Transcription
After reading hundreds of fantasy novels, I've realized there are 15 main techniques that great fantasy authors use to hook you in their opening pages. I've stolen these techniques and used them in my own published novels, and it's led to reviews like this one Matt wrote for The Thunder Heist. "Right from the beginning, it is high-paced and engaging from start to finish, which makes it extremely hard to put down."
Today, I'm going to break down these 15 hook frameworks so that you can write an opening that immediately captures your readers and gets them invested in your characters and your world. So, let's start with the five character hooks.
First of all, you have sympathy. So, with this hook, your character has been unjustly punished by the world and they're in some kind of bad situation. As a result, we feel like they're an underdog. We feel like they're deserving of our kind of care in many ways. And a great example of this is Harry Potter, right? He grows up in an abusive household. He's an orphan. He doesn't have any parents to love him. The Dersley family, they're just absolutely horrible and mean to him all the time. As a result, we feel a tremendous amount of sympathy to him in those early few chapters. And then when he finally starts getting some wins later on in the story, like going to Hogwarts, becoming friends with Ron and Hermione, and joining the Quidditch team, we celebrate those wins so much more because of how sympathetic we felt to him at the very start of the story.
Another great example is Sandang Glocker from The Blade Itself by Joe Abocrombie. So Sand Dan Glocker used to be a champion swordsman. But when we first meet him in the story, he's a who experiences horrible pain just trying to climb up a set of stairs. And the way that Abocrompie writes about that pain is done so viscerally that when he finally gets to the top of the stairs, you're just so on his side and you're feeling so sorry for this poor guy. Then when he goes into a room and begins torturing someone because he's an inquisitor, you actually weirdly feel on his side even though he's doing horrible things. And it's all because Joe first hooked us with sympathy towards this character.
The next hook is skill. So this is basically when you show your character being really proficient or the master of their craft. It could be a magical skill. It could even be like a physical skill. Maybe there's some really talented blacksmiths or swordsmen or something else like that. And they could also even be in the pursuit of mastery as well. They don't necessarily have to be perfect at their craft. They just have to be really competent at a skill that we find interesting to follow along with. And that's really the essence of this hook. It is so exciting to watch someone being competent at something. There's kind of a vicarious thrill that comes from it, right? And a great example of this is Gavin Guile in the Black Prism. So Gavin is the most powerful magic user at the start of this series. And in this world, the magicians can sort of create these hard light structures from different colors in order to create various devices, objects, weapons, etc. And early on in the story, we see Gavin using this power to create this skimmer device, which is a kind of boat that almost flies across the waves of the sea of this world. And it is so vicariously exciting to watch him push the magic into a direction that has never been done before and to just come up with this really creative solution for his magical powers.
The third character hook is personality. So this is where your character has some kind of unique voice. Maybe they have a really cutting wit. They're really funny to read or to hear their dialogue or even just to see how they react to things. Maybe they even have a very special way of processing the world around them that's different from how most other characters in this situation would do it. A fantastic example is Lach Lamora in the Lies of Lamora. There's this great description in the prologue that accurately conveys this quite well. And it's interesting because this description actually comes before we physically meet Lach. So, it kind of sets him up in our mind as someone who is pretty special um and has a very distinctive personality. "I've got kids that enjoy stealing. I've got kids that don't think about stealing. one way or the other. And I've got kids that just tolerate stealing because they know they've got nothing else to do. But nobody, and I mean nobody, has ever been hungry for it like this boy. If he had a bloody gash across his throat and a physique was trying to sew it up, Lamora would steal the needle and thread and die laughing." He steals too much. So, this is a pretty distinctive uh introduction of Loach's personality. It shows how obsessive he is about stealing and thieving. shows how kind of integrated into his personality it is. The fact that like even if he was getting sewn up, he would steal the needle and thread and die laughing. So, I think this is a brilliant description for immediately hooking us on Lock's personality here.
The next character based hook is progression. So, this is where you basically promise that your character is going to get better over the course of the story. Now, this tends to fall into two different categories. The first one is moral progression, where your character goes from being a bad person or from having some kind of moral failing or deficiency. It could be something like they're a coward at the start of the story and you're setting up a promise that they will become brave and competent over the course of the narrative. Or it could be skill progression, which is where your character, you know, is not a very talented magician or martial artist or swordsman or whatever it is at the start of the story, but you set up the promise that they are going to become better and they're going to level up in this skill over the course of the narrative. And of course, you can combine these and plenty of stories do that really effectively. I would say in many ways the promise of progression using progression as a hook is maybe one of the most dominant or most common uh hooks we see in many fantasy novels out there and you can probably think of tons of examples from the stories that you have read. Some examples I love uh this actually doesn't come from a fantasy novel but I think it does it really nicely is Po in Kung Fu Panda. At the start of this story, he is this chubby, unfit, unskilled panda who doesn't know anything about martial arts. But when he accidentally becomes appointed as the dragon warrior, he is going to have to learn martial arts and he's going to become a skilled fighter over the course of his training with the Furious 5 and Master Shifue. And another great example is Lynden in Cradle by Will White. So, at the start of the story, Lyndon is considered to be this powerless unsold who is not even really given permission to learn the magic of his clan. But when he is confronted with the vision of this dread god that's going to come in a few years and destroy his valley and destroy his village, he realizes that he must gain competence as a sorcerer if he is to defend his home from this great threat.
And then character hook number five, worthy cause. So, this is where your character is struggling and trying to seek this hard-to-reach ideal. Maybe there's a lot of negative pressure from society and her friends and her family that are resisting her attempt to seek this ideal. And what you should be knowing with this one is that the more opposition you can give against the character's worthy cause, the better the hook is going to feel and the more compelling it is and the more suspense and stakes you're going to experience as a reader throughout the story. To give you some examples of this character hook in action, we've got In Legends and Lattes by Travis Bulry. Uh Viv, who is a barbarian orc adventurer, gives up on her adventuring life to create the first coffee shop in this little medieval village. And she faces a lot of opposition and skepticism from the town's people towards this. But we get this sense that this is a very passionate cause for her. and it feels like a very worthy course for her to try to build this thing and to grow that sense of community around this very first coffee shop in this fantasy setting. Another example, maybe on a slightly different scale, is Kelsia in Misborn the Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. Kelsia is trying to overthrow this evil empire that has ruled for a thousand years. and he faces a lot of opposition and a lot of resistance from the other people in the world around him because that's all they've ever known and they don't think it's possible to overthrow this empire and restore peace to the world.
And of course, you can actually mix and match all of these character hooks together. And you can of course mix these character hooks with the plot hooks and the worldbuing hooks I'm about to share later on. In many cases, it actually makes your story feel far stronger when you start to mix these things. So, for example, if we look at Loach Lamora, he is someone who has a very rough upbringing as an orphan. So, that gives us hook number one, sympathy. But he's also a very talented thief who comes up with all these clever rues and cons to steal things from other people. And it's really fun to watch him work like this. So, that's hook number two, skill. He also has this very cheeky, witty, charming, and quite irreverent voice. There's a lot of funny dialogue from him. a lot of great banter between him and the other members of his thieving crew throughout the story. So that's hook number three personality and he is also uh in the backstory sections of the lies of Lamora because it sort of goes between present time frames and then when Loach was a child kind of growing up and being an apprentice to this older conman who trains him. We see hook number four which is progression. We see a sort of training sequence throughout those flashback moments. And then lastly, in terms of the actual plot of the story, he has to get revenge against an even worse criminal after a job goes wrong. This criminal does some unscrupulous things and Lock's friends are hurt. Which gives us hook number five of a worthy cause. And that's the thing with a worthy cause. It doesn't mean that your character is out there saving puppies or doing charity work or something like that. They could be doing those things, but often you can actually have a character who's doing kind of objectively bad stuff like stealing things, being a criminal like Lock is, but if you contrast him against worse criminals, then Lock is going to feel like an absolute patron of goodness in the story.
Okay, so those are our five character hooks. In a moment, we'll move on to our five plot hooks. But first, I should mention that all those character hooks we just covered will be massively enhanced the more you can understand and develop your characters. So, if you're wanting to write better characters in your fantasy novel, then you should definitely check out my free 5-day character course. You can sign up using the link in the description, and I'll send you an email a day giving you the best character building exercises that I've personally learned from publishing my four novels and from directly teaching over 170 writers in my programs and classes. Over 3,000 writers have gone through this 5-day character course so far, and so I think you'll find it really useful as well. You can sign up for free by using the link in the description.
Okay, let's move on to the five plot hooks.
The first one is a rare event. So something that has never happened is about to unfold. It could also be something that just rarely happens. Maybe there's even you know some kind of annual event. So like in our world we have birthdays, New Year's, Christmas, other religious celebrations etc. These are all sort of rare events that we and sometimes like anchor our sense of time to, right? Because you're looking forward to Christmas or you're looking forward to your birthday and so it feels special when that day finally approaches. A good example of this is in The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. The story starts on the day of the reaping. This is an event that only happens once per year where two tributes from District 12, where our main character lives, are selected to go to the capital and take part in these death games called the Hunger Games as reparations for a war that happened many generations ago. Here is one of the opening paragraphs from the Hunger Games that brilliantly sets up this idea. "Our part of district 12, nicknamed the seam, is usually crawling with coal miners heading out to the morning shift at this hour. Men and women with hunched shoulders, swollen knuckles, many of whom have long since stopped trying to scrub the coal dust out of their broken nails and the lines of their sunken faces. But today, the black cinder streets are empty. Shutters on the squat gray houses are closed. The reaping isn't until two. May as well sleep in if you can." I really love this opening because it introduces so many things in such a short space of time, right? It introduces the kind of downtrodden nature of the coal miners in District 12 while also establishing that something quite different and not necessarily special in the case of exciting, but special in the case of we are interested to see this as readers with the reaping, right? Like, oh, the reaping is the reason why everything shut down. You could maybe try to sleep in, but you probably won't be able to because you're too nervous about this event that's about to happen.
So, the second plot hook is mystery. So, this is pretty simple. Something strange has happened, and we want the explanation. The reason why mystery is so effective is because it creates an open loop in the reader's mind, and the reader's instinct is to try and get that loop closed. Of course, most murder mystery stories and detective stories are going to use this type of opening. It's sort of in the name. And something to consider with this type of plot hook is that the more cognitive dissonance you can create, the stronger the mystery will be. So what I mean by that is that if you open your fantasy novel and someone has been murdered, there's a certain mystery and suspense that is created through that. But if you open your fantasy novel and someone has been murdered inside a locked room that can only be locked from the inside, there's so much more cognitive dissonance now because you're wondering, how could this possibly happen? How could someone actually kill this guy even though they're in a room that no one should be able to enter and no one has entered since the murder? More cognitive dissonance means more suspense. An example of a fantasy novel that starts with a good mystery opening is The Night Circus by Aaron Morgan Stern. The novel opens with the sudden and mysterious arrival of a strange circus that only opens at night. This immediately makes you wonder as the reader, well, where did this come from? What's the purpose of this? And what's inside?
Our third plot hook is the why done it. So you might have heard of a who done it before which is who did this thing. You know who did this crime. A why done it is why did someone do this. So unlike hiding the person who perpetrated this particular action like a who done it where the mystery is about trying to uncover you know who the person was that committed the crime. For example a why done it is going to show you the person who did the crime but the question in your mind will be but why did they do it? What was the motivation? And getting to the core of that motivation is the driving force behind the story. In many cases, wide dunits will begin with an in media res style of opening, which is Latin for in the middle of things. And you'll typically see this in prologus that start kind of in the middle of some dramatic sequence and then flashback to explain how we got to this point. And perhaps most of the story will actually be us trying to reach this point that we see in the prologue, which might not come up again until the ending or the climax of the entire novel. So in those type of openings, the suspense is not so much in how will this end because we know how it's going to end in the prologue. Although of course many authors will use that uh supposed certainty that you have as a reader to give you a different ending to what you were expecting. The uncertainty and the suspense is far more in about how did the character reach this point. And ideally with this type of opening, you're going to show a big difference between where the prologue is and where the character actually starts in the story because then we're going to have more of a sense of transformation and uncertainty around how the character made such a dramatic shift. In Christopher Rockio's science fantasy epic, Empire of Silence, Hrien Marlo begins the first chapter by telling us how he destroyed a sun which wiped out millions of human lives and genocided an entire alien race. And then the story flashes back 1 and a half thousand years before that moment and he promises to basically explain the story of his life and how he arrived at this point. This creates huge suspense for us as the reader. How did this child get to the point where he committed genocide against the alien race that we see him having a lot of interest and respect for early on in the novel? He even tries to learn their language in the first couple of chapters.
Our fourth plot hook is conflict. So, this is pretty simple. Your character wants something. There's obstacles resisting them. And in many ways, this is probably the most common hook. And almost every fantasy first chapter probably is going to have some level of conflict embedded into them. Again, that's what I was saying before. All of these hooks can be combined and mixed and matched with each other. Now, while conflict is very important, it is essential that you prevent yourself from beginning your fantasy novel with bad conflict. So, what exactly do I mean by that? Well, it's rare that the conflict itself is enough to excite readers. Unlike in a movie where the pure visuals and the pure kinetic excitement of an action sequence might be interesting by itself even if you have zero connection to the characters, you do not have the luxury of visuals and sound in such a direct way when you are writing a novel. This is why it's so important that as an author you are trying to learn from novel examples and not from looking at movies too much. Obviously movies can be useful to understand the structure and some character details and that sort of thing. But when you're writing a novel, it is fundamentally a different medium to when you are watching a movie or when you're writing a movie. And that's why I'm trying to use examples from novels in almost every single case. So if you do want to start your first chapter with conflict like I did in the Thunder Heist, it's important to make sure that we care about the characters the conflict is happening to. And often the best way to do this is simply to combine the conflict plot hook with one of the character hooks I was describing before. So your character is either really skilled, so it's going to be interesting to see how they go through the conflict, or your character is a huge underdog in this fight, so we feel a lot of tension about whether they're going to lose. When you can combine both a character hook and this conflict hook, there's going to be much more emotional involvement, and the reader is going to actually give a damn about the conflict they're experiencing in the first chapter. So, to give you a bit of inspiration about how to structure the conflict in your opening chapter, I've got a list of 33 different conflict formats right here on the screen. And I'm not going to go through and explain all of these different elements, but these are just different ideas you can be thinking about when it comes to the conflict in your first chapter. So, feel free to pause the video if you want to have a more of a detailed look at this.
And then our fifth plot hook is arriving at a new location. So, this is quite straightforward. your character enters a new setting and they might have some particular mission or goal they're attempting to accomplish here. They may have been forced to come there as well. Maybe it's not something they've done out of their own free will. And the idea and the essence behind this plot hook is that you are removing your character from your comfort zone. And of course, you can reverse this. You can have a strange character arriving in the familiarity of your main character's setting, like Gandalf arriving in Bilbo Baggin's home at the start of The Hobbit. A classic example of this type of plot hook occurs in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis, where we see four siblings leaving London during World War II to seek shelter with a professor that lives in the middle of the English countryside. Here's the opening few lines from this story, and you'll see how efficiently CS Lewis sets this idea up. "Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air raids. They were sent to the house of an old professor who lived in the heart of the country, 10 miles from the nearest railway station and two miles from the nearest post office."
Okay, let's get into the five world building hooks.
The very first one is alternate history. So, this is where you show some kind of divergence from our real world reality. It makes readers want to know what caused this and how does this change things moving forward. His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik starts with an English naval captain boarding a French cruiser after a heated battle during the Napoleonic Wars. Below decks, they discover a dragon egg. And this perfectly introduces the idea of dragons being used in the Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800s. Here's a passage from early in the first chapter in this story. "Perhaps not all of you are aware," he said, silencing the whispers with a look, "that England is in a very dire situation as regards the aerial corpse. Naturally, our handling is superior, and the corpse can outfly any other nation of the world. But the French can out breed us 2 to 1, and it is impossible to deny that they have better variety in their bloodlines. A properly harnessed dragon is worth at least a first rate of 100 guns to us. Even a common yellow reaper or a three-ton Winchester, and Mr. Pollock believes that from the size and color of the egg, that this hatcherling is a prime specimen and very likely one of the rare large breeds." See how perfectly it just sets up all of the world building in that short passage there. This is great.
The next worldbuing hook is unique magic. So, this is where you show a character using magical powers we've never seen before that feel fresh and exciting to us. Or you can have a character using familiar powers that the reader might have seen before, but they're used in an unexpected or new way. The Paper Magician by Charlie Anne Holberg opens with Seni Twill being apprenticed to a paper magician against her wishes. And then we learn how these magicians animate paper constructs in this alternate version of London. So it's actually using the alternate history hook as well as the unique magic hook here. Take a look at this opening passage. "For the past 5 years, Cene had wanted to be a smelter. However, while most graduates of the Tis Prof School for the Magically Inclined got to choose what material they dedicated their craft to, Cene had been assigned. 'Not enough folders.' Magician Iioski had explained in her office. 'Less than a week had passed since San had heard this, and she still felt the tears that had stung the back of her eyes.'" So, a little bit of the uh sympathy hook here as well, the fact that she hasn't gotten what she wants. "'Paper is a wonderful median,' magician Aioski had continued. 'And one that's lost credit in recent years. With only 12 acting magicians left in that discipline, we have no choice but to direct a portion of our apprentices that way. I'm sorry.'"
Our third worldbuilding hook is to show a strange society. So you're showing a society with norms that are very different from the ones that we are used to. Maybe it has different beliefs, practices, a different social structure. The family dynamics are a little strange compared to what we're used to. Uh the education system is structured differently. The economics are unique. The concept of time even could be something that is uh sort of radically reimagined. And the art and aesthetics could be totally different. And so could the governments. So you get the idea. That's just a small fraction of the ways in which you could show a society being quite diverged from the one that we have. An example of this is Red Rising by Pierce Brown, which begins by establishing that humans live on Mars and there is this kind of strange color-coded cast system that dictates the roles that people do and the status they have within their society.
Our next worldbuing hook is unusual worldbuilding. So, this is where you show something that is unique about the world building in your story. For example, in Senland Ascends by Josiah Bankraftoft, it opens with Thomas Sendland and his new wife Maria arriving at the Tower of Babel for their honeymoon. The tower is a massive structure full of mysteries, rich cultures, and architectural marvels. Sen himself reflects on how climbing the Tower of Babel, even if only a little way, was his greatest ambition, and he was quite excited.
And then our last worldbuing hook I'm going to cover in this video is genre blending. So, this is where you combine different genres in a unique and fresh way. And the essence here is you want to make readers feel curious and excited about how these different ideas are going to collide. So in Gideon the Ninth by Tamin Mr. the story immediately introduces this really strange blend of space opera sort of science fiction along with sword and sorcery fantasy combined with these necromancers and the undead and then just this very witty sort of Tumblr blog style of writing and voice from the main character.
So once again here's those 15 hooks that we went through. Remember, this list is just a starting framework. However, right now, I would like you to ask yourself, out of all of these different hooks here, which one do I want to be using in my opening chapter? If you've already written an opening chapter, try to identify the one you were using. If you haven't written your opening chapter yet, I want you to sort of pick one that you are definitely going to be angling towards as you go through that writing process. And the reason for this is that once you can figure out which hook you're trying to target, it will give you much more focus as you go through the writing or through the editing process.
If you found that video useful, you might enjoy this one over here.