My Husband Married a Hooker, Part 2

A couple weeks ago, I gave you the Readers' Digest version of the first part of my MY HUSBAND MARRIED A HOOKER workshop. (It's about writing hooks, of course! What were you thinking?) We talked about what a hook is and how to set one with your title. For a refresher, here's a link to that post.

Today, we'll talk about hooking your reader with your opening line.

The beginning of a book is a delicate time. You must introduce your protagonist, establish the conflict and set the tone in ripping fashion. Years ago, readers gave authors leisure to do this in a long prologue or a first chapter loaded with backstory. No more. We must drop the reader in medias res ("into the middle of affairs"). We hit the ground running and leave enough breadcrumbs in our wake for the reader to follow and catch up.

If this sounds daunting, that's because it is. Most writers I know spend more time revising the first chapter than any other with emphasis on the first line. That's because if you don't hook your reader with the first line, the first paragraph, the first page, she's likely to reshelve the book and move on.

So here are a few tips to start with a hook.

1. Begin as you mean to continue. No bait and switch allowed!The first sentence sets the tone for the whole book.

My Distracting the Duchess starts with “I’m going to have to shorten his willy.” Ok. I admit it. I was going for a snort. Obviously, with this start, you’re in for a sexy romp. If I’d tried to make it a serious tear jerker, there would have been problems.

2. Surprise your reader.

If the world of your story has its own special rules, lead with them. I still remember my reaction to the opening of Nora Robert's Carolina Moon. "She woke in the body of a dead friend." It made me do a double take to make certain I'd read it correctly. When I was sure I had, I knew I had a unique tale ahead of me.

3. Raise a question in your reader's mind. Moby Dick opens with "Call me Ishmael." The first time I read it, I wondered if that was really the narrator's name or if he chose the name of an outcast to describe himself because that's how he felt. In just three words, Melville has set the stage for a story of biblical proportions.

4. Elicit an emotion from your readers. Stephanie Meyers' Twilight begins with "I'd never given much thought to how I would die." Well, that grabs us by the jugular, doesn't it? We all have wondered about death at some time and have pretty strong feelings about it.

You MUST hook your readers on the first line. Surprise them. Make them shiver. Give them something to elicit an emotion or raise a question that compels them to read on.

STROKE OF GENIUS starts like this:

Starting from the well-formed foot and ankle, the long line of the man’s leg ended in a disappointingly small fig leaf.

Raise any questions? Does it give you an idea of the tone of this story? Are you expecting a light-hearted, classy, yet ribald tale? (Click here if you'd like to read the rest of the chapter!)

If you're a writer, please share the opening line of your current WIP. If you're a reader, what's the first line of the book you're reading now and why do you think it's a good one or not?

What an Editor Wants . . .

Well, it's happened. After 8 weeks of Red Pencil Thursdays, I find myself in the position of having no volunteers.

Several writers have contacted me and I'm waiting for their material, so I feel confident this feature will continue. (If you'd like to take a ride in the RPT hotseat, please contact me through my website!) But this week we'll do a more general critique based on some of the things I heard directly from editors during RT.

Here's what an editor wants:

1. A clean manuscript. This means proper formatting (12 pt. Courier New font, one inch margins all around, author/title/subgenre/word count in the header, pages numbered). It means you've run the spellcheck. It means you've made several passes through the manuscript, looking for proper use of there, their and they're and other common errors. It means you've enlisted the help of a beta reader who's a solid grammarian if you're not. If you turn in a manuscript riddled with little errors it says you don't respect the work, the editor or yourself. (That last sentence dropped verbatim from an editor's lips.)

Make sure your punctuation is correct and appropriate. Heather Osborn, editor for Tor-Forge, has an intense dislike for overused exclamation points. According to Heather, "Everytime you use a ! you kill a kitten."

Lots of careless mistakes mean more work for an editor. Put yourself in the editor's shoes. If you have a choice between two roughly equivalent manuscripts and one is clean and the other is not, which would you choose? Why give them a reason to say no to you?

2. A tight manuscript. Angela James, editor of the Harlequin's Carina imprint, says, "Not every noun deserves an adjective." Don't pad your word count with extras. A tight manuscript does more with less.

Use the Find function to search out these space wasters: too, even, just, only, almost, nearly, that, still . . . You get the idea. They become a "writer's tick," flowing out our fingers without our conscious knowledge. Cut them wherever you can. Qualifiers suck the life out of your prose. Descriptive verbs and specific nouns get the job done without the niggling little hangers-on.

3. An on-time manuscript. There must be a rash of late authors out there because I heard this from several editors. If you sign a contract, you make a promise to deliver a product by a certain date. If you fail to deliver, you are in breach of contract. Worse, you've potentially hurt other people's careers.

A publishing house has a schedule to keep to bring a book to market. If you fail to deliver, you may lose your slot and cause someone else to be hustled in to fill it. And if you're given a new slot, you may be bumping someone else. I lost a spot in the Historical Book Club for one of my releases because a lead author failed to deliver her manuscript on time. She wasn't a historical, but the reprint they shoved into her slot was, so it bumped me out of the Book Club and several thousand guaranteed sales. No light matter when you live or die by the numbers.

And no. Nothing will induce me to give you that other author's name. I'm sure she has no idea her action (or inaction) affected anyone else. But now you know what happens when you miss a deadline and I know you don't want to muddle things up for others.

So even before you sell, set a deadline for yourself. You may as well get used to delivering on schedule since it will be part of your creative life later. Get a calendar. Figure out what's a reasonable daily page count for you. I have a project planner on my computer and have set a reminder for myself each Friday of where I need to be in order to stay on schedule. Factor in some fun time. If you don't have a life, you don't have anything to write about.

Project the whole thing out and set the date on which you will actually type "The End." This is not the date you should agree to as a deadline. Pad your estimate with at least a week and a half. Send it to your beta reader as soon as it's finished, but give yourself a week to set the manuscript aside so it leaves the forefront of your consciousness. Then after a week, read it in one sitting, marking places that need correcting as you go. Take a day to fix the boo-boos and send it off, basking in the glow of having made your editor proud.

Now sometimes life intervenes in the best laid plans and everyone understands emergencies. What editors don't understand is that you're late because you had to go to Italy for a month on vacation. Or because you were working to meet a deadline for another house and that's why you're late for them. (I kid you not. Someone actually told their editor this. And we wonder why we don't feel the love.)

4. A wonderful story. Several editors told me they want to forget to edit because the manuscript is so compelling, they become readers instead. They want the same things readers want--to be surprised and delighted at every turn.

So our goal should be to make our editor's job easy. We should give her a clean, tight, on-time story that sweeps her completely into our fictive dream.

Sounds a little daunting, doesn't it?

As Blanche Thebom, a celebrated operatic diva, once said to me: "Hey! If it was easy, anybody could do it."

My Husband Married a Hooker! Part 1

“I couldn’t put it down!”

This is the accolade every writer longs to hear. And the best way to earn this ultimate compliment is by peppering your prose with hooks.

The dictionary describes a hook as a stratagem for snaring someone and writers need to snare their readers hard, fast and securely if they want to keep them turning pages. If a writer sprinkles her prose with hooks, she creates a path for her readers to follow through the narrative. In my workshop, My Husband Married a Hooker, I share tricks to help writers hook their readers using their title, their opening line, chapter breaks, embedded hooks and even the final sentence.

And hopefully hook their readers into searching out their backlists!

Here's the Reader's Digest version of the first part of that workshop:

Hooking with your title ~ Make ‘em pick up the book! The title is your foot in the door. It’s the first chance for you to show the reader what kind of story they’re going to get. CL Wilson’s Lord of the Fading Lands isn’t likely to be mistaken for a contemporary comedy. Why? The title is too reminiscent of Tolkein. This is one place where it’s ok to be like something else. You want to call an image to the reader’s mind that will tell them where your book falls in the grand scheme of literature.

Authors sometimes have no say on the final title, but make up a good one anyway. It's your first chance to hook your editor. I sold STROKE OF GENIUS on the strength of the title and a paragraph.

Why is it a good title? My editor loved the play on words. There's a hint of a naughty double entendre in the word stroke. It lets my reader know they're in for a sensual romp. And it gives a clue about my hero--the artistic genius.

Here are some good title tricks:

Something familiar—Take something your readers will recognize and give it a twist.
Play on movie titles: Karen Hawkins' Sleepless in Scotland.
Play on TV: Elizabeth Boyle’s How I Met My Countess.
Song Lyrics: Susan Elizabeth Phillips Ain’t She Sweet? (And of course, her heroine isn't!)
Old sayings: Mary Balogh's First Comes Marriage, Then Comes Seduction, And Last Comes Love. She's taken the old saw "First comes love" and given it a shake-up. Isn't that brilliant for a set of connected stories?

Series titles—Set up a recurring theme.
One for the Money by Janet Evanovitch. She has an unlimited supply of numbers for subsequent books.
A is for Alibi by Susan Grafton. Same principle, but only 26 available titles. Darn.
The Serpent Prince, the Raven Prince, The Leopard Prince by Elizabeth Hoyt. By repeating Prince in each title, she's given readers a clue that they are related stories. And if they enjoyed one, they'll want the next.

Alliteration—People respond to patterns. We crave it. Christie Craig’s Divorced, Desperate and Dating plays to our need for pattern beautifully. So does Mary Janice Davidson's Undead and Unpopular. I used this trick for my Distracting the Duchess, Pleasuring the Pirate and Vexing the Viscount.

There are plenty of good ways to develop a hooking title. Just remember, the goal is to surprise and delight your readers into picking up the book. Next Wednesday, I'll talk about how to hook your readers with the first sentence.

And even though I don't have my author copies of STROKE OF GENIUS yet, I'd like to give away one to someone who leaves a comment or question here today. When I get back from RT in Ohio, I'll have my DH pick the random winner, so be sure to let me know you were here.

Here's the discussion question:
What's the best title you've ever seen and why do you think it's a good one? If you're a writer, it's ok to use one of your own if you like! Just be prepared to share why it fits your story.