THE CRAFT OF WRITING: Reeling in your Reader

By Anne Hamilton

Every second about 11 million bits of information scrabble for your brain’s attention. And every second, your brain filters out all but a handful of them as irrelevant to the present moment. 

Neuroscientists think we choose out of this mind-blowing datastream according to our moment-by-moment judgment of whether the information pertains to survival or not. 

So, they’ve wondered, what makes us turn off all the switches and curl up with a good novel? If the brain devotes so much effort to personal survival, why on earth does it risk throwing all its work away by encouraging us in the dangerous pastime of reading fiction? 

Because it’s beneficial, of course. Andrea addressed some of the issues in Why Bother? And Iola addressed still others in On Christian Romance. 

I’m going to look at other factors. As neuroscientists have analysed brain function while a subject is reading, they’ve discovered the brain is hardwired for story. When we read about fictional events, neural pathways turn on in our brain — the same neural pathways as those which would indicate we are actually experiencing the event.

In other words, fiction teaches us how to navigate through a new experience by allowing our brains to thrust us in a virtual ‘simulation’. Now, generally speaking, we know this. We know that a good story makes us feel the emotions of the protagonist, walk in their shoes, have empathy for people we’d otherwise avoid. 

It also helps us survive. Maybe the storytelling of ancient man was all about raw survival out in a brutal world, but the social world today is no less brutal. Story puts us into all sorts of different social situations where the main character survives, giving us the hope that we too can make it through without gaffe or embarrassment. In fact, a good story gives us clues on just how to do this. 

Ahh, good story. That’s the key. Lisa Cron’s book Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence emphasises that the brain responds positively to a sense of urgency in story (no matter how badly it’s told) and switches off if the prose seems to be meandering and pointless (no matter how beautiful and inviting the style is.) 

Yep, when the story starts, it’s all about narrative hook. I’m thumping my favourite theme yet again. Grab the reader’s attention and hold it. 

Lisa Cron has some excellent questions to ask yourself about your opening paragraph. Here are just four of them but they are sufficient to get you going. 

(1) Do we know whose story it is? If we can’t see the world through the protagonist’s eyes from the start, then we’re missing more than the hook — we’re missing the whole boat. 

(2) Is something happening? Don’t set the scene for later conflict. Jump into the conflict. 

(3) Is something at stake? And does the reader have clues as to what it is? 

(4) Is there a sense that ‘not all is as it seems’? 

I highly recommend the book and going back to your narrative hook (now that you’ve worked on it for the last few weeks) and seeing how it shapes up in the light of your answers above. 

It’s not just about the narrative hook, it’s about the kind of bait you’re using.

Anne Hamilton is the author of the award-winning children’s fantasy, Many-Coloured Realm. She’s just finished reading Wired for Story and looking at her next children’s fantasy with critical eyes, wondering just how well the opening paragraph works, after all.

THE CRAFT OF WRITING: Bait and switch (plus a book giveaway)

by Anne Hamilton 

The ads are everywhere: cut down on 1 kg of belly fat each week with this 1 weird diet tip. 

It sounds too good to be true. And it is. It’s a con. A lure to pull you into the world of health supplements and diet foods, vitamin regimes and alternative weight loss programmes. Now personally I have nothing against any of those things. However, I object to the advertising methodology: bait the customer with a simple tantalising message and, once you’ve got them hooked, switch the pitch.

That said, in the world of writing, there’s a lot to be said for the old switcheroo. Last week we looked at the ‘Narrative Hook’ and two of its styles—the puzzle and the hint.

This time we’ll look at two more styles which offer the prospect of presenting the reader with a tempting enough morsel to draw them into your book. They’re my two favourites: atmosphere and interruption. I like them both so much, I usually combine them. 

‘Murder?’ Holly whispered. She frowned, turning aside to look out of the bus window at the sun-scorched fields and the blurring heat haze on the distant mountains. The roadside went up and down but the sleepy drone of the bus’ engine remained undisturbed by each bump and jolt. 

‘It’s true,’ Reece insisted. ‘That’s what she said she saw.’ He lowered his voice. ‘By midnight tonight, he’s going to be arrested for murder. Our murder.’ 

This was the opening of my debut novel Merlin’s Wood, published ten years ago today. It was the heyday of ‘bait and switch’—the truly explosive, gruesome, intriguing or spectacular opening paragraph that often seemed unrelated to the rest of the book. I sometimes felt someone other than the author had written those spell-binders.

It was kind of like a MacGyver effect—if ever you watched the show, you might been sucked in, as I often was, by the thrilling opening scene—which would then turn out to have nothing whatsoever to do with the episode. Terry Nation, famous for introducing the Daleks in Dr Who and developing Blake’s 7 moved to Hollywood and made an excellent living writing those MacGyver hooks. 

I’d resisted the idea of a narrative hook for a long time, lulled into a false sense of security by beta-readers who liked a slow build-up of tension. Finally, after a long series of rejections, I decided to bite the bullet on the issue and see what happened. With cold calculation, I thought of the most dramatic word I could to start a children’s novel. Let’s try, hmmm… murder… 

The story was picked up the very next time I sent the manuscript out. The publisher even told me right up front it was the first fantasy he’d ever read. But he couldn’t put it down because he was so intrigued by the opening. From that moment, I was sold on the narrative hook.

Yet, as I’ve looked across my shelves and plucked dozens of Christian novels down to find examples, I’ve seriously struggled to find any.

Perhaps it’s time for us to be more intentional about them. There’s a good reason why it’s used—because they work so well. 

In the meantime, if you know of any examples of the Interruption or Atmosphere styles of narrative hook, I’d love to read of them. 

And a reminder: over at Omega Writers, this month’s writing challenge is to craft your manuscript’s opening paragraph – either fiction or non-fiction – so it has a nifty narrative hook. 

Deadline for entries is 20 December 2013. Entry is free for members of Omega Writers and $5 for non-members. A cash prize of $25 plus 3 new books from Light the Dark and a cool award for your CV awaits the winner. 

Send your entries to registrarATwordswithwingsDOTnet 

Anne Hamilton is the current President of Omega Writers, a support group for faith-based writers across Australasia. Today she’s celebrating the tenth anniversary of the publication of her first book, Merlin’s Wood. If you’d like to win a copy of this historic momento, we’ll draw a few winners from those who comment a week from today.

Print book giveaway, 3 winners: 1 Australian reader, 1 New Zealand reader, and 1 international reader. 

THE CRAFT OF WRITING: Are you a fisherman or a landscape artist?

By Anne Hamilton

Every nine seconds, the celebrations begin: fireworks go off, the party poppers explode, the streamers fly skyward and yet another email campaign begins as another book is launched onto an unsuspecting world! 

Yes! Every nine seconds! Maybe significantly less by now. The stats I found to figure this out are a few years out of date. Even global publishers with their multi-million dollar budgets are finding it hard to get any cut-through. 

While selling books is tougher than ever and many bookstores are closing down, it’s not necessarily true people are reading less. There are more books than ever before being produced annually. It’s estimated over half the books available in the USA alone today are effectively self-published through some avenue such as CreateSpace or Smashwords or Lulu. 

However consumers are getting more savvy. The reputation of Smashwords is falling dramatically as readers find it hard to find the cherries amongst the slush. Many readers are growing increasingly like the commissioning editors at big companies who discard a manuscript before the end of the first paragraph: if you don’t have a hook to engage them by that time, your chance of being picked up is gone.

Of course, if you’ve got JK Rowling’s reputation, you don’t need to worry at all about your opening paragraph. But until you reach that mega-stellar status (or if you decide to follow Rowling’s lead and use a pseudonym such as ‘Robert Galbraith’), you might want to consider a ‘narrative hook’ to reel your reader into the following chapter. 

Two styles are illustrated here: the puzzle and the hint. Often these overlap as in the following examples where an intriguing flavour immediately pulls the reader beyond the first sentence: 

It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea. 

‘Mortal Engines’, Philip Reeve 

Prince Kaspar Kandinsky first came to the Savoy Hotel in a basket.

‘Kaspar’, Michael Morpurgo 

Ever since Jack’s funeral, Sandra had been covered in glass.

‘Knitting’, Anne Bartlett 

Expect the worst! Phil re-read the text twice. Oliver must be exaggerating. It can’t be that bad.

‘Motive Games’, L.D. Taylor 

Heidi Jordan preferred to make resolutions at the start of each new month.

‘Heidi’s October’, Penelope McCowen

When my workday is over, and I have closed my notebook, hidden my pen, and sawed holes in my rented canoe so that it cannot be found, I often like to spend the evening in conversation with my few surviving friends. 

‘A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Carnivorous Carnival’, Lemony Snicket 

In general, these are not new examples from recent books. Beginning a story with a description of the landscape around the protagonist went out about a century ago. If you’ve got a tendency to be a landscape artist in that opening paragraph of your writing, it’s time to change professions. Become a fisherman. 

If you know any great hooks of the mystery or hint type, I’d love you to share them. Old or new, it doesn’t matter. (But don’t be tempted to offer that famous Kingsley Amis one. If you know it, you’ll know why. This is a G-rated blog.) 

Over at Omega Writers, this month’s writing challenge is to craft your manuscript’s opening paragraph – either fiction or non-fiction – so it has a nifty narrative hook. 

Deadline for entries is 20 December 2013. Entry is free for members of Omega Writers and $5 for non-members. A cash prize of $25 plus 3 new books from Light the Dark and a cool award for your CV awaits the winner. 

Send your entries to registrar (at) wordswithwings (dot) net 

Anne Hamilton is the current President of Omega Writers, a support group for faith-based writers across Australasia. She is an award-winning author and the Australian sub-editor of the popular devotional, The Word for Today.