Tag: active reading

Five Things I Learned from The Clan of the Cave Bear

I mentioned in my previous Razor Mountain post that I was reading The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel. A portion of Razor Mountain follows a pre-historic tribe, and Cave Bear is one of the few titles I’ve come across that is set in a similar time period, albeit in a different part of the world.

The book gave me some things to think about as far as prehistoric settings go. There were aspects of it I really enjoyed. However, the book also had a number of small issues that, taken together, made it a frustrating read for me. Today, I want to dig into those things, and try to discover what I can learn from them to improve my own writing.

The Clan of the Cave Bear is written mostly as straight historical fiction, with a few fantasy elements. The protagonist of the story is Ayla, a Cro Magnon (early modern human) child who loses her family in an earthquake within the first few pages. She is eventually rescued and comes to live with the titular Clan of the Cave Bear, a Neanderthal tribe that was displaced by the same earthquake and forced to search for a new cave. The Clan have only rare interactions with Ayla’s kind, who they call “the Others,” but end up adopting her.

As Ayla grows, she has to deal with the challenges of integrating into the Clan as an outsider. Though her body is noticeably different, the conflicts between her and the Clan are primarily differences in worldview. Auel drives this conflict with the fantasy element of the book. The Neanderthals of the Clan possess ancestral memories that are passed down through generations. They rely on the experiences of previous generations, as well as their own, to navigate the world around them. Auel paints the Clan as a slowly dying race. Their long memory keeps them in a rut of tradition and limits their ability to adapt to change. Ayla, as homo sapiens, lacks their racial memory, but is more adaptable and quick to learn. She chafes under the heavy tradition of Clan life, and constantly seeks out new skills and new experiences.

Lesson #1 — A Little Verisimilitude Goes a Long Way

Auel does a tremendous job constructing a believable world filled with detail. Ayla learns rudimentary medicine from her surrogate mother, the tribe’s medicine woman, who expounds on dozens of plants and their uses. The variety of animals and their habitats are also important to the Clan’s survival, and described in great detail. The tools used by the clan, how they are made, and how the go about their everyday tasks are all carefully thought-out.

I don’t know much about plants, let alone their medicinal properties, but I’m betting Auel did quite a bit of research to get the details right. She didn’t have to name all the plants, or go into detail about which ones are used to treat different ailments. The story could be told without those details. But these are things that the protagonist is learning, and things that her adoptive mother is intimately familiar with. Those details help the reader to feel what she’s feeling by learning about this plants as she does.

There is no limit to the level of detail you can include in a novel, but at some point, it bogs down the story. The trick is finding particular places to add that detail that help the setting feel more like a living world, without getting lost in the weeds.

Lesson #2 — Perspective is Powerful…and Dangerous

The story starts with the child, Ayla, losing her family in an earthquake. Although the story follows her and ostensibly shows her perspective, it becomes clear very early on that the narrator is distant, wiser than this child, and has more modern sensibilities.

Brush close by the upstream banks quivered, animated by unseen movement at the roots, and downstream, boulders bobbed in unaccustomed agitation. Beyond them, stately conifers of the forest into which the stream flowed lurched grotesquely.

As the story goes on, the narration veers into scientific terms to describe some of the animals and their less ferocious descendants in modern times. The narrator is not anchored to any character’s perspective. It’s not anchored in the time period of the story.

Some of this is personal taste and fashion in fiction writing (this kind of third-person omniscient perspective has fallen out of favor in recent years), but there are some clear downsides to this style. As a reader, it’s hard to feel close to Ayla when the narration seems to be separate from her. The occasional digressions into the more scientific and into far-future times pull the reader out of the here-and-now of the story. Jumping from the thoughts of one character to the thoughts of another in the same paragraph puts the reader at a distance to both of those characters.

This style of writing allows the reader to know what everyone is doing, what everyone is thinking, and any of the past history or future ramifications. It gives the author the power to show anything they want, at any time. The cost of that power is the distance it puts between the reader and the characters and current action.

Lesson #3 — Don’t Break Your Own Rules

Auel makes it very clear that the Clan are people with traditions. In fact, they are trapped in those traditions. Their ancestral memory is such a guiding force that they cannot adapt to change. This is stated repeatedly. When Ayla joins the Clan, she is constantly going against their norms and traditions. It is the cause of almost all the conflict in the book.

Ayla talks, laughs, and cries, all strange things to the Clan, who feel emotion, but experience no physical tears or laughter, and rely on their very limited vocal capabilities to augment a much richer sign language. Ayla hates being subservient to the men of the Clan, a social structure supposedly easily accepted by the women of the Clan. She secretly teaches herself to use a weapon, something that is strictly forbidden to women by Clan tradition. She observes rituals that she should not see. These are things that the clan believes could bring down a sort of spiritual cataclysm on them. In short, by the end of the book, Ayla has completely upended the social and religious order of the Clan.

And yet, time and again, the repercussions are limited. The laws are modified. The punishments are made less severe. The supposedly unadaptable Clan adapts constantly to her presence.

That’s a perfectly fine story structure. It’s a classic “stranger comes to town” style of plot. But it doesn’t make sense to draw so much attention to the Clan’s built-in unchageability when the rest of the story is going to go on and show them adapting every step of the way.

Lesson #4 — Characters Need Goals

Ayla certainly does a lot throughout the book. She is constantly in the midst of conflicts. This action and conflict drives the story. However, there were several points were I got the sense that the story just wasn’t going anywhere. What I eventually realized was that I didn’t know what Ayla wanted.

Most of the conflicts that come up are due to Ayla acting impulsively — doing something without thinking of the consequences. Sometimes she’s completely unaware that there will be a problem. Almost none of it involves her choosing a goal and acting in pursuit of that goal. In fact, the only instance I can think of is when she flees the Clan in order to protect her baby, which she believes they will force her to kill (it looks like her, rather than a Neanderthal baby, and is thus considered “deformed”). I don’t think it’s coincidence that these chapters were the most compelling portion of the book for me.

The other characters are also mostly lacking in goals and desires. They could mostly be boiled down to “support the status quo,” or “help Ayla with all this trouble she’s in.” There are two exceptions.

First is the leader of the Clan, Brun, who wants to be a good leader and take care of his tribe. He is often the one who has to make hard decisions about the conflicts around Ayla, and always tries to do what is best for the tribe.

Second is Broud, the son of Brun. He is the most goal-oriented character in the book. His goal is to make Ayla’s life a living hell.

Lesson #5 — Give Villains Some Good Qualities

The clear villain of the book is Broud. As a child, Ayla ends up stealing some of his thunder at an important Clan ceremony. From that point onward, he takes everything she does as a slight. Interestingly, because he hates her so much, he is the one member of the Clan who is completely intolerant of her transgressions, while the others come to accept her.

Broud is essentially the cave-man version of the 1980s “asshole jock” movie archetype. He’s selfish. Everything he does is to honor himself and gain status. The only thing he fears is his status being diminished, and only because it might prevent him from eventually becoming the leader of the Clan. He is not only cruel, but derives sadistic pleasure from that cruelty. He shows no particular love for his family or those who ally themselves with him.

The climactic end of the book comes when Broud is made leader of the clan, at which point he becomes a literal maniac, screaming and ranting. Without the looming threat of his father blocking his ascension to the throne, he immediately does everything he can think of to hurt Ayla. When Ayla and the others complain, he forces the Clan shaman to essentially excommunicate her, a spiritual punishment that the Clan views as literal death.

It’s certainly easy to manufacture conflict with a character like this, but it feels like such a caricature. Sure, he’s easy to hate. That’s his only purpose. But couldn’t he have loved his family as more than just status symbols? Couldn’t he have actually wanted to make his father proud? Couldn’t he have had some redeeming features to make him feel human?

I know plenty of people who love villains like this, so it still comes down to personal taste. I’d rather see a villain who is understandable and relatable. A villain that, were the story shown from a slightly different perspective, might look more like a hero.

Every Book Has Lessons

Even though The Clan of the Cave Bear wasn’t for me, I don’t consider it a bad book or regret reading it. I think the language of pop media criticism has become really, unfortunately black-and-white, where people talk about books, movies or music as being good or bad. We all have our own tastes, and a book that might be great for someone else just won’t hit right for me. Criticism is about justifying your opinion about art, and even a justified opinion is still just an opinion. From an author’s perspective, that’s nice, because it means readers may dislike some or all of your book, without making it a “bad book.”

In any case, I learned a lot from The Clan of the Cave Bear. By thinking about the things I didn’t like, I can work on excising those from my own work. It was useful to see a perspective on writing a story set in pre-history, and I have no doubt that it will influence me as I continue to work on Razor Mountain.

How to Write a Book Description

As I prepare to publish Razor Mountain, my serial novel, I have several side tasks to tackle. One of these is the book description. You might know this as the back cover or the book blurb.

The cover art and description are usually going to be your first (and often only) chance to catch the interest of a potential reader. The blurb isn’t the most important thing — the most important thing is to write a great book — but the blurb is the first thing. You have to convince your potential reader to start reading before they can see how great your book is.

Don’t think of the blurb as a simple summary. It’s a sales pitch. The blurb’s only job is to get a person to open the book and start reading. After that, it’s up to your story to keep them hooked.

Short and Compelling

Most writers don’t have a lot of experience crafting book descriptions. It can be a daunting task. If you’re writing a novel, it’s usually because you have a story that you want to explore over a lot of words. A luxurious amount of words. But there’s no such luxury to be had in the blurb. So the overarching idea of crafting a blurb is condensing and cutting that huge story into a few sentences that give the feel of the story and help sell it.

For Razor Mountain, I’m looking at services like Wattpad and Tapas as places built to publish serial fiction. Wattpad doesn’t limit the size of the book description, and Tapas has a limit of 2000 characters, which is quite a lot. A typical back-of-the-book blurb or Amazon description is in the neighborhood of 100-250 words, which equates to about 1/3 to 2/3 of a page, double-spaced.

The real limit is the reader’s attention span. We live in a world where we aren’t just competing with thousands of other books and stories, but all the other forms of entertainment available at the click of a button.  We’re competing with Netflix and TikTok too.

In a great recent conversation about book openings on the Writing Excuses podcast, they told the story of an author who planned to throw away an unsolicited ARC they received, but got caught up in by the back cover blurb on the way to the trash can and ended up reading the book. That’s how short and compelling the blurb should be.

Resources

One of the best ways to get started is to find good examples and deconstruct them. What is the description actually telling you about the characters, plot, or conflict? What kind of language are they using? Does the description pull you in?

My first step was to pull books I love from my bookshelves. These are books that I’m already familiar with, so I can evaluate what bits of the book actually make it into the blurb. I have also been cruising Amazon’s most popular books and reading descriptions. Many of these are books that I haven’t read, so I have to strictly look at how the description makes me feel. Do I want to click the “buy” button by the time I’m done reading?

Ultimately, if you want to craft a great book description, you should read a ton of book descriptions. Like learning a new language, immersing yourself in this stuff is the best way to get into the right mindset for writing a blurb of your own.

It’s important to know what genre(s) you’re targeting, and look at similar books. If you have a list of comp titles, that’s ideal. You’ll quickly notice that certain structures are common in the blurbs for particular genres.

On the other hand, don’t limit yourself solely to your chosen genre. You may find that a blurb structure common to another genre happens to work for your story. Just make sure you’re not inadvertently posing your book as a different genre — you don’t want excited readers feeling let down when they realize what they’re reading is completely different from what the blurb advertised.

Of course, I’m not the only person who has ever tried to figure out what makes for a great description. It’s also worth looking at the analyses other people have done. I was able to find a few good articles on the subject:

What’s In a Blurb?

You’ll notice that a lot of these articles claim to have the secret recipe (or “handy formula” or “step-by-step” guide). That’s great click-bait, because we all want to believe that there’s a simple and straightforward process for these things. Unfortunately, this is art, baby.

As is so often the case when it comes to writing, it can be unnecessarily limiting to treat a rigid recipe as the gospel truth and refuse to deviate. However, there are a few elements that are so common in a book description that they are almost obligatory. If you’re not touching on them, you should have a good reason why.

Hook(s) – This is a sentence or tiny paragraph at the start (and sometimes also at the end) of a blurb. This is straight up ad copy. It’s clickbait for your book. It should be surprising or shocking, exciting or unbelievable. A hook at the start of the blurb is a foot in the door, designed to get the reader to read the rest of the blurb. A hook at the end, on the other hand, should be the stinger — the summation of the blurb that compels the reader to immediately flip the book over and open it to chapter one.

Character(s) – If you have a single protagonist, especially with a first-person POV, they should feature prominently in your blurb. If your book is focused on the conflict between protagonist and antagonist, the antagonist should be prominent as well. However, if you have a large cast with multiple points of view, you may have to pick one character to focus on in the blurb, or lean more heavily on the overarching plot.

Plot & Conflict – Unlike a full summary or synopsis, you do not need to reveal the whole plot. What you need to do is reveal an important conflict or source of tension. If you have big secrets and exciting reveals, you can drop hints, but don’t give them away. Show the reader why they’ll want to keep reading. What is the challenge the characters will face? What will the consequences be if they fail?

Examples

Let’s look at some examples from my bookshelf.

The Martian, by Andy Weir

A MISSION TO MARS. A FREAK ACCIDENT. ONE MAN’S STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE.

When a dust storm forces his crew to evacuate the planet while thinking him dead, astronaut Mark Watney finds himself stranded on Mars’s surface, completely alone.

Armed with nothing but his ingenuity, his engineering skills — and a gallows sense of humor that proves to be his greatest source of strength — Mark embarks on a dogged quest to stay alive. But will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

  • At 86 words, this is a pretty short blurb. This is partly to make room for seven glowing quotes from major reviewers and authors. But it also reflects the story, which is a suspenseful sci-fi thriller.
  • The fact that it’s a sci-fi story comes through in the first four words.
  • You may or may not like the all-caps sentence fragments that form the hook here. “One man’s struggle to survive” reads a bit cliché to me. But there’s no question that this alone is a fair summation of the book, and it pulls me into the rest of the blurb.
  • The book has a single protagonist in Mark Watney, and that comes through clearly here. The bulk of the book is him, alone, on Mars. It’s told from his POV, and it’s a strong POV. His gallows humor is a selling point.
  • The conflict is also laid out clearly. He’s trapped, alone, on Mars. His crew thinks he’s dead, and he has to survive. This is the question that’s going to keep us turning pages.

Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett

When her dear old Granddad — the Grim Reaper himself — goes missing, Susan takes over the family business. The progeny of Death’s adopted daughter and his apprentice, she shows real talent for the trade. That is until a little string in her heart goes “twang.”

With a head full of dreams and a pocketful of lint, Imp the Bard lands in Ankh-Morpork, yearning to become a rock star. Determined to devote his life to music, the unlucky fellow soon finds that all of his dreams are coming true. Well, almost.

In this finger-snapping, toe-tapping tale of youth, Death, and rocks that roll, Terry Pratchett once again demonstrates the wit and genius that have propelled him to the highest echelons of parody next to Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and Carl Hiaasen.

  • This one is 133 words, but about 30 of them are spent putting Sir Terry Pratchett on a pedestal among literary greats, not on the story. Which is a good selling point, if you can get it.
  • The genre is again pretty clearly defined as quirky fantasy by the strange names and the personification of Death.
  • The book is equally split between two protagonists, Susan and Imp, and this blurb dedicates a paragraph to each.
  • What it doesn’t do is delve too deeply into the plot. We only get a hint of the conflict for each character. Susan’s heart goes “twang.” Imp is unlucky that his dreams are coming true. Almost.

American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

Shadow is a man with a past. But now he wants nothing more than to live a quiet life with his wife and stay out of trouble. Until he learns that she’s been killed in a terrible accident.

Flying home for the funeral, as a violent storm rocks the plane, a strange man in the seat next to him introduces himself. The man calls himself Mr. Wednesday, and he knows more about Shadow than is possible.

He warns Shadow that a far bigger storm is coming. And from that moment on, nothing will ever be the same…

  • Word count: 97. While this back cover has only one quote next to the blurb, it is from Stephen King, and the remainder of the space is dedicated to young, slightly goth Neil’s dreamy stare, which seems like reasonable use of the real estate.
  • This blurb focuses tightly on the protagonist, Shadow. Things haven’t gone well for him, and now they’re going worse.
  • From Mr. Wednesday’s strange name, and the implications of his impossible knowledge, we can guess that this is some sort of relatively down to earth fantasy. This description is the least clear about genre so far. However, that may be reasonable, as the book itself lives mostly in the mundane real world, even when there are gods involved.
  • Again, we get the start of Shadow’s story, but not much detail beyond that. We can presume that Shadow will have internal struggle with the death of his wife and the bad things in his past. All we know about the more external conflicts of the book is that trouble is on the way, and Mr. Wednesday seems to be involved.
  • Here we see a closing hook (although “nothing will ever be the same” feels a tad clichéd to me). The blurb ends with ellipses, explicitly suggesting that the reader can continue this thought by opening the book and reading on.

The Girl Who Drank the Moon, by Kelly Barnhill

“There is magic in starlight, of course. This is well known. Moonlight, however. That is a different story. Moonlight is magic. Ask anyone you like.”

Every year, the people of the Protectorate leave a baby as an offering to the witch who lives in the forest to keep her from terrorizing their town. But the witch, Xan, is really kind and gentle. She shares her home with a wise Swamp Monster and a Perfectly Tiny Dragon. Xan rescues the children and delivers them to welcoming families on the other side of the forest.

One year, Xan accidentally feeds a baby moonlight, filling the ordinary child with extraordinary magic. Xan decides she must raise this girl, whom she calls Luna, as her own. As Luna’s thirteenth birthday approaches, her magic begins to emerge with unpredictable consequences, just when it’s time for Xan to go collect another child. Meanwhile, a young man is determined to free his people by killing the witch. And a volcano, dormant for centuries, rumbles within the earth…

  • The opening paragraph is the hook here, set in a different font and color. In this case, we’re getting a quote directly from the book, to give us a feel for the prose. Just like The Martian, this hook uses short sentences, some just fragments, to pull us in. Interestingly, these sentences don’t appear all together in the book. There’s an extra paragraph in the middle that has been left out to achieve this punchy, staccato effect.
  • At 170 words, this is the longest description we’ve looked at. That extra word count affords it the opportunity to include the three main characters and quite a lot of plot.
  • Xan gets the most words, Luna gets fewer, and Antain (merely “a young man” here) gets the least. As far as I remember, this roughly matches how much of the actual book each of these characters appear in.
  • This blurb wears its genre on its sleeve. It’s clearly fantasy, and details like the witch and the Perfectly Tiny Dragon suggest that there’s no small amount of whimsical fairy tale here. The mention of leaving a baby as offering every year, on the other hand, suggests that there’s some classic fairy tale darkness as well.
  • The blurb finishes with a building-up of tension by stacking conflict on top of conflict. First, there’s Luna’s magic and its unpredictable consequences. Then Xan is away while it’s happening. Then the young man is introduced, and he wants to kill Xan. But wait, there’s more! A volcano, set to erupt.
  • Once again, there are the ellipses at the end, inviting us to open the book and find out what happens next.

Next Time

I’ll be continuing to talk about book descriptions later this week. I’m taking all this analysis and putting it into action as I craft a book description for my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

Do you have a favorite book with a great example of a back-cover description? Post it in the comments!

I’ve Been Reading Drabbles…Lots of Drabbles

In my pursuit of the form, I’ve now read something like 100 to 150 drabbles. Luckily, hundred-word stories don’t take that long to read.

In addition to the Martian Magazine, which I’ve mentioned previously, I discovered The Drabble (which does include poetry and fiction less than 100 words, rather than exactly 100 words). I also found Speck Lit, which stopped updating a few years ago, but has a large archive still available. I’ve found drabbles of the exactly-100-words definition in a handful of other places. I’m sure there are plenty more out there, especially in flash fiction publications that would accept very short fiction, but typically have max lengths of 1000 or 1500 words. They’re just a pain to find.

One of the nice things about drabbles is that you can read quite a lot of them in a short amount of time. It’s relatively easy to see what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, because everything has to be laid out in a couple of paragraphs. They lend themselves to quick analysis.

My Favorites

These are my favorite (freely accessible) drabble stories so far. They surprised me, or made me laugh, or made me feel something. As usual, I skew toward speculative fiction. You can read the whole lot in less time than it would take to read a typical short story.

  1. Nicholas Was — Neil Gaiman
  2. Orbital Views — Gretchen Tessmer
  3. Todd — Jason P. Burnham
  4. The Reluctant Time Traveler Wears Two Watches — Wendy Nikel
  5. The Weave — M. Yzmore
  6. Double Trouble — R. Daniel Lester
  7. The Forest of Memory — Anna Salonen
  8. A Cabin to Die In — Anna Salonen
  9. Of Artistic Temperament — Sophie Flynn
  10. Redemption — Belinda Saville

Styles of Drabble

Having now observed quite a few drabbles in the wild, I tried to classify some of the common styles that are used to make a story interesting in one hundred words. It’s interesting to see that the limited word count really does force a wide variety of forms.

How to Create Authentic Children’s Voices in Fiction–and Hold an Adult Reader’s Interest – by Gail Aldwin…

on Anne R. Allen: For writers who want to improve their practice in using children’s voices in their work, one of the best places to start is by …

How to Create Authentic Children’s Voices in Fiction–and Hold an Adult Reader’s Interest – by Gail Aldwin…

Learning from Great Hooks

The “hook” is the opening of a story: the handful of sentences where a reader is willing to completely suspend judgement and open themselves up to a new world. It’s called a hook because it’s the author’s opportunity to reel the reader in. To grab hold of them and refuse to let them go until the story is done.

Hooks are among the most daunting things to write. A hook needs to pull the reader in, but it’s also a promise of what’s to come. If the hook captures the reader’s interest, but does it in a way that’s at-odds with the rest of the story, it will feel like a betrayal. A bait-and-switch.

Today, I want to look at hooks from a few books I like and see what I can learn from them. How are they structured? As a reader, how do these introductory sentences pull me in? What do they promise about the story to come?

Travel Light, by Naomi Mitchison

It is said that when the new Queen saw the old Queen’s baby daughter, she told the King that the brat must be got rid of at once. And the King, who by now had almost forgotten the old Queen and had scarcely looked at the baby, agreed and thought no more about it. And that would have been the end of that baby girl, but that her nurse, Matulli, came to hear of it. Now this nurse was from Finmark, and, like many another from thereabouts, was apt to take on the shape of an animal from time to time. So she turned herself into a black bear then and there, and picked up the baby in her mouth, blanket and all, and growled her way out of the Bower at the back of the King’s hall, and padded out through the light spring snow that had melted already hear the hall, and through the birch woods and the pine woods into the deep dark woods where the rest of the bears were waking up from their winter sleep.

This lovely rush of words is only five sentences. Most of them start with conjunctions, making it feel like one long, breathless run. So much is happening.

It’s clear from the first few words that this is going to be a fairy tale, and that’s further confirmed when we see that being able to turn into an animal is treated as no particularly impressive feat. We can also tell that this is no light and fluffy fairy tale. It begins with the almost casual cruelty of the king and queen.

This opening also makes it clear that this girl is the protagonist, and she will not be living a normal life. In this single paragraph, we see her lose her birthright, saved by a bear-woman and brought to live in the woods. It’s hard not to be curious about what will happen next.

The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains, by Neil Gaiman

You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things. For where I left him. For what I did. But I will not forgive myself for the year that I hated my daughter, when I believed her to have run away, perhaps to the city. During that year I forbade her name to be mentioned, and if her name entered my prayers when I prayed, it was to ask that she would one day learn the meaning of what she had done, of the dishonour that she had brought to my family, of the red that ringed her mother’s eyes.

I hate myself for that, and nothing will ease that, not even what happened that night, on the side of the mountain.

This opening starts in the second person, drawing the reader in by including them in what seems to be conversation in progress. A conversation with us.

We start with a few fragmented sentences, already waist-deep in mysteries. Where did you leave him? Who is he? What did you do? The daughter clearly didn’t run away to the city, so what happened to her?

The viewpoint character is already being defined here. He’s someone with strong emotions – a fierce temper that more or less caused him to disown his daughter, and his shame when he discovers this still unexplained truth of what really happened to her.

Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card

“I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I tell you he’s the one. Or at least as close as we’re going to get.”

“That’s what you said about the brother.”

“The brother tested out impossible. For other reasons. Nothing to do with his ability.”

“Same with the sister. And there are doubts about him. He’s too malleable. Too willing to submerge himself in someone else’s will.”

“Not if the other person is his enemy.”

“So what do we do? Surround him with enemies all the time?”

“If we have to.”

“I thought you said you liked this kid.”

“If the buggers get him, they’ll make me look like his favorite uncle.”

“All right. We’re saving the world, after all. Take him.”

Starting with dialogue puts us in the action immediately. It also tells us that whoever these two disembodied voices are talking about is probably important to the story. Dialogue like this, without tags attributing it to a character, is a dangerous choice because it can be disorienting to the reader. In this case, it works because we don’t have to care about these two speakers, only the information they’re conveying really matters.

The first sentence sounds like standard Messiah fare, but it’s immediately subverted. We understand that the target of this discussion is being observed and tested (in a very invasive way), and his brother and sister were subjected to this treatment as well. These voices are willing to be cruel to him if it’s required to make him into this messianic figure and save the world. The stakes of the story are already being established on the first page.

There is a little mystery here as well. What are the buggers, and why does the world need to be saved?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

It goes on like this for another page and a half of prologue, which meanders right into the first chapter. I found it hard to pick a cut-off point.

To me, this is the most interesting example we’ll look at today. It doesn’t introduce any of the main characters, or anything about the situation or setting (beyond Earth in general).

It does tell us that it’s science fiction, it’s not going to take itself seriously, and it’s going to be looking at everything from a rather skewed and unexpected viewpoint. In fact, what it’s really introducing is the the author’s incredibly distinctive voice and tone. If you’ve read Douglas Adams, you’ll know that his narrative voice is almost a character in its own right (even if it isn’t from an actual character’s perspective). This series includes plenty of chapter-length digressions and asides, and is undoubtedly better for it.

In short, the story can afford to wait a bit, because it’s so damn entertaining to just listen to what Adams has to say.

Give it a Try!

I’d encourage every writer to do this exercise with some favorite books. One of the wonderful things you’ll discover is the sheer variety of forms that a hook can take. You don’t need to feel forced into a formula — there are a plethora of ways to pull readers into a story. By analyzing the hooks of stories you love, you might discover some great ideas you can apply to your own stories.