: 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.'

@Karen856

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Excellent answers already - tricky to come up with something that hasn't already been mentioned.

The thing that hooks a reader will depend on what sort of book it is (I'm using the word "book" to separate it from "story", though it could be a film, poem, interactive game or almost anything else). Detective writers will often start a book with the crime, which doesn't (at that point) involve the main characters and is the reason behind the story rather than part of it. Science fiction and fantasy books will want to establish an ordinary world that isn't the ordinary world of the reader.

With other sorts of book, the important thing may be the style. Writers like Mark Twain, P.G. Wodehouse and Douglas Adams were particularly good at this. If you're going to twist the readers expectations with comic asides throughout the book, it's important to get this in early and to keep the reader involved in the humour ("I couldn't put it down." Sometimes he regretted his decision to become a veterinary surgeon.).

Whether you think of it as a hook or as something else, the early pages establish the relationship between the reader and the narrator (often - but not necessarily - the reader and the writer). Problems occur if this isn't done effectively, or is done in a way that's inconsistent with the rest of the book. As dknestaut said, it's showing the reader why they should care, and a way to do this is to show why the narrator cares enough to be telling you the story.

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