#Easy way to write a book how to#

This family is wealthy, NYC royalty, living a charmed life. In my novel, The Heiresses, I start with the lines: “You know the Saybrooks. When writing first chapters - of thrillers, especially - it’s fun to hint at trouble, lies, secrets, and scandal, but not give away everything. By the end of chapter one, the reader knows the whole situation at hand, and can’t turn the pages fast enough to see what happens next. This “inciting incident” all happens within the first ten pages of the novel. The first chapter of Jodi Picoult’s Handle with Care talks about a baby’s birth - always exciting! But things get even more interesting when the baby emerges with a whole host of health problems - forcing her parents to make a heart-wrenching decision. Begin at a life-changing moment.Ī life-changing event for a protagonist can be their “inciting incident” - a moment that thrusts him or her into the conflict they must resolve or overcome by the end of the story. For me, there was absolutely no way I could put the book down. It’s surprising and mysterious, and it gets the reader right into the main character’s head - it’s a confession of sorts, which unravels throughout the novel. “ I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960 and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” One of my favorite novels, the Pulitzer-winning Middlesex, starts with a doozy of a first line:

Shocking readers immediately with a jarring moment, visual, or confession will get them excited to read on.

#Easy way to write a book how to#

So how can you start your novel with a bang? Here are 12 tips for how to write a good hook! 1. Otherwise they might deem the book a big DNF (did not finish) - or if they’re perusing the sample pages online or first pages in a bookstore, they might not make the purchase at all.

In this age of instant gratification, short attention spans, and tons of other great fiction to compete with, a story’s beginning needs to grab the reader. Learning how to write a good hook, if I really had to choose, is truly the toughest thing. Whenever people ask me what the most difficult part of writing a book is - the beginning, middle, or end - I usually say, “All of it.” Each section of a novel comes with its own set of challenges: Middles are hard to plot, ends need to be satisfying (and in my novels, they usually involve a twist), but then there is a novel’s beginning.