Anatomy of a Hook

This morning, I was thinking about Six Word Stories. You know, the writing exercise inspired by Earnest Hemingway's famous short, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."  After lying dormant for decades, these literary bon mots surged back into popularity a few years ago. Here are a few of my favorites from the Wired Magazine collection:

"Longed for him. Got him. Shit." - Margaret Atwood
"Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so." - Joss Whedon
“I couldn't believe she’d shoot me.” - Howard Chaykin
"Tick tock tick tock tick tick." - Neal Stephenson
"Epitaph: He shouldn't have fed it." - Brian Herbert

Personally, while I enjoy reading Six Word Stories, I always objected to calling these things stories. With the exception of Margret Atwood's spectacular entry above, none of them have plot or characters. Nothing changes, no tale is told, therefore, I put forth that these short pieces (however clever) aren't stories at all. They're hooks, and when done right, they represent a perfect encapsulation of what makes us want to know more about a story.

"Hook" is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot in writing about writing. You can't even search about "how to get an agent" or "how to write a book" without someone telling you that you have to hook your reader, often from the first line. And for the most part this is true, good advice, but when you use a word, especially a metaphor, so often and so exclusively, its meaning begins to leach away. That in mind, I thought I'd take a few words to stop the dilution cycle and talk about what the hook does mechanically in a story.

What Does the Hook Do?
As its namesake implies, the purpose of a hook is to "catch" a reader's attention. The starting point for all narrative is interest. Even before they've read a word, readers can be attracted by an evocative cover or a clever title, but the real kicker with hooks is that one is never enough.

This is where the fishing metaphor breaks down. Readers are not trout. You can't just have one powerful hook to pull them into the boat and leave it at that. Rather, you're enticing them to climb into the boat of their own accord, first with a good title, then with a good first line, then with good tension, then with plot twists. It's never done, it's always hook hook hook until they've reached the last page, and then you've got to hook them again for the sequel.

I actually wrote about this eternal hooking process in a post called Story Velcro. The basic idea is that if you want your reader staying up all night and turning pages, you have to keep sinking hook after hook into them until they're stuck to your book like velcro. And, of course, with so many hooks, you need to vary it up to make sure the reader doesn't get bored and the hooks become less effective as a result. So, let's take a look at what types of hooks we have to work with.

Because I enjoy dividing things into categories, I like to separate my hooks out into 3 broad classes: Big Ideas, Suspense, and Wit.

Big Idea hooks are exactly what they sound like: big ideas that capture the imagination and then use that thrill, that inspired curiosity, to make you read more. Because of their inherent Wow! nature, Big Idea hooks are often high concept, like the opening line to J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan novel, Peter and Wendy, "All children, except one, grow up." This hook immediately sets out an impossible situation that makes the reader want to know "Why doesn't this child grow up? What's going on?" It also, coincidentally, meets the criteria for a Six Word Story. See how that works?

But the Big Idea hook doesn't have to be highbrow or complicated. It can just as easily be straight and to the point, like the exceedingly simple and highly effective "Snakes on a Plane," which is quite possibly the greatest hook of our generation. (Seriously, they sold the entire movie, millions and millions of dollars, on that line alone. Now THAT's a hook!) The essence, however, is the same. We hear a big idea, and we immediately want to explore it.

Sometimes the Big Idea is the core of the novel as well as the hook, the central spoke that everything else radiates off. Other times, the Big Idea is just one of several cards in the writer's hand. However it's used, though, the Big Idea hook packs the biggest bang for your buck. As Snakes on a Plane showed, people will put up with some pretty awful drek if they love the Big Idea enough. That said, Big Idea hooks rely on execution (i.e., how well you actually explore and use that Big Idea to tell a story) and can overshadow the narrative they're supposed to be pulling the reader into if used incorrectly (see the final two Matrix movies for an example of how Big Ideas aren't everything).

Long story short, the Big Idea is the Dirty Harry gun of hooks, and should be treated accordingly with respect and caution.

But while the Big Idea hook is the most flashy of the three, the Suspense hook is by far the most prevalent and omni-useful. The Suspense Hook is a line that rouses curiosity by implying an interesting situation without giving away the details. Going back to our Six Word Stories, Joss Whedon's "Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so," Howard Chaykin's “I couldn't believe she’d shoot me,” and Brian Herbert's "Epitaph: He shouldn't have fed it," are all examples of Suspense hooks. Each one is a tiny peek into a much larger, more complicated situation, a tantalizing hint of a vastly interesting story, and we as readers can't help but read the next line to find out what happens next.

"What happens next?" is, in fact, the core of what makes the Suspense hook work. You are hooking interest via that most powerful of human drives: nosiness. We always want to know what's going on, what are people doing, even if those people don't actually exist. A good Suspense hook grabs that curiosity and turns it into a page turning engine.

This sort of thing is the bread and butter of the Mystery and Suspense genres, but human curiosity exists everywhere there are people. So long as your reader is human, you can count on enticing them with a leading, suspenseful hook. Keeping them, of course, will require actually making that suspense pay off.

(On a side note, "Weather Report" openings (i.e., "It was a dark and stormy night") also fall into the Suspense category since they are there to create atmosphere, interest, and general What's going on?-ness in the world at large. That said, they tend to do this badly, because unless there's a hurricane bearing down on our heroes, weather is not in itself very interesting. There's a reason these openings get a bad rap, so unless you're dead confident you can knock it out of the park, I'd avoid trying to make weather into a hook.)

Finally, we come to my personal favorite hook: Wit. Wit hooks are exactly that: bits of writing so charming and interesting and well done that we will keep reading just for a chance at more. Jane Austen was a master of the art, and several of her Wit hooks are now well known lines everyone repeats. Even people who haven't read Pride and Prejudice know that "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." That's how good her hooks are, they hook themselves out of her book and into our cultural consciousness.

Of all the hooks, Wit is the hardest to pull off. It's a delicate and highly creative art that's insanely easy to mess up and depressingly dependent on individual taste. What one reader considers witty, another might consider overwrought or cutesy. That said, when done right, it can win you readers like nothing else. Even if they're bored stiff with the actual story and characters, people will keep reading so long as the text is packed with enough witty hooks to overcome the rest, which is a claim none of the other hooks can make.

That said, wit is not the same as good writing. Granted, many good writers are witty, but there's so much more to storytelling than being a good wordsmith. Your story should stand on the strength of its characters and narrative, not just because there's enough wit in the language to keep the pages turning. There are plenty of successful authors who survive by wit alone, but I wouldn't call them good writers, and I don't tend to keep their books past the initial burst of witty pleasure (or finish them at all, actually).

Special Addendum: Mixing Hooks
Just like in Food Science where the best recipes rely on mixing fat, salt, and sugar into ever more complex concoctions, the absolute best hooks come when you mix two or more of these hooks together. My absolute favorite novel opening of all time is the beginning of Deanna Raybourn's, Silent in the Grave.

"To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband’s dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching upon the floor."

This is an absolute perfect mix of suspense and wit. I want to know every single thing about what's going on here, and I am still grinning like an idiot over how charming it is. I bought the omnibus of her first three books on the strength of this line alone. A highly effective hook.

But as with everything in writing, the more you try to do, the better you have to be to pull it off. Mixing hooks is a delicate alchemy, and can easily blow up or fall flat if you don't get it just right. But again, as with everything in writing, the more you know about what you're doing, the easier pulling it off becomes.

Hey girl, this sounds great and all, but who appointed you grand poobah of putting things in boxes? Why do hooks have to be categorized, anyway? You're one of those crazy people who labels everything, aren't you?

... Maybe...

While I confess to a slight obsession with dividing nebulous ideas into workable categories...(What? Nebulous ideas defy examination by their very nature, and without examination, how can we improve? I must catch this cloud and pin it down...FOR SCIENCE!!!)

Ahem, anyway, the point here isn't that these three branches I've outlined above are some kind of Holy Trinity of Hooks. Quite frankly, while I of course hope that you like my categories and find them helpful, I don't really care one way or the other if use mine or make your own or say screw it all together. The point of all this, my dear reader, is to take the washed out, overused, high-school-lit-class-vocab-word hook and turn it into something useful again.

Though hooks are one of the most important concepts of writing, constant flogging has robbed the term of all its meaning, and the only way to get that meaning back is to divide, dig in, and examine. If this article has done nothing but make you pissed at how wrong I am about all this, then it's still done its job, because you were thinking critically about hooks, and that very act pours meaning back into a vital term that deserves so much more than an off the cuff, "everyone knows what this is" comment on a writing blog.

It's hard for me to express how angry I get when I see so many people talking about hooks, and yet saying nothing. "Something that hooks the reader" isn't enough. You can't define a term with itself, especially when that concept is the make or break point for a novel. It doesn't matter how good your book is, if you haven't mastered your hooks, no one is going to get past the first page. If there was one thing I would tell new writers to master above all, it would be the hook, because the hook opens the door to everything else.

Whew, that got long and technical, but still, I trust, enjoyable. If you're a writer, I hope this breakdown of hooks helps you find new, more effective ways to use them in at your own writing. If you're a reader, I hope this insider knowledge helps you realize when you're being tricked into reading a bad book supported by hooks alone (because who has time to read bad books?). Thank you as always for reading, and please feel free to leave your thoughts, good and bad, in the comments!

Yours as always,
Rachel

The Art of Story Velcro

I apologize for the extended blackout. Our house has been beset by a green plague (also known as pollen), and fallout has not been pretty. I'm not sure what cruel and whimsical force gave humans sinuses, but I think I hate it right now.

But while all of this sneezing and general miserableness didn't leave much space for writing/tweeting/blogging/cleaning/being a functional human being, it did allow for a great deal of thinking. Specifically, I've been thinking about what makes a story un-put-downable, and how I can get more of it.

You know how sometimes you'll have a book that you're enjoying, but it takes you forever to finish? Like, it's good and you want to know how the story ends, but life conspires and you just keep putting it down. Now, you know those books that take you over? The books that keep you up until all hours of the night when you desperately need to sleep but you simply can not put the sucker down? Yeah, those books.

The difference between these two types of books can be difficult to pin down. After all, they're both good, it's just that one was addictive and one wasn't. Why? What creates that special MUST READ brand of story crack?

I'm sad to say I haven't figured out the entire recipe for book crack yet (but man, once I do, watch out world! None of you are ever getting anything done again ever!), but I do believe I've figured out a major ingredient: reader engagement.

Reader engagement is just a fancy term for how into your book a reader is. When you can't put down a book, you are highly engaged, and engagement is a facet of reader interest. Specifically, if I want a reader to keep reading, I have to keep them interested on as many levels as possible. Interested in the plot, in the romance, in the world, in the outcomes of my character's lives, etc. And the more interest I can build, the more engaged (and addicted) my reader will be. As a story teller, I am competing against the reader's busy life for attention and time. To win this battle, my story needs to be almost impossible to rip yourself away and incredibly easy to get locked back in to if you do manage to pull free. In short, I need to story Velcro.

If you look at Velcro up close, you can see that one side is covered in thousands of tiny hooks which snag on the soft strap and hold the two together. Once stuck, the two sides require force, sometimes massive force, to pull them apart again. This is exactly what I want in my stories, to snag my reader so tightly they'll need to exert massive force to pull away, and every time the force stops, they fall right back and get hooked again. This sort of broad, inescapable engagement is essential to creating an un-put-downable book, and to achieve it, I take my cue from Velcro. I make hooks.

Putting hooks in your story is hardly a new concept, but I'm not talking about the big hooks that convince someone to pick up your story in the first place. If the reader's already reading, those hooks have done their job. We're in subtler territory now, which means smaller hooks, sometimes tiny ones, spread all throughout the story for the purpose of keeping your reader locked at that same level of interest that made them pick up the book in the first place.

To see this in action, let's take my favorite go-to example: Harry Potter. Most people picked up the series initially because a boy magician going to a secret wizard school is pretty great hook, but they stayed because J. K. Rowling is a freaking master of story velcro. Practically every paragraph of Harry Potter is filled with interesting tidbits, things you want to know more about. First there's the mystery of a baby left on the doorstep, and then empathy with Harry's terrible home life. This is followed by the wonder of obviously magical happenings and overall giddy excitement that is the world of Harry Potter itself and then finished by intense character drama and an exciting climax.

Rowling doesn't hit you with all of this at once. Instead, she picks at you, revealing one tidbit after another, hook hook hook hook, snagging you and pulling you into her story until you can no longer (and have no desire to) get free. Even when her hooks never really panned out (like all that stuff about the dragons in Norway), they kept me reading. I take several issues with the plots of the Harry Potter series, but I read each new HP book at midnight on release day just like everyone else. And that, my friends, is the power of amazing story velcro.

On a practical writing level, I believe that creating this sort of deep engagement is more of an exercise in attention than talent. You need to remember to think like a reader. When you look at your story, you have to put aside what you want it to be and see the text for what it is. You might know your main character is going to transform from a spineless wimp into an amazing person over the course of eight chapters, but your reader has no idea, and it's the writer's job to keep that reader hooked long enough to allow the transformation to occur. To do this, in every scene, in every paragraph, you have to ask yourself, "how can this be more interesting?" and then be ready to find that answer in all sorts of different places.

The best story velcro happens on multiple levels through out the story. It's not enough to just cram your paragraphs full of amazing ideas and prose (though that can take you pretty far if your ideas are cool enough, just look at China Mieville). But this sort of shot gun approach can overwhelm readers unless done amazingly well. A far safer (and easier) approach is to try to think vertically through all the threads of the book and apply your hooks on multiple levels. For example, if you've just done a lot of talking about world building, throw in some snappy character dialogue that reveals interesting facets about your cast. If it's a low point in the plot tension, create character tension to fill the gap. Have an argument, hint that someone might be lying. My personal favorite is to have something vaguely sinister happen just on the edge of the scene to make a reader gasp and go "WHAT'S THAT?!"

Wherever you see an empty spot or a place where reader attention might be flagging, work in a hook, even if you're not sure what to do with it yet. Not only will this keep your reader engaged at every turn, it also deepens the book and gives you something cool to pull up later in the plot, sometimes entire books later, and come out looking like you planned it all along.

I realize this probably sounds overwhelming. I mean, working in hooks when you're also supposed to be thinking about tension and character development and, oh yeah, just getting the freaking story down and making sense? That's a lot to think about. But as I said two paragraphs up, this isn't a matter of talent or genius or inspiration, it's an exercise in attention. The most important thing a writer can be is attentive to their own work. Having care, paying attention, adding detail, these are how you create depth, and the more you deepen, the easier it becomes to add nuance and flourishes to every part of your work.

Fortunately, writing is neither a spectator sport nor a timed event. Creating the dense network of hooks required to make excellent story velcro is a multi-pass project that goes on for as long as you're working on a story. For my part, I keep shoving in hooks all the way up to the final copy edit. But so long as you are actively thinking about reader engagement, even if it's nothing more than rejecting boring sentences in favor of more interesting ones, you are actively making your story better, and that's always a step in the right direction.

Writing Wednesday: Reader Investment and the Ticking Time Bomb

I've talked about tension and hooking my reader a LOT on this blog over the years. (Seriously, a lot. Search my blog for tension and you get, like, 20 posts.)

Given all the pixels I've already spilled on the topic, you might think I've already covered every single aspect of writing tension that exists. Well, you'd be wrong! There's always more stuff to say about tension in stories! This is partially because the mechanics of good tension are deep, subtle, and worthy of exploration, but mostly, I talk about tension because tension is really freaking important. More important than characters or plot or any other critical element of writing.

Note that this isn't to say those other things don't matter. They matter a ton! Just try writing a book with cardboard characters and see how far that gets you. It's just that tension matters more, because while you could have the best characters/plot ever committed to paper, no one's ever going to read long enough to see them if your tension sucks. Maintaining good tension is how you keep a reader's attention over the course of your writing, and since 99% of being a successful author is writing shit people want to read, I'm sure you can see how keeping your tension on point is critical to story success.

This is both a great example of narrative tension and a really great book on the subject!

So if you're new to the blog and I've just made you paranoid about your own tension, click here to get caught up! (And if you have no idea what I'm talking about with all this tension stuff, click here for my very first post on the topic to see me work myself into a froth explaining what tension is and why you desperately need it in your life).

For the rest of you old hands (or who just don't want to read back posts), today's tension topic is all about tricks and mechanisms for maintaining tension and reader investment over the course of a scene, chapter, or even an entire book. (And yes, I did just use the word "mechanisms.")

Gird your loins, peeps! It's about to get technical in here!

Writing Wednesday: Reader Investment and the Ticking Time Bomb

So I've already talked about how you can use hooks to grab a reader's attention and yank them into your story like an angler landing a sweet, highly literate fish. (And if you're not sure what a hook is, go read this post.) For maximum effect, most authors use hooks at the very beginning of the story to draw a reader in and then again and again throughout the rest off the text to keep them there. This post is about what happens after the hook has done its job.

Congratulations! Your reader now reading your book! Now: how do you keep them there?

7 Posts to Help You Use Hooks Better

Hi everyone, this is Travis. I realized that we have a lot of new readers lately. If you want to be a better writer, there's years of materials here on Pretentious Title to dig through!

But no one likes digging through years of old posts. So, to help you all out, I've put together a quick link round up of some of Rachel's most popular How To writing posts. Today's topic is: the Hook. What it is, how to use it, and some great examples of the hook in action.

I hope you find these links handy! If you'd like more of these roundups, let us know what topics you'd like to see covered in the comments below. And remember, One Good Dragon Deserves Another comes out tomorrow!

(Rachel takeover: REVIEWS! In addition to the absolutely wonderful FBC review I mentioned Weds, OGDDA has already racked up great reviews from The Midnight Garden and Notes from a Readerholic as well! SO HAPPY YOU GUYS! Thank you!!!)

And now, the links!

Rachel's Top Posts About Hooks

Anatomy of a Hook - Using 6 Word Stories to examine the hook in its purest form.

The Art of Story Velcro - Using every aspect of your story to hook readers so hard, they never let go.

How to Write a Great Blurb - Who says writing great blurbs has to be torture?

Where to Start Your Story - It's not always where you think.

Tension - Why hooks work in the first place. The alpha and omega of successful writing.

How to Write a Prologue People Won't Skip - For all my fellow prologue junkies out there!

How I Manage Large Casts of Characters - Using character hooks to keep readers invested.

Thank you again for reading, and happy Almost OGDDA Release Day!

- R & T

author toolbox: the three hooks

(Cross posted from The Magic District)

One of the biggest problems I've had with my writing is excess flab. I have a bad habit of putting in scenes that I like (important, wonderful, fantastically written scenes) just because I like them, and not because that's where they should actually go (or be in the novel at all). This led to really big, unsellable books full of tension killing, scared cow scenes that went nowhere. It took me a lot of editing (and a lot of bad feedback) to finally learn my lesson: just because a scene is good does not mean it has a place in your novel. The good ship book is a small vessel. There's no room for scenes that don't pull their weight. But I'm an author. I generally like everything I write on some level (otherwise, why would I write it?) So how do I know what DOES belong?

To combat this problem, I created a checklist I call "the three hooks". Whenever I am planning a novel, the first thing I do is write out everything that happens. If I don't know what happens, this is when I figure it out. Some authors can just get an idea and go, and I do that a lot, too, but in the end novels always come back to their essence: a pile of scenes leading the reader from the beginning to the end. Once I have this pile of scenes, either in finished or outline form, I take each scene and I apply a set of standards. For the scene to pass, it must:

• Advance the story


• Reveal new information


• Pull the reader forward

Without all three of these elements, a scene, no matter how good or beloved, is just wasted words. A scene that does not advance the story, like a flashback revealing character information that is not pertinent to the story, may be brilliantly written, but it does nothing for the book. A scene that does not reveal new information, say a talking head recap scene, may be chock full of snappy dialog, but it does nothing for the book. A scene that does not pull the reader forward, say a break in the narrative where everyone is happy and all their needs are met, may be very cathartic for the author, but it does less than nothing for the book. In fact, I'd say a scene like that would give you negative progress. Resolved tension leads to put down books, and that is not what we want!

These hooks don't have to be obvious (in fact, the more creatively you can hide them, the better things get), but they do have to be there to keep the story rolling. These are the hooks that keep your reader reading, the tiny little claws of interest you constantly need to wiggle into the reader's brain to keep them turning pages. If every scene in your novel moves the plot ahead, reveals new and important information, and gives the reader a reason to turn the page and move on to the next scene, then you've got a book that a reader can not put down, and that is what it's all about.

Writing Wednesday: Tips for Great World Building

Hi folks,

Rachel refused to come out of her writing cave this morning. Something about Dragons, interruptions, and tasty with ketchup. So it looks like I'm going to be doing the blog post today. Mwahahaha! Last week was a business post, so this week I'm going to try to keep it writerly with a post on settings and world building.

Writing Wednesday: Tips for Great World Building

I've been making my own settings since sixth grade. Not for books, but for the table top RPGs that I run for my friends. Surprisingly to me, this experience has been invaluable when I help Rachel world build for her series. In fact, one of the most crucial contributions I make to Rachel's books have to do with her settings. She's even written a post about my world-building help called My Husband, the World Wrecker. 

(RACHEL NOTE: This is true. All of my settings were either blatantly stolen from or enormously improved by Travis. Also, YOU GUYS, he is the best GM ever! Seriously. I learned so much of what I know about stories from being a player character in his games over these last 14 years. Just goes to show that you really do pick up novel writing skills from everywhere!)

I'm not a writer like Rachel, but this is something I've done a lot both together with her and on my own, so today I want to share with you some of the things I've picked up over my two decades and countless worlds worth of experience into what makes for really good world building. Now, this will be less "how to world build" and more "how I world build", but I hope that you all find this interesting none the less.

Starting Out, the Big Hook

All my best worlds start with a hook. The setting itself needs to have a core component that invokes curiosity, "OMG factor," an exciting twist, has implications, or invokes a sense of irony/dread.

However, I'm not a fan of every type of world hook. I definitely feel like some are better than others. Specifically, I'm a big big believer in the power of,

The contradiction. Aka, the mystery, the thing-that-doesn't-add-up, the glaring exception...

All the coolest settings I know of (including Eli, Devi, and Dragons ^_~) have the contradiction deep within them. Our brains are desperate for order. We instinctively crave for everything to make logical, or at least explainable, sense. When we see something that doesn't make sense, say a broken rule of the universe or society, the urge to know why it doesn't drives us nuts.

In story, just add on the fact that not-knowing might have deadly consequences and you'll get some great baked-in tension.

For example,

How to Write a Great Blurb

This week, I finally read Blake Snyder's Save the Cat!, the screenwriter's classic How To Tell a Story book. As a non-screenwriter, I still found it very interesting, but the part I liked the best was definitely the chapter about loglines.

So a logline is basically the one sentence description of a movie you used to see in the paper back when people actually looked at news papers for movie times. Things like:

"The fight for the future begins when a computer hacker learns the world exists in the sophisticated alternate reality of a computer program called 'The Matrix'"

"A 17th Century tale of adventure on the Caribbean Sea where the roguish yet charming Captain Jack Sparrow joins forces with a young blacksmith in a gallant attempt to rescue the Governor of England's daughter and reclaim his ship."

"Toula's family has exactly three traditional values - "Marry a Greek boy, have Greek babies, and feed everyone." When she falls in love with a sweet but WASPy guy, Toula struggles to get her family to accept her fiancée while she comes to terms with her own heritage."

These are loglines for The Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean, and My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding respectively, though I probably didn't even have to tell you that. We know these stories, because these were all loglines that sold movies. In the business part of Hollywood, that's a logline's job: to sell a script.

In this area, at least, we novelists have it WAY better than screenwriters, because we have blurbs. Unlike loglines, which have to be short enough to pitch in that proverbial elevator, blurbs (or query letters, which are basically blurbs personalized to an agent) are allowed to take up entire paragraphs. Compared to the loglines above, that's an embarrassment of riches in terms of space to lay out our stories, and yet we still struggle to fit it all in. How do you convey what your 100,000 word book is about in two paragraphs? That's barely enough space to lay out the main characters and a basic sketch of the plot.

Well, you're in luck, because telling the story isn't what blurbs are for! A blurb, like a logline, isn't meant to be a synopsis or a report or anything so heavy. Instead, it is the answer to the question, "What is your story about?" And as any author who's admitted their profession in public can tell you, when someone asks "What is your story about," they're not signing up to hear a book report. They just want to know what's the genre, and why should they care.

Once you understand that, you've taken the first step toward mastering the blurb, because blurbs, like the loglines above, aren't there to tell the story, they're there to sell the story. They're meant to hook, to tease, to excite, to get whoever is reading them to want to read more. That's it, that's the entire point, and once you realize that, writing blurbs becomes very simple.

Not easy, of course. Blurbs still have to be short, witty, tantalizing, and full of hooks, which is hardly a walk in the park. But with a few guidelines (and the knowledge that you're writing ad copy, not a book a report), blurbs can stop being things you hate and become fun writing exercises.

Years ago, when I was haunting the NaNoWriMo forums, I came across the best single line hook for a novel I've ever read. It was one of those "boil your novel down to one sentence" challenges, and the entry was "He broke the world, can he fix it?"

That's a hell of a hook. I think I actually asked out loud "I don't know, can he?!" If there'd been more, I would have read it right there. Now, having read Save the Cat!, I think I understand why I was so immediately snapped up. In his book, Snyder mentions that the two essentials for every logline are irony and mystery. "He broke the world, can he fix it?" is just these two things in their purest form, a giant, unbreakable thing has been broken by an individual (irony), can he fix it? (mystery)

This two pronged approach is most easily visible in loglines where the enforced brevity leaves no room for anything else. Looking back up at the logline for The Matrix, we see that our real world isn't real at all (irony) and that we're going to be fighting machines to get back (inherent mystery, can we win?). Blurbs, being longer, are a little different. They still rely on mystery and iron, which could also be called the ingredients for a good hook, but they have the space to pack in more: more characters, more intrigue, more hooks. The canny writer will use this to her advantage.

Take, for example, the blurb for Magic Bites by Ilona Andrews:

"Atlanta would be a nice place to live, if it weren't for magic… One moment magic dominates, and cars stall and guns fail. The next, technology takes over and the defensive spells no longer protect your house from monsters. Here skyscrapers topple under onslaught of magic; werebears and werehyenas prowl through the ruined streets; and the Masters of the Dead, necromancers driven by their thirst of knowledge and wealth, pilot blood-crazed vampires with their minds. In this world lives Kate Daniels. Kate likes her sword a little too much and has a hard time controlling her mouth. The magic in her blood makes her a target, and she spent most of her life hiding in plain sight. But when Kate’s guardian is murdered, she must choose to do nothing and remain safe or to pursue his preternatural killer. Hiding is easy, but the right choice is rarely easy…"

This is a fantastic blurb on all accounts. There's requisite the irony (how could a city with magic not be a nice place to live?!) and mystery (Why is there magic? Will Kate catch the killer?), but there's also about ten billion other amazing cool hooks waiting to grab us--magic and technology switching places! A ruined metropolis crawling with magic! Necromancers who mind control vampires! A kick-ass heroine! A killer on the loose! How could you not want to read this book?!

This is the power of a great blurb. The paragraph above tells us almost nothing about the actual plot. There's only one named character (Kate Daniels) and a single recognizable location (Atlanta). We don't know why magic came back or what the world is like or even what Kate actually does for a living, and yet I want to read it all RIGHT NOW, as do hundreds thousands of other people going by her regular appearances on the NYT Bestseller List. We all want to read because this blurb does a great job of selling the setting, characters, and voice of the book.

That last bit is really crucial, and one of the reasons why authors should never farm out their blurb writing. Unlike loglines for movies, blurbs are more than just a sales pitch. They're also a sample of the writing we can expect inside. If a writer can't write a good blurb, or at least an interesting, engaging one, I have to wonder if they can write a novel. Blurb writing is hard, yes, but it's still writing. When I see an overworked blurb full of awkward sentences, predictable turns, and cheesy stock phrases ("the fate of the world," "toughest challenge she's ever known," "Character's perfect life falls apart when"), I can't help but wonder if the book isn't just as bad. That's never what you want people to wonder! You don't want them to wonder at all, you want them buy/request sample pages with squeals of delighted glee!

So, if you're sitting down to write a blurb or a query letter for your book, or if you already have a blurb/query letter and you're not getting the responses you want, take a step back and ask yourself if your blurb is doing its job. Is it highlighting what's best and most interesting about your work? Is it only telling people what they will read, or is it showing them why they want to read it?

Again, blurb writing is not easy. I can write 1000 words an hour, but I've spent two days on a 200 word blurb and still not been completely happy. That can feel a lot like failure when it hits, but your blurb is worth that level of effort, because the blurb is the most important bit of writing in your novel. The blurb is the first impression, the foot in the door. It's the very first thing anyone will read of your work, and if that blurb can't convince a reader or agent to keep going, your novel will not be read. So never be afraid to take your time and never settle for a blurb you don't love. It might take dozens of tries, but a good blurb is always worth the work in the end.

I hope this has helped you get a bit more insight into the World of Blurbcraft! I wanted to put up a really terrible blurb as a counter example to the Ilona Andrews one above, but there's no writer I dislike enough to embarrass them like that. Besides, you know a bad blurb when you see one. Everyone does, which is why they don't work. So use that same gut instinct on your own blurb. It might hurt, but I promise it's a good, becoming-a-better-writer kind of hurt.

And that's my post on blurbs! As always, thank you for reading, and remember to pile those hooks high!

Happy writing!
Rachel

Writing Wednesday: Anatomy of a Scene

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Prose Summer Camp!

Today, we're going to be taking a look at the workhorse of fiction, the scene. But first, announcements!

First, on Monday, Trav had a great post about why you shouldn't price your novel at $0.99. For the record, I absolutely agree with everything he says, but (as we always say around here), our way is not the only way. Case in point, after we posted the article, the awesome and very successful Annie Bellet contacted me on Twitter to tell me that she and several other authors have had fantastic success pricing at $0.99! This lead to a great discussion which I begged her to put into a post, and she gracious obliged. So, next Monday we'll have a guest post from Annie about why you should price your novel at $0.99! I've already read it, and it's going to be awesome.

Secondly, we've added a ton of new posters to the shop! Including this little beauty...

Squeeee!!!

Folks, I've got one in my hands right now, and it is gorgeous! The colors are so much more vibrant than on screen. We've also got posters for the covers and art for One Good Dragon Deserves Another (finally) and No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished as well, and they look just as good. You need more dragons in your life, right? Head on over to the swag shop to take a look and get some special Heartstrikers art for your walls!

Now that's out of the way, let's get down to brass tacks, with...

Prose Summer Camp: Anatomy of a Scene

So far in this series, we've talked about the small, technical details of good writing like improving sentence structure and how to write good sentence level description. We even had Bob come in to help us with dialogue! 

Now we're going to zoom out a bit and take a look at a larger, but still fundamental, aspect of good novel writing: the scene. As always, though, a disclaimer:

**This is how I write. All of the tips below are drawn from my taste and experience as a writer. If you don't like my writing style, knowing how I plan my scenes might not be useful. This is fine! Everyone writes in their own voice. I hope, of course, that you will still find some it helpful, but please don't take any of this as me setting down the One True Path of Writing. I'm just telling you what works for me in the hopes that it might also work for you.**

Now that's out of the way, let's talk about what a scene can do.

Your Other MC: Thoughts on Villainy

First up, I want to announce that Orbit is putting Eli Monpress is on sale this month! Get the omnibus of the first three Eli books for only $2.99 (Amazon | Nook | Everything Else)! You could even say they're a steal (har har thief humor). This is a great and cheap way to get new people hooked on the series, so please, spread the love! Now, on to the blog post!

Here at last, my long promised post about villains. It took me so long to write this because once I'd announced my intention to make a post like this, I realized I didn't actually know what I was going to write about. My original goal was to write a simple how-to guide for creating a good villain, but the more I tried, the more I realized I was attempting the impossible. First, if there was actually a reliable alchemy to creating excellent villains, we'd see a lot more of them. Second, even those bits I have penned down are so incredibly specific to my own method of story percolating that I doubt they'd be of much use to anyone else.

Honestly, I can no more describe to you how to write a truly good villain than I can teach you how have an epiphany. I can, however, write a blog post about villains--what makes them good, why we love them, and what happens to a story when the villain can't carry their end of things--and hope that knowledge spurs inspiration. So, let's talk antagonists.

What Does A Villain Do?
I went over this a bit in my AMA sessions last month, but since this whole post is about villains, I want to go ahead and get the definition out of the way, just to make sure we're all on the same page.

At the very highest level, the purpose of the antagonist is to provide the plot's push back. In a story of any sort, you have the main character(s), who generally want to do something. The antagonist is the thing/person/force that stands in their way. Without them, the MCs would just go over and do whatever they'd set out to do, and there would be no story.

You'll notice I used the term "antagonist" there. This is because this not all antagonists are villains. An antagonist is simply someone or something who is against the protagonists. This conflict doesn't always mean that the antagonists are in the wrong. There are some books where the protagonists are, in fact, horrible people who shouldn't be allowed to have their way, and in those the antagonist is often the force of good who are trying to stop them. But those sort of reverse stories are few and far between. In the vast majority of cases, the protagonist is a hero working toward some kind of good, and the one standing in their way, antaging their protag, so to speak, is the villain.

Villains are antagonists who are not doing the right thing. Who are, in the vast majority of stories, actively trying to do the wrong thing, either by preventing the heroes from doing good or by doing evil in their own right that the heroes must stop. Sometimes this evil is straight forward (kill the princess, take over kingdom, cover world in darkness for all of eternity), other times the waters can be murkier. It is in this murk, however, that the best villains often reside.

The Spectrum of Villainy
I like to think of villains as falling on a spectrum. At one end, you have the pure cackling evil sort, think Sauron or (my all time favorite) Maleficent.

Now that is some stylish evil.

As fun as villains at this end of the spectrum can be, however, their unabashed love of being, well, evil can make their characters shallow. There's a reason villains like this tend to show up in children's fiction. There's no question that this character is bad, and therefore they can be killed by the good guys without remorse. Their evil is so intense they are dehumanized. Their deaths are victories to be celebrated, not murders.

Villains like these often have monstrous forms that match the black evil of their hearts, and they're always shown being cruel without provocation or purpose: kicking puppies, killing children, etc. Sometimes they're mindless evil, like the zerg from Starcraft or the zombie hordes from any of the Romero Night/Dawn/Day of the Living Dead movies. They don't have to be physically dangerous either. Emotional abuse can be far worse than any physical danger, especially if the hero is the one being abused. Judge Claude Frolo from Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame was a violent and powerful man, but he was at his most evil when he was calmly emotionally abusing Quasimodo.  However villains at this end of the spectrum present themselves, though, they are always 100% unmistakably evil beings who need to be killed for the good of everyone.

On the other side of the spectrum, we have the misunderstood or reluctant villain, the one who could have been a hero had things been different. My absolute favorite example of this is Antonio Salieri from the play/movie Amadeus (one of my absolute favorite movies of all time).

Though named for Amadeus Mozart, Amadeus is actually the story of the composer Salieri and his absolute frustration and jealousy with the young Mozart. Here is a young, vulgar man who, though his genius, effortlessly produces music so beautiful that Salieri believes it is the work of God, while Salieri himself is cursed with only the ability to appreciate that genius but never create such beauty himself no matter how hard he works. The unfairness of this drives the jealous Salieri, who is otherwise a decent, if overly strict man, to set in motion a series of events that bring about Mozart's death and destroys Salieri in the process.

Salieri is the ultimate reluctant villain. So much so, in fact, that he actually ends up being both the hero and the villain of his own story. You could easily argue that the bumbling hero in this piece is Mozart, but Salieri is without a doubt the core of its story. Amadeus is the story of the rise and bitter fall of a talented but ultimately forgettable artist driven to villainy by jealousy of another's true genius. It is a deeply complex character drama where plot takes a far back seat to the relationship between Salieri, God, talent, and music.

And it is here we see the biggest different for authors between the two extremes of villainy. While cackling villains lend themselves to shallowness, misunderstood villains like Salieri demand depth. They struggle with their misdeeds and take over stories with their own internal conflict. This isn't to say that one type is better than the other, just that they are different animals who require different treatment within a story.

In a plot heavy YA fantasy, for example, a reluctant villain with highly complex motives that require a lot of exploration might end up feeling cramped or underdeveloped despite your best writing simply because there's not enough space in a 100k action adventure novel to properly deal with all of his/her issues. Especially if you're already dealing with two or more main characters who also need development time. On the flip side, if you try to put a cackling evil-for-evil's sake villain in an intense character drama where everyone else is multi-layered, you're going to have a real struggle making sure your bad guy doesn't appear flat or one note by comparison (this is actually a huge problem in Hollywood movies, the heroes will be deep and multilayered while the villain is left as almost an afterthought).

This isn't to say you can't make either of these set ups work. You're the writer, you can do whatever you can imagine. I'm just saying that these are issues that bear consideration when you're putting your book together.

I'm also not saying that all villains fall into one of these two extremes. Quite the contrary, there are thousands of highly successful villains who fall everywhere on the spectrum, and most likely your villain will also fall somewhere in the middle. But simply by upstanding that there is a spectrum of villainy can help you as a writer understand where your own villain falls, and that, in turn, can help you figure out how best to use them in your plot.

What This Means and What it Doesn't
In the section above, you'll notice I used a lot of hedging words like "tends to be" and "most of the time." This is because part of our job as writers is to break the molds we're given. Just because evil overlords tend to be overly simplified just because they're wholly committed to their evil ways and misunderstood villains tend to invite more complex narrative because of the innate complexity of a decent person driven to do bad things doesn't mean that's how you have to write them. Hannibal Lecter showed us just how complex and nuanced a wholly evil character can be, while the Grinch from the Dr. Seuss story of the same name is a perfect example of how powerful and simple a misunderstood villain can be.

With so many good counter examples, it might seem silly to bother putting villains on a spectrum at all. But the point here isn't to be right, but to create a way of thinking about the concept of villain in a broader sense. Because the only way to make something better is to understand what makes it good in the first place.

Okay, So What Makes a Good Villain?
The same things that make a good character: hooks, flaws, and motivation.

One of my favorite sayings in writing is that every villain is the hero of their own story. Like your hero, your villain needs to yearn, to crave, and to act. They need the agency to move the plot to their own ends and the motivation to make them do it. They can't just be evil because you need someone to lock your hero up so she can make her daring escape. Or, I guess they can, but this is a post about writing GOOD villains, not plot devices, which is what villains become when you let them wither.

Way back at the beginning of this post, I defined the villain/antagonist as force providing the push back that must be overcome before the heroes can achieve their goal. They are what creates the tension, doom looming on the horizon, the threat in the dark, the mountain that must be overcome. If the three act structure is defined as 1) put your characters in a tree, 2) light the tree on fire, 3) get your characters out of the tree, the villain is the one setting the fire, or the one chopping down the tree, or the one doing both at once while climbing up into the branches after them. Villains are conflict, they are your other main character, just on the opposite side of the plot.

But even more important than their vital roll in the plot is what a good villain brings to a book's emotional weight. What we as authors are really asking from our readers is investment. At the simplest level, we want them to be invested enough to turn the page, but on a larger scale, you want your readers to care about your characters, to stay up all night reading just to make sure everything turns out okay. The greater the level of reader investment, the deeper the book hooks into them, the more they remember it. I've read plenty of books that I've liked, but the ones I loved were the ones where I felt a deep emotional connection to the characters, and those are the books I bug people to read.

Commercial success in a book is directly related to reader investment, to how much people care. To that end, you want to make sure you give your reader every opportunity possible to become invested in your work, and villains are a huge part of this, because people LOVE great bad guys. I mean, I didn't watch The Dark Knight for Batman, I watched for the Joker, and I wasn't alone. But you don't get invested in a plot device, you get invested in a person, and what's what a good villain has to be: an amazing, interesting person capable of captivating your reader's attention.

The easiest way to do this is to create a villain people love to hate. Hate is the simplest emotion to inspire (see the commonality of puppy kicking mentioned above), but being easy, hate is also simple. For my money, the absolute best villains are the ones you hate but also sympathize with. Maybe they have very good reasons for the terrible things they do, and you can't help but feel for them even as you're cheering for the hero to win.

These sort of villains fall toward the "redeemable" end of the spectrum, but you can also court reader investment on the unrepentant end of things by having your villain be tempting. The will to evil is a universal constant, and villains like The Joker or Hannibal Lecter are masters at showing just how much fun life on the dark side can be. With good writing, good dialogue, and good hooks, a wholly evil villain can be hypnotic and addictive and even admirable in their unwavering dedication to being dastardly.

All that said, though, one of the true challenges of writing great villains is that you have a limited amount of space to do it in. In the vast majority of cases, the villain is not the main character. No matter how big a deal they are, in the end, it's not their story. Cutting away from the main character action to check in on the villain is a classic way to build tension, but like any powerful tool, if you use it too much it loses its impact. In fact, often the less you show a villain, the better and more interesting their scenes get, though how much is too much is something only the writer can decide.

But If You REALLY Want to Learn How to Create a Great Villain...
The best way to do it is to go and find your favorite villains and figure out why you like them. And once you've pinned those down, find some more. Read books, watch movies, read comics. Comics are actually really awesome places to find great villains (Magneto 4 EVA!) as well as some truly terrible ones. Honestly, though, that's even better. I've always found you learn way more from figuring out why a sloppy mess didn't work than trying to pick apart a masterful job that did. Pick up the bad guys and dissect them, try to think about why the author/artist/director made the choices they did. And if you don't like my villainy spectrum, make your own. That's what I did! It's just a model, a way of organizing information so you can think about it more clearly. But the important part of this, the most important part of all writing, is thinking. If you can look at Hannibal Lecter and understand why a soft spoken, over educated sociopath who likes to eat people captivated America, then you've got all the foundation you need to create your own amazing villain.

So there's my villains post. I hope you enjoyed it! Please leave your comments if you think I missed something or if you have your own way of defining villains. I'm all about learning something new. Thanks again for reading!

- Rachel

PS: My next post is going to be about my experiment writing a series that had NO villain. It was... interesting. Let's just say I got a very hard lesson in exactly how much work a villain does in a series. Until next time! - R

How to write a prologue people won't skip

There are many different parts to a book - middles, endings, beginnings, climaxes, that train station scene at the end of the last Harry Potter - but no slice of the novel engenders quite as much derision and outright hatred as the prologue. Agents don't want to see it, readers skip it, editors cut it, yuck.

With so much open hate the pressure to just forget about a prologue can be intense, but just because prologues are tricky to pull off doesn't mean you can't have one. When used correctly, a prologue becomes an invaluable tool and an indispensable part of the story. The secret (as always) is that you have to know what you're doing. 

The Prologue's Purpose

As a writer, I never, ever, EVER want to write something readers can skip. A good novel is like a well tuned race car, every piece has its purpose within the whole. If a reader can skip a part of your book without consequence, then you have to ask yourself does that part really need to be there. But prologues are even more sensitive since they come at the very beginning. Mess up the middle of your novel and you'll get a bad review, mess up the opening and the reader will put the book down and forget about it forever. 

With stakes like these, it may seem safer to just skip the prologue and save yourself some trouble, but I say prologues can be a huge help to your novel so long as the writer understands that the purpose of a prologue is to improve the reader's enjoyment of the book. 

Your prologue is not your first chapter, it's not even the beginning. It's what comes before, the set up, the before dinner cocktail that eases you into a wonderful night. The most successful prologues fall into two types: prologues that exist to feed the reader information they otherwise couldn't get, and prologues that set the mood.

Past as Prologue

The easiest (and my personal favorite) prologue is one that serves as a vehicle to give the reader information they couldn't otherwise obtain within the structure of the story. For example, in my second Eli novel, The Spirit Rebellion, I open with a scene from Eli's past showing how he ran away from home and came to be the Shepherdess's favorite. 

This was perfect prologue material. It was something Eli himself would never talk about and, since it happened several years in the past, I couldn't show within the constraints of the novel's timeline without resorting to a flashback. More importantly, by showing this scene to the reader at the very beginning, I was able to foreshadow and set up several events that happened later in the book. I gave my reader information about what happened in the past in order to make the events of the present more powerful. In other words, I used my prologue to set up context, and then I used that context to twist the knife.

This sort of one-two set up is incredibly powerful, and you don't have to limit yourself to the past to make it work. In The Spirit War (Eli book 4), I show events that are happening in the present, but on the other side of the world. Again, I used the prologue to feed the reader information the characters couldn't know in order to create tension. Eli and company had no idea what was going on across the sea, but the reader knew exactly how big a shit storm was coming, and that knowledge created a ticking time bomb that twisted the tension in the novel to heights I couldn't have achieved otherwise.

By giving the reader inside information, I was able to drop subtle hints that the characters didn't notice, but the reader did. This let me create a "don't open that door!" situation to keep the reader on the edge of their seat without having to resort to gimmicks. Thanks to the prologue, the hooks were already there, buried deep in the reader, all I had to do was pull.

That said, I have to admit this sort of prologue works much better in subsequent novel than it does in a first book. The prologue for The Spirit Rebellion I mentioned earlier wouldn't have worked nearly as well if I hadn't been able to rely on my readers' built up curiosity about Eli's past to pull them in. This isn't to say you can't use the "show a hint of the past to put the present into context" prologue in a first book, but there are more hurdles. In a first novel, your readers aren't yet invested in your world or your people. They don't care about what happened in the past yet. Hell, they don't even know it is the past unless you tell them. You have to make them care right off the bat, and that can be a difficult trick to pull off, especially if your prologue jumps around between times and characters. 

As with everything in writing, it all comes down to execution. If you can pull it off, a good Past as Prologue can take your novel to new heights. By giving the reader inside information, you can tighten your story's tension to a cutting edge with very few words simply by leaning on and hinting at what the reader already knows. It's showing the maid hiding a body before you spend the novel with everyone else wondering whodunit while the murderer is pouring their tea and your reader is going out of their mind waiting for her to strike again. It's tension through revelation, and with the right treatment, it can be magic.

Setting the Stage

The second type of prologue is more nebulous, artistic, subjective, and, consequently, much easier to mess up. I'm talking about the atmosphere prologue which, rather than flat out revealing plot information, focuses instead on setting the stage and preparing the reader to enter your world. A good (and very famous) example of this kind of prologue would be the opening of Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities: 

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

In this prologue, Dickens sets his stage. Though the novel is in third person, the author here speaks directly to the reader, describing the context of the story and the political situation of the time. Simultaneously, the exalted language and sweeping statements gets us in the mood for an epic tale of revolution so that by the time the plot actually kicks in in the next chapter we are 100% on board.

Unfortunately, these type of prologues are often the ones agents/readers/editors are talking about when they hate on prologues. When done well, atmospheric prologues can be the most memorable part of a book, the lines people can still quote years later, like the first line of the Dickens quote above (which most of America can quote even though a very small percentage of those people have actually read the book).  When done badly, the atmospheric prologue becomes a long winded, boring, and disjointed from the story it's supposed to be introducing. When done very badly, it can become a cosmic info dump (more on that below).

This isn't to discourage you from trying an atmospheric prologue. As I said, some of the best writing comes from this sort of work. But because it is so easy to mess up, you have to be extremely careful and self critical when writing an artistic prologue, especially if you're trying to sell your novel for the first time. Trust me, nothing makes you come off as a pretentious, boring doofus like a badly done art prologue.

At its best, an artistic prologue is the beautiful beginning, the gorgeous credits at the opening of a movie where, by the time they finish, you just know you're going to love the film even though it hasn't yet begun. But the atmospheric prologue is an all or nothing deal with an extremely high bar. If you can't knock it out of the park, you're probably better off just starting on chapter 1.

What a Prologue Isn't
So those are the two large classifications of prologue, and though I'm sure you can find outliers if you look hard enough, the vast majority will fall into these two camps. That said, perhaps the most important part of writing a good prologue is understanding what makes a bad one. So, to make things a bit easier, here's a list of shit that doesn't fly in prologues:

1. The Cosmic Info Dump 
In the beginning there was darkness, and then Gaia the Earth Mother created the light and the waters and...zzz...

Ahh, the creation story opening. This little gem is almost exclusively a fantasy trope, but can you see it in other forms all through fiction. In Science Fiction, it can be the history of how people got into space, in mysteries, it might be how your detective got into business solving murders, whatever. The point is that this sort of industrial scale info dumping does not belong in a prologue.

The very worst thing you can do to a prologue is to treat it like a chute to shove setting information down a reader's throat. If background details are really important, they'll come up naturally in a story. If they aren't important enough to be woven into the novel, then why the hell would you put them in your prologue?

To be fair, there are plenty of big, successful authors who have done this kind of info dump prologue successfully. To this I say hooray for them, but just because someone else got away with it doesn't mean you get a free pass. No matter how beautifully you write it, dumping information on your reader in huge blocks is lazy writing plain and simple. Maybe you can get away with it, but for my money, if you're going to do all the work it takes to make an info dump like that palpable, why not just not be lazy in the first place? Background info belongs in the background, not at the front of the book.

2. The Action! Prologue
Have you ever picked up a book and opened the first page to find yourself dropped unceremoniously in the middle of the action? Right off the bat there's dramatic stuff going on you and all these characters are dying or doing seemingly very important things, but there's no context, so you flip back a page to make sure this is actually the beginning only to find out that yes, this is the start of the book, and you have no idea what's going on.

This is the Action! prologue, also called in medias res, where the author dumps their reader smack dab in the middle of the action in the hope they'll stick around to see what happens. This sort of thing is a very powerful tool that can be used to great effect. It's also just enough rope to hang yourself.

With so much emphasis being put on hooking your reader from paragraph one, the Action! prologue can seem like a good bet. You get to start right in with the big explosions for a flashy opening and then go back to cover all that boring, "why this stuff was blowing up" paperwork once chapter one begins. (Of course, if the why of the blowing up is too boring to start your book then you've got bigger problems than your prologue, but you get the point.) Even if your why is very cool, though, starting in the middle of the action can be problematic. Sure you get immediate tension and interest, but it's all just dazzle, smoke and mirrors with no context and, thus, no depth. And unless you dig that depth very quickly, your reader will quickly see through the ruse.

Unfortunately, digging in to build that depth brings its own problems. Full throttle starts tend to throw a lot of information at the reader very quickly, and that puts a lot of pressure on your audience to keep up, especially if you're asking them to remember stuff while you're setting off explosions in their face. Readers can handle pressure, but at the very beginning of a book with no context or investment, some might not see a reason to try. If you're lucky, they'll simply skip ahead to the actual beginning of the book. If you're not, they'll put the book down entirely.

This isn't to say an Action! beginning can't work. There are plenty of novels, especially in the thriller genre, that get right to the shooting and worry about the details later. However, just like driving a high performance sports car, writing a high octane opening takes a surprising amount of skill and practice. It also has to be right for the book in question. If your the rest of your novel doesn't eventually match the boom at the beginning, even the best written Action! opening can feel jarring and out of place.

Like everything in writing, it all comes down to execution. If you can pull off an Action! prologue, bully for you. But as a general rule of thumb, if your opening has your reader wondering if the publisher put chapter 5 at the the beginning by mistake, that's bad.

3. The Wha?
Have you ever read a book where the opening just seemed to make no sense at all. Like, there's action taking place, and it's clearly important, but you have no idea why or what's going on? Maybe the prologue opens with a woman standing on a hill and then she opens a box of sand and pours it to the wind, after which we jump to a child in England during the Blitz eating a stolen ice cream cone while the narration waxes poetic on the ephemeral nature of life. Through it all, there's the implication that this that this is all actually very deep and you should be moved, but you're not, because just don't know enough yet to care.

This is what I call the Wha? opening, because by the time you've reached the end, that's all you can say. Wha? In theory, a Wha? opening is supposed to be confusing, an artistic mystery to draw the reader in while also planting a question in the reader's mind that the novel itself will then proceed to ruminate on. These sort of openings are mostly found in literary novels and are part of why I have a hard time taking lit fic seriously. Even the best written ones can't help coming off as pretentious.

I will freely admit to some bias here. The Wha? prologue is my absolute least favorite way to open a book. I get how it's supposed to work, I've even read some that were quite lovely, but I have never, ever seen one of these that actually helped the novel it was attached to.

For me, these are the ultimate skippable prologues. Even in the hands of a master, it's almost impossible to make these sort of beginnings meaningful because meaning requires context and the Wha? opening lacks context by its very definition. Actually, I've found these kind of openings much more enjoyable after I've already read the book, and while I'll admit that has its own merits, do you really want to open your novel with something that doesn't get good until the end of the story?

As with all the "bad" prologues I've mentioned, I'm sure there are exceptions out there. As always, you are the only one who can decide whether or not this kind of prologue works for your novel. That said, however, I think prologues like these--the giant info dumps, the jarring, no context action, and especially the nonsensical disconnected arty openings--are the type of extremely hard to pull off, usually terrible openings that give all prologues a bad name, and I would think very, very carefully before putting any of them in one of my novels.

What a Good Prologue Can Be

When setting out to write a prologue, or anything really, the most important thing to remember is your audience. Your reader is your partner, the one you must entertain. As such, they can be your best friends and greatest champions, climbing mountains just to hear the end of your story. Readers are the ones who make your story come alive and support your career, but before any of that can happen, you have to earn their trust.

Readers picking up a new series for the first time (or agents looking at a new novel in the slush) owe you nothing. They will not jump through hoops for you, and they certainly won't extend you the benefit of the doubt. It is your job as the writer to entertain them, to make them love you. As with all romances, first impressions are vital. You have to be very, very careful to start on your absolute best foot if you want them to stick around. This is why getting your prologue right, especially on a first book, is so important. It's your opening shot, maybe your only shot, and if you flub it, your book may be done before it even begins. But if you nail it, a good prologue can hook your reader even better than a fantastic first line, because a good prologue hints at everything a novel can be, and if you can sell the reader on that, you've got them right where you want them.

At its very best, the prologue is the perfect augment for the story it begins. It is the icing that takes a cake from delicious to gourmet, the overture that deftly plucks you out of the real world and prepares you to fully appreciate the symphony to come. A prologue should never exist merely to hold information you want the reader to know but couldn't be bothered to work into the main story, nor should it be treated as an optional extra for those readers who want a little more. Like every part of your book, a good prologue must be necessary, a vital piece of the whole. It should be unskippable, a joy to read all on its own, and if that sounds hard, it's because it is.

Remember, the reason so many people hate prologues is because most of them are bad. Even good writers fall victim to the bad prologue because prologues are really freaking hard to pull off. It's like a gun: incredibly powerful, but it can shoot you in the foot if you don't treat it with proper respect.

I hope this post helps you prologue responsibly. Maybe if we all work together we can end the prologue's exile to the butt of bad writing jokes and restore it to its proper place of honor among the author's tools. Or at least keep agents from wincing when they see the word "Prologue" at the top of the page. Baby steps, people, baby steps.

I hope you enjoyed the post! Do you have a prologue in your novel? Has it given you problems? Let me know in the comments!

As always, thanks for reading, and if you enjoyed this post, I hope you'll check out my new book on writing, 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love. It's less than a dollar, so give it a try!

Thanks again, I couldn't do this without y'all!

<3s and="and" p="p" ponies="ponies">Rachel

Writing Wednesday: "He never wasted a single failure"

I got dragons to write, so this one's going to be short and sweet :)

Writing Wednesday: "He never wasted a single failure."

So as you guys might know, I'm a pretty big anime nerd, and my current show of obsession is Food Wars (aka Shokugeki no Soma)!

WHY IS THERE NOT MORE OF THIS RIGHT NOW?!

This show is SO GOOD, YOU GUYS!

On the surface, it appears to be just another goofy shonen school fighting anime that picked cooking and rampant nudity as its hooks to stand out in a crowded market. I actually ignored it for several months because I thought it was all gimmick, but after one episode, I realized I was epically wrong. Food Wars is amazing! Not only is it a perfectly executed fighting anime with some of the best tension I've ever seen (trust me, give this thing three episodes and you will be obsessively binge watching anime characters cook rice just like the rest of us) and awesome cooking techniques that are based in reality, the writing is really freaking good.

This is noteworthy in and of itself. I'm a pretty big anime fan, but even I can admit that story, especially on the episode level, is sometimes a weak point in the genre. This goes double for a weird series like this that has so much else going on, but so far Food Wars seems incapable of screwing up. The tension mechanics at work so perfect it hurts and the large cast is both amazingly well drawn and expertly handled so no one gets lost. These would all be (and are) fantastic reasons to watch the show, but what really knocked my socks off was the dialogue writing. Even in translation, there are several lines that made me green with envy, but my stand out favorite of the first season was

"He never wasted a single failure."

Tension

Ok, so I was going to post this at Orbit, but after much hemming and hawing, I decided it was too nuts and bolts of writing oriented. I'm going to write something a little more reader oriented for Orbit later, but for now, have a post about developing tension. I hope someone finds it helpful, or at least entertaining! - R

Have you ever read a book so quickly you had trouble remembering everything that happened? I'm not talking about rushing through books for school (though we've all been there), I'm talking about turning pages like a desperate animal because you simply CAN NOT WAIT to get to the end and see how it all turns out. (I read the Harry Potter this way, attacking anyone who came near me. Limbs might have been lost, I couldn't tell you. I was reading.) Now, have you ever wondered what the author did to make you so desperate to get to the end?

Well, probably not. You were reading, after all. But let me ask you a second question: have you ever been reading a book and liking it ok, and then suddenly you finish a chapter, put the book down, and feel absolutely no urge to pick it up again? Like, it wasn't a bad book, you were just... done, even though the book wasn't.

At their simplest level, these phenomena are two manifestations of the same book construction principle: Tension, one done right, one done not-so-right. I'll let you guess which is which.

Tension is one of those things critics and agents and editors and book reviewers and pretty much anyone who reads critically is always commenting on.  It's the tug of the novel, the gravity that pulls the reader toward the end. It's the force that makes you turn a page, and it's every bit as important to good fiction as plot and character. (Don't believe me? Try reading a novel that has no tension and see how far you get.) But while it's easy to talk about tension like it's some mystical force, it's not very helpful to someone looking to actually put tension into their work. As someone who struggled a lot with tension as I learned how to write a novel, I offer you the simple writer's definition I finally came up with for myself.

Tension is making the reader ask a question, and then not answering it.

At least, not immediately. To give an example, let me turn back to that old stand by, Harry Potter. Why HP? Well, not only is it one of those few things I can expect everyone to have read, but also because Rowling is the freaking ninja master of tension. In the very first paragraph of Sorcerer's Stone , JKR spends her first sentence talking about how the Dursley's are perfectly normal. The second sentence reiterates this, adding that, of course, these are the very last people you'd ever expect to be involved in something magical.

And right there, the tension's locked in. Already you're asking the question: what magical doom is going to befall these stringently normal people? JKR spins this answer out over the course of a chapter, by which point more questions have been posed and you can't help it, you have to keep reading to learn those answers. Some hooks are big, some are small, some are long term, some are short, but they all add their pull. Before you know it midnight has come and passed you're still up, snarling at anyone who dares try to pry that book from your clenched fingers. You, dear reader, are hooked.

Speaking of hooked, the above example could also be called a hook, which is another thing critical readers, especially agents, are always going on about. But all of that violent language - hooking a reader, grabbing a reader, pulling a reader in, has to do with tension. They all force questions: Will she get out alive? Where is her husband? How did that wizard end up in evaporating most of central park? Can a zombie find love?

Of course, part of a satisfying read is having all your questions answered eventually. Dangling threads make for pissed off readers. But, and here's the most important thing I've learned about tension, you have to be very, very careful doling out your answers. If questions are the engines that drive a reader forward, answers are the destination. Once all pertinent questions are answered in a book, the tension is gone.

Let's jump back to paragraph 2 and the book you put down. For sake of argument we'll assume you didn't put it down for obvious reasons (characters were too stupid to live, something horrible happens that makes you throw the book across the room, the story completely jumped the shark, etc). So we have a decent book, maybe even a book you were enjoying, which you just stopped reading and have no real urge to start again. Why? What made you stop? All other things in the book being decent, I will bet you money that it was because the tension fizzled.

Several years ago this happened to me with a romance novel. Things were rolling along initially - broody hero, snappy heroine, money problems in high society, all good and going along fine. And then, a little over half way through, the couple confessed their love for each other and got married.

I put the book down shortly after. Now, I had another five chapters at least of the couple solving the mystery of whatever, but as you see, I didn't care. At least not enough to keep going.

In Romance, the tension question is always "will they get together?" Once this question and all its requisite "How? Where? Why? Is there sex?" facets are answered, that's it. Unless the framing plot is AMAZINGLY compelling and has plenty of tension of its own, once the couple is happily together, the question is answered and the tension is over. Most of the time, that also means the story is over, even if the writer's not done writing.

All that said, though, the final point I'd like to make is that there's no greater tension builder than reader investment. You can hook people with questions all day long, but unless you give the reader a reason to care about the characters and world you're trying to hook them into, they're not going to stay. Initial curiosity will get someone to turn the first page, but not the second. However, if you can create a character the reader cares deeply about, if you can force them to worry for that character, to make them ask "what's going to happen?" and really mean it on a deep, emotional level, you've achieved the highest pinnacle of fiction. But the only way to get to this lofty peak is good tension right from the beginning.

And that's what I've learned about tension so far. Any advice you see here is purely my own and should, as with any single opinion, be taken with a grain of salt. I hope you found it helpful, or at least interesting. I'm always interested in how other people approach tension, or any part of story telling, so if you have a comment, please chime in. I'm all ears (well, all eyeballs, since this is the internet).