizable sense of conflict. This doesn't have to be your main conflicts, mind you. It just has to be something that can keep the readers interested until you can introduce the main conflicts. However, I should note, you'll probably want to introduce those main conflicts as soon as possible so your reader has an idea what the book they're reading is going to be about.

Furthermore, you should intersperse small conflicts wherever you can. Treat scenes like mini-stories where your characters have goals and are working towards accomplishing them. They might not achieve them in the scene, but it will help have them drive towards a goal.

Or maybe you have a scene that's not holding readers' interest. Maybe it's because you don't have enough conflict inserted to keep it interesting. For example, maybe the scene is an amicable conversation between two associates. Instead of making it amicable, have them disagree with each other, and then the dialogue is them trying to convince one another of why they're right and the other is wrong. That alone will make the scene far more interesting.

If you're ever bored, it's probably because there's not enough conflict, and therefore no story.

There will come a time when you want your main character to walk into a room and describe something. Whether that's the room itself, the woman sitting at a table, or the gun she's pointing at him. Now, there are a few ways to write bad description, such as through passive language, or using "to be" verbs, but that's covered elsewhere in this guide and is more of a technical aspect. This section assumes, instead, that you are proficient at writing description but need something that can improve it just a step further.

The answer to adding kick to your description is function, which is also covered elsewhere in this mega guide. Basically, description that does more than one thing at a time is good description. Specifically, you can easily establish character while also establishing description if you describe through the eyes of the character.

Everyone is different, and everyone has different outlooks. How a hitman sees a room will be different from how a fisherman sees a room. For example, a fisherman might walk into the room and see:

The place reeked of gut fish. Not the good stuff either. Swedish herring. Porpoise. No one seemed to mind, since the windows were all shut, trapping that stink in.

Whereas the hitman sees the same room like this:

Cramped. Not a lot of room to swing your arm. Try it and you'll hit a table or a post. Only three exits, if you count the door I came in through. Four, if I assume I can break the glass of one of those windows when I jump through it.

What they notice first says a lot about the character. You can see the way this nuance plays in the way both describe the windows--the fisherman sees it as trapping the smell in, while the hitman sees it as a possible escape route. We learn something about the characters based on their description of the room, which means there's function. This also applies to the woman at the table:

He'd heard about women like this. Where he was from, a sight like her lured you into the sea to kill you. She'd no doubt have the same enrapturing voice, the tempting words. But she would be the death of him.

vs.

The broad has tits, I'll give her that. Strong arms, too. I'll have to watch that in a fight. She's wearing heels, which means she won't be standing long if she takes this to fists.

You can tell, without me prompting, who is who. This is because even the way you describe another character should match the character the reader is used to.

Other things to think about when entering description through the eyes of a character:

-What is actually important for the story? If it's not establishing character and not pushing the plot, then it's useless. For example, I see a lot of stories that give exact heights for characters, or measurements for rooms; unless your character is unnaturally gifted at judging measurements like this, it doesn't feel natural, and adds nothing but the author trying to indulge in giving all of their description first.

-What does the character notice first? If I was to describe the woman sitting in the room holding the gun to the character, what does the character take in and therefore describe first? It's a toss up between the woman and the gun, mainly, but once I choose which one to start with I can flow through the description.

-Keep a sense of movement. There should be a logical train in your description. Don't jump between describing the gun, mentioning a line of bottles on the wall, then come back to the woman, only to mention the sound of the bathroom door opening and closing. Find some train of thought that makes sense