: Re: What constitutes a 'hook?' I intuit that hooks are things that hook. (I'm quite astute in this way.) They can be good prose, relatable characters, rich settings. Books must start with a 'hook.'

@Ann1701686

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A hook is something that catches your reader in the first moments and continues to reel them in at a differing pace throughout your work.

That's about it.

The first page, if not the first couple of sentences, have to hook your reader into wanting to know more - more about the world, the character, the problems, the past, the future, ...

The details depend on your style and your specific story. For example I remember reading a book that started with the main character basically saying "I fu&!ed up... How did I get myself involved with a dragon, just because that damned elf somehow found out my secret?!" Now I wanted to know three things:

What is currently happening? -> draws me in for the next pages until the action fades
Why is the dragon such a problem? -> draws me in for some more pages until I get a view of the world and the role dragons play in this world
What is the secret? -> the secret was not revealed until only a couple of pages were left, but it was alluded to throughout the whole book; each chapter contained hints and remarks about this...

This is the problem with the word hook: it's not just one hook that you need.

You need to get your readers to start turning pages. Then you want them to feel like the next interesting thing is only a few more pages with a slightly different pacing. And after they've read through half the book they probably won't let that big secret shrouded in mystery.

Therefore you have to plant some hooks early that can be used throughout the whole book. And in between you always use little hooks of the first kind that I've shown. Little skirmishes hook your reader for the next pages and can be used regularly. These are contributing to the goals for the medium term, which should be used sparingly. And you as the reader know that there is one overarching long-term goal behind everything that you want to reveal.

What exactly you use depends on your style, the genre you are writing, your target audience, ... Dragons for example will work perfectly fine for me, but they might bore you to death and make you put the book away. A fighting scene that is probably happening a couple pages makes me want to read just one more chapter, while you may not think highly of senseless fights. Maybe a mystery helps you and your story? The hint to the next witness? The next room in a thriller?

Cliffhangers are an often, sometimes overused, way of hooking your reader to read the next chapter. These are the short-term kind that I've mentioned and you should be careful to not overuse them. I remember reading a book that ended with a cliffhanger after each chapter and each chapter was a mere 4 or 5 pages. They always showed that something horrible happened - and three sentences on the next page it was obvious that everything was just a misunderstanding... After 20 such chapters these cliffhangers bored me because the author used the same thing over and over and over again without any variety.

Be therefore careful of only thinking in terms of hooks - they are not everything, but merely a tool to keep your reader interested in your book and wanting to read a little bit more to get a little bit more information for the next pages, the next chapters and until the end of your book - depending on which hooks were recently used and are currently in the focus of the main character.

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