The first few sentences of a novel must lure the reader away from the real world we all inhabit and into the imaginary world of the author. It is part of the author's art to make this transition as quick and as pleasant as possible. That is why a novel's beginning cannot just lure, it has to “hook”.
Now reader I know that you are not a fish. You might think that this is unnecessary. After all, millions of people have read and enjoyed Umberto Eco's Name Of The Rose and in doing so had to plough through the first ...hundred and eighty tedious pages before they were actually hooked. But if you are not a masochist, wouldn't you prefer to be hooked into a book quickly and consume it rather than labour through it? Say for example that you are standing in a bookstore or a library and you see an interesting title and like the cover. Now if you know nothing else about the book, if you haven't read any raving reviews or listened to admiring words of mouth, you would probably start to read it. How long would you give the author before you decide to take the book home or put it back on the shelf? A few pages? Most people would just read a few sentences. So those opening few lines have a commercial as well as a practical purpose. And that's why most authors take care on how they start.
Rather than try to explain what it is that makes a good hook, I think it will be far simpler if I quoted the first few lines of some famous books. This way the great masters will instruct and you will enjoy. You might even decide to read the book!
_________
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
The warning message arrived on Monday, the bomb itself on Wednesday. It became a busy week.
Eric Ambler: The Care of Time
Write it on the walls.
H. Carter Gavin, Her Britannic Majesty's Vice-Consul in Athens, is a shit.
Eric Ambler: Dirty Story
It came down to this: if I had not been arrested by the Turkish police, I would have been arrested by the Greek police. I had no choice but to do as this man Harper told me. He was entirely responsible for what happened to me.
Eric Ambler: The Light of Day
To be encumbered with a corpse is to be in a difficult position, especially when the corpse is without benefit of death certificate.
Desmond Bagley: Running Blind
Roving has always been, and still is, my ruling passion, the joy of my heart, the very sunshine of my existence.
Robert Michael Ballantyne: The Coral Island
I returned from the City about three o'clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life.
John Buchan: The Thirty-Nine Steps
The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: ‘Philip Marlowe… Investigations’. It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization.
Raymond Chandler: The Little Sister
The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox’s left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one.
Raymond Chandler: The Long Good-Bye
I have read of men who, when forced by their calling to live for long periods in utter solitude—save for a few black faces—have made it a rule to dress regularly for dinner in order to maintain their self-respect and prevent a relapse into barbarism.
Erskine Childers: The Riddle of the Sands
The crown grew heavier with each passing year. When the Venerable Bodhidharma Mahanayake Thero had - so reluctantly! - first placed it upon his head, Prince Kalidasa was surprised by its lightness. Now, twenty years later, King Kalidasa gladly relinquished the jewel-encrusted band of gold, whenever court etiquette allowed.
Arthur C Clarke: The Fountains of Paradise
Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. On 30 June 1908, Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four thousand kilometres - a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe.
Arthur C Clarke: Rendezvous With Rama
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
Charles Dickens: David Copperfield
My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (A Scandal in Bohemia)
We were in class when the head-master came in, followed by a "new fellow," not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who had been asleep woke up, and every one rose as if just surprised at his work.
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about life and death.
It was part of his profession to kill people. He had never liked doing it and when he had to kill he did it as well as he knew how and forgot about it.
Ian Fleming: Goldfinger
"The Signora had no business to do it," said Miss Bartlett, "no business at all. She promised us south rooms with a view close together, instead of which here are north rooms, looking into a courtyard, and a long way apart. Oh, Lucy!"
E M Foster: A Room With A View
The letter from Tally came on the day Bert Checkov died. It didn’t look like trouble; just an invitation from a glossy to write an article on the Lamplighter Gold Cup.
Dick Francis: Forfeit
Murder didn’t mean much to Raven. It was just a new job. You had to be careful. You had to use your brains. It was not a question of hatred.
Graham Greene: A Gun for Sale
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
Ernest Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea
Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.
Homer: The Odyssey
I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.
Nick Hornby: Fever Pitch
My desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups, in chronological order:
1) Alison Ashworth
2) Penny Hardwick
3) Jackie Allen
4) Charlie Nicholson
5) Sarah Kendrew
These were the ones that really hurt. Can you see your name in that lot, Laura? I reckon you'd sneak into the top ten, but there's no place for you in the top five; those places are reserved for the kind of humiliations and heartbreaks that you're just not capable of delivering.
Nick Hornby: High Fidelity
I am in a car park in when I tell my husband I don't want to be married to him any more. David isn't even in the car park with me. He's at home, looking after the kids, and I have only called him to remind him that he should write a note for Molly's class teacher. The other bit just sort of . . . slips out.
Nick Hornby: How to be Good
I was tired and very cold; a little scared, too. The red and green navigation lights cast a weird glow over the sails. Beyond was nothing, a void of utter darkness in which the sea made little rushing noises.
Hammond Innes: The Wreck of the Mary Deare
The trial was irretrievably over; everything that could be said had been said, but he had never doubted that he would lose. The written verdict was handed down at 10:00 on Friday morning, and all that remained was a summing up from the reporters waiting in the corridor outside the district court.
Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
He didn't want to buy a gun. At least, not the kind I sell. You can tell.
Gavin Lyall: Venus with Pistol
The Peacemaker Colt has now been in production, without change in design, for a century. Buy one to-day and it would be indistinguishable from the one Wyatt Earp wore when he was the Marshal of Dodge City. It is the oldest hand-gun in the world, without question the most famous and, if efficiency in its designated task of maiming and killing be taken as criterion of its worth, then it is also probably the best hand-gun ever made.
Alistair MacLean: When Eight Bells Toll
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.
Edgar Allan Poe: The Cask of Amontillado
The 'Red Death' had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution.
Edgar Allan Poe: The Masque of The Red Death
Every August 14 for twenty-three years Mrs Steerforth put the same In Memoriam notice in the Daily Telegraph:
STEERFORTH, John Adair Steerforth, Flt Lieut, DFC, RAFVR.
Lost at sea, September 1945. On this, his birthday, not forgotten
–Mother.
Anthony Price: The Labyrinth Makers
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
J D Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
In the town they tell the story of the great pearl - how it was found and how it was lost again. They tell of Kino, the fisherman, and of his wife, Juana, and of the baby, Coyotito.
John Steinbeck: The Pearl
His pain was vast. But at least it was finite. Sharp-edged waves of agony climaxed in intensity until his body convulsed and his mind was awash. Then, just before madness, the crests broke and swirled over his limen of consciousness, and he escaped into oblivion.
Trevanian: The Loo Sanction
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
The Old Testament-King James Version
The year 1866 was marked by a bizarre development, an unexplained and downright inexplicable phenomenon that surely no one has forgotten.
Jules Verne: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
"Are we rising again?" "No. On the contrary." "Are we descending?" "Worse than that, captain! we are falling!" "For Heaven's sake heave out the ballast!" "There! the last sack is empty!" "Does the balloon rise?" "No!" "I hear a noise like the dashing of waves. The sea is below the car! It cannot be more than 500 feet from us!" "Overboard with every weight! ... everything!"
Jules Verne: The Mysterious Island
When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city — which was strange because it began before I even knew what a city was. But this city, clustered on the curve of a big blue bay, would come into my mind. I could see the streets, and the buildings that lined them, the waterfront, even boats in the harbour; yet, waking, I had never seen the sea, or a boat. ...
John Wyndham: The Chrysalids
Reader, if your patience hasn't worn out, here is how my two latest novels begin:
He couldn’t hide it from me.
If I didn’t know him, I may have believed anything he told me. But he wasn’t just my doctor. He was also my best friend. And through the years I had seen his face contour all his possible emotions.
Nikitas Terzis: Fantasy Land
Fear, like hunger, is an instinct. It comes whether you like it or not.
It came in waves to the cute Chinese girl. It made her shift uneasily in her seat. It made her glance around her and it made her palms sweat. There was little she could do about it though.
I had her.
Nikitas Terzis: Bird of Prey
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