By Rose Benjamin
"You need a good hook," every English teacher says when they assign an essay or piece of writing.
This "hook," of course, is referring to the very beginning of the piece, the sentence or paragraph or page that makes the reader become interested in the writing. The hook is the reason you keep reading, is it not? For me, usually not.
To me it seems that hooks are either boring or confusing. I have only ever seen two types of beginnings in books. One type gives the context you need for the story. This one, I think, is more common. You must know the type: "It had all started when..." or "Years ago..." or, in one famous case, "Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much." This last one might need some explanation. It has been years since I first tried (or rather, was forced to try) to read Harry Potter, but I still remember sitting on the big leather chair in our living room being bored to death by its long introduction. Yes, it is very important to the story that Harry's parents had died and he had been taken to his aunt and uncle's house, but that did not mean I wanted to read about it. It was a long time until I tried to read it again.
The other type of introduction I have noticed is where the author simply starts telling the story with almost no context. The Serafina series that I talked about in a previous blog post uses this type of introduction. It does so in all three of the books, although of course with the second two you do have context from the previous book(s). The first book opens up with Serafina waking up at night, looking around, and deciding to "hunt," which essentially means grabbing rats and throwing them out. I chose an unfortunate example for this type of introduction, because while I usually find these beginnings confusing, the opening of this book in my opinion is extremely well done. Or maybe I simply cannot remember how I felt about the book when I started reading it for the first time. In any case, when a book immediately launches into the story without explaining anything, I get a sort of anxiety when I read it, because I feel the need to keep track of what happens for when I do get the context I need. Putting pieces of books together is always difficult, and almost always takes multiple tries-- as in, I have to read the book multiple times to understand it fully.
Both of these types of beginnings somewhat annoy me, because I have enough trouble starting new books as it is. If the beginning is just context, I am easily bored by it and it will not take much for me to put the book down at that point and not pick it up again. If the beginning provides no context, then I am likely to "rage quit" from the anxiety the absence of context gives me.
Maybe it is hypocritical of me to get anxious because of the absence of context and then be bored when there is context. Only context, that is. At this point, the reader of this post is probably frustrated with me for creating such a useless article. No one forced you to read it, though.
I really agree with this. More of a writer's perspective in this case, but whenever I sit down to write a short snippet of something, I often find myself just starting with dialogue. It's difficult to hook your readers, provide backstory, and jump into the action all with one sentence, so your frustration is extremely understandable. Overall, well written, nice!
ReplyDeleteI've noticed this too, and I've devoted some time to thinking about it. It seems that there should be another way to introduce a story, right? But what else can one come up with other than context or action? That's basically all that you can find in a story, right? What else is there to convey? The text is meant to either show (through action) or tell (through explicitly stated context) new information. I've wondered if someone could come up with something new that doesn't fit under either of those two very wide umbrellas, but in my brief contemplation of the issue I've come up with nothing. Great post!
ReplyDeleteUsually when I read a book I just kind of turn my mind off until about 20 or so pages in when the boring exposition is over. I find the first kind of hook you talked about boring too and I would even say it makes the story worse. I do actually like the second kind, most of the time. As long as I can understand what's going on I usually just keep reading and try to slowly pick up context or exposition.
ReplyDeleteThis was an extremely relatable post as an avid reader in my free time. I always hate having to sit through the first few pages/chapters while the author gives all the background stories. This is useful for the rest of the book, but it just seems like a whole other part of the book rather than included with the rest.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your post, and noticed these patterns. I wonder how authors would resolve this issue to make the beginnings of books more engaging. Good job!
ReplyDeleteYou're absolutely correct. Another thing that annoys me, although it's definitely less common than the example above, is the "wow I am in such a wacky and unexplained situation right now you are probably wondering how I got here Please let me explain how I got here" sort of intro.
ReplyDelete