How to deploy ‘the hook’

Stephen King is successful because he leaves questions unanswered. Often within the first paragraph of his stories, he causes readers to want to know the answer to a question or two. He then moves into other parts of the story. When he answers those initial questions, the reader now has many other questions. If King has done his job really well, these readers keep turning the pages not just for unanswered questions, but because they care about the characters and the story.

Sandy Blackburn-Wright, author of the memoir Holding Up the Sky, uses the hook too, albeit in a more subtle way than King. Rather than posing questions at the start of a section, she often plants her hook at the end, with a hint that the bad things are coming. This way she tells the story from the naive perspective she had when the events unfolded, and adds insight from hindsight.

Why this is interesting to me is I love the hook. Ever since I started writing, I’ve sought to master the device. In my memoir’s most recent draft I attempted to incorporate the hook, but it wasn’t until I read Sandy’s book that I began to get an idea of how to do this. Now I have that question answered.