Category: Writing tips

The second most important sentence in your book

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Copywriting (my day job) will never be as rewarding as fiction writing, but they share some similarities in craft. For example, the headline.

“Headline” doesn’t just refer to the large type on the front of a newspaper; it can mean the main line of text on any ad, billboard, webpage, or whatever. I probably spend more time writing headlines than anything else, mainly because they’re difficult. I can easily write a paragraph in fifteen minutes, but I might take hours to find the right headline for one ad. Why?

Lacking a striking image, the headline is the most important part of the ad. It must capture the attention of the audience and compel them to read the rest of the ad. It’s not enough to be well-written. Good writing by itself is not compelling. The same applies to the first sentence of your book.*

The first sentence of your book is the make-or-break moment for many readers, when they choose to keep reading, or to put it down forever.

So, a few pointers:

  • If you haven’t spent more time on your first sentence than on any other sentence in your book, you’re doing it wrong.
  • Scenic description, no matter how poetic, isn’t compelling.
  • Fight or chase scenes, no matter how action-packed, aren’t compelling if you don’t know anything about the characters involved.
  • What is compelling? It’s hard to put a finger on it, but it is usually weird, surprising, insightful, contradictory, or witty.

Examples!

In the fading afternoon light, the helicopter skimmed low along the coast, following the line where the dense jungle met the beach.

               –The Lost World, Michael Crichton

She seemed to float above the ghostly evening mist like a menacing beast rising from the primeval ooze.

               –Sahara, Clive Cussler

Eragon knelt in a bed of trampled reed grass and scanned the tracks with a practiced eye.

               –Eragon, Christopher Paolini

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

                –Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

Those all sound quite nice. But compare them to the following:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

               –Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

All my life, I’ve wanted to go to Earth.

               –Podkayne of Mars, Robert A. Heinlein

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

               –The Go Between, L.P. Hartley

This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

               -William Goldman on The Princess Bride, by S. Morgenstern.

There was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

               –The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis

Which ones make you want to keep reading? How does your first sentence measure up?

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*I call the first sentence in a book the second most important sentence because in keeping with the philosophy that we owe our readers satisfactory closure, the last sentence of the book is actually the most important. But I digress.

Everything you need to know about writing a query 2

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PART TWO: Hook Examples

As promised, here are some hook examples I wrote based on four of my favorite books. I made them as short as possible – one or two sentences – because expanding from there is the easy part.

Death himself narrates the story of a foster child in Nazi Germany who steals books from bonfires.

For The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. Actually, she only stole a book from a bonfire once, but you don’t need to be exact in the hook. Take some poetic license. The expanded version could talk about the Jewish fist fighter hiding in the basement, but it is still perfectly intriguing without.

A servant searching for a quiet lifestyle is relieved when he lands a position under a man whose boring habits have not changed in decades – but is shocked to find himself dragged on a wild adventure when his master makes an offhand wager that he can travel around the world in only eighty days.

For Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne. This one is a little longer, but still fairly simple. I leave out the fact that this master is also being pursued by a detective who thinks he robbed the Bank of England. There’s enough charm just in the first twenty pages to arouse curiosity.

A bookbinder who can make stories come alive by reading them aloud is pursued by the villain from a fantasy novel.

For Inkheart by Cornelia Funke. This story is much more complicated than Book Thief or 80 Days, but it still boils down to one sentence nicely – so long as I leave out what the villain is after, that the bookbinder’s wife disappeared into the same book the villain sprang out of, and that the main character really isn’t the bookbinder at all, but his daughter. None of that is important in the hook.

Charles Darnay is accused of crimes against the Republic when he returns to revolutionary France to save a friend from the guillotine. An alcoholic genius in love with Darnay’s wife may be the only person who can save him from a death sentence.

For A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I would be remiss if I didn’t pick at least one truly complicated story, just to prove it could be done. This one actually went to two sentences, and required a name! We can leave out how Darnay’s father-in-law was rescued from the Bastille, how Darnay escaped death once already when he was accused of being a French spy, how Darnay came to know said alcoholic genius, why the genius is the only one who can save him, and whether or not he succeeds or even tries.

Overall, notice that I tend to use descriptors instead of character names, and I keep the wording simple and fluff-free. No gimmicks. Just story.

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Now you’ve got the hook part down – here’s what else you’ll need in a query letter.

Everything you need to know about writing a query

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PART ONE: THE HOOK

A hook, a.k.a. elevator pitch or logline, is 2-3 sentences explaining what your book is about. It’s the heart of a query letter, the thing that gets the agent to request pages. It is also the second hardest thing you will write (next to your synopsis, which we’ll discuss later). But here are some tips that made it easier for me.

The Technical Stuff

Write in third person, present tense. Anything else will get you in trouble. Even if your book is in first person, past (“I did this, I went there”), write the hook in third, present (“He does this, he goes here”).

Keep it short. The entire letter should fit on one page in Times New Roman, 12pt. That means the hook is one or two short paragraphs.

State facts, not opinions. No fluff phrases like “thrilling page-turner,” “harrowing adventure,” “heart-wrenching tragedy” or any of the things you want reviewers to say after you’re published. That’s bragging. Don’t include your book’s theme (e.g. “about trying to find hope amidst despair,” “about love conquering against all odds”). That’s telling, not showing, remember?

 

How You’ll Really Get it Done

Start with one sentence. I took this advice from Nathan Bransford. It’s painful, but it works. Write in one sentence, as short as possible, what your book is about. Then, expand in one or two more sentences, including whatever makes your story different from everyone else’s.

Write what it seems to be about, not what it’s really about. If your story seems too complicated to narrow down to a hook, this tip is your magic key. I struggled with the same thing for years. In one book I had two storylines and at least five major characters, three of whom had back story to be explained before any of it made sense. In 2-3 sentences? Impossible. So I turned my thinking around. Yeah, when all is revealed, it’s really a complex political chess game involving secret organizations and entire worlds, but what it seems to be about, what happens in the first chapter – is a bunch of kids stranded in the wilderness. So I went with that. And it worked.

You’ll know when you’ve found The One. I read this somewhere and then experienced it myself, so I swear by it now. I sent out multiple versions of a query letter thinking each version was alright, but I never got page requests back. That was my problem; it was decent, okay. But I wasn’t in love with it. Then when I finally hit upon The One, I felt it, deep down – and I got page requests days or even hours after submitting it. So learn from my mistakes, keep rewriting your hook and don’t submit a query until you know. And none of this “I think I know.” You’ll know.

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Still confused? Read some exciting hook examples!

What fiction genre sells the best?

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book store display

Image by Kriss

You’re going to be smart. Strategic. You’re going to look at the books readers are going crazy over right now and write one just like them – but better – and copies will sell like hotcakes because you’re giving the people what they want.

As you’ve probably figured out, it doesn’t work like that. You can look at the market now and see that Twilight* is popular and decide to write a novel about the forbidden romance between a vampire/werewolf hybrid and a dog lover who runs a blood bank. It’s going to be huge! The problem? It’s going to take you a few years to write and edit the book, another couple of years to find a literary agent to represent you, another couple of years for your agent to find a publisher willing to take a chance on you, and another year before it sees print. Next thing you know, a decade has gone by and paranormal romance is so blasé now. Steampunk zombies are the new hot topic.

Don’t write for the market; write for yourself. This sounds narcissistic at first, but when you really think about it, it’s quite the opposite. If you are writing for the market, what’s your motivation? You want to sell a million copies, become rich and famous, and be interviewed on Regis and Kelly. But if you write for yourself it’s because there’s a story you need to tell. You want to write the kind of book you’d enjoy reading, and you want to share a bit of your soul with the rest of the world.

Now this soul bit you create may or may not be a huge commercial bestseller. It may or may not sell at all. But it will be honest, and it will be a good story, and because of that, it will be more likely to succeed than any produced-for-the-market book would ever be. When you like your own story, you put more tender loving care into it. You take the time to get it right, and your readers can tell.

With that being said, you must also be conscious of your responsibility to your audience. Writing talent is a privilege, having your work read by others is an honor, and in exchange for these things you owe honesty, quality and completeness. So write from the gut, rewrite like a critic, and be sure to tie up all your loose ends.

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*If you’re curious, I’m team TARDIS.

book store window

Should you be writing a different genre?

Lemony Snicket: four victories and one epic fail

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A Series of Unfortunate Events. Even the title is enough to spark interest for its sheer cleverness. First, because of the play on the word “series,” and second, because “unfortunate events” is simultaneously charming and intriguing – a word which here means “makes you long to pick it up and peruse its pages.”

And Lemony Snicket’s thirteen-volume series does not disappoint. Except in one important respect.

Mr. Snicket, as stated, does not lack charm. His whimsical wit is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll and Douglas Adams, but with melancholy overtones. A chapter titled “Déjà vu” opens with a description of the stated phenomenon. We read to the end of the page, turn that page – and find ourselves reading the same page again. And this is only one in a long list of amusing devices.

Mr. Snicket uses reverse psychology to make his writing irresistible. He opens Chapter One of Book the First with:

“If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.”

Mr. Snicket does not forget that his narrator is also a character. From starting each volume with a mysterious dedication to “Beatrice,” to slipping in snippets of his own sad story at intervals, to confiding in his audience that he often visits bookstores so he can find copies of his books and put them on the highest shelves where they won’t be found, Mr. Snicket carefully paints a picture of his baffling, utterly depressed self.

Mr. Snicket keeps us interested by feeding us tidbits of information that we know are important. We begin to desperately wonder what happened  to Beatrice, whether or not the Baudelaire parents are actually dead, and what in the world is in the sugar bowl. We devour each chapter, bookmarking every few pages – everywhere we see a clue. As we near The End, the mysteries are piling up, we are holding our breaths, we—

And this is where Mr. Snicket fails us.

Granted, he warned us there would be no happy ending. Granted, he did everything he could to persuade us not to read on. But we still expected different. We expected the ending to be happy after all because no matter how vehemently the author denied it in every printed line, we could read the truth printed on the white spaces in between. Or so we thought. But even if we took his words at face value, we at least expected answers. Every problem promises a solution, remember? Every mystery promises an explanation.

But all we are left with at the end are broken promises and a sugar bowl that will remain eternally shut.

And hours of amusement. Yes, even though I am grievously disappointed in the ending, I would still highly recommend the series. Such is the dark art of Lemony Snicket.