Ask Tina: How to Hook Your Reader from Page One
Ask Tina shares six techniques for crafting a first page that hooks readers and sets the tone for the entire book.
Dear Tina,
I have been working on writing a memoir, but am struggling with choosing the first chapter and the opening lines. How do I write something that is compelling and will make people want to keep reading? How do I make sure it encapsulates the rest of my book, and at the same time draws the reader in?
I think your column is great and would love your opinion!
Best, A Fearful First Page Writer
Dear Fearful,
If you’re trying to get the opening perfect before you’ve finished an entire, solid first draft, please stop! Not only will you get stuck and stifle your flow, you may not have figured out exactly where the book is going yet, so there’s no way to make sure the opening encapsulates the rest of your book.
So the first step is answering the question: What is this memoir about? After reading several thousand student essays and stories, I can say with confidence that the answer is almost always found at the end of a draft. So before you can begin to revise your opening, you have to go mining for your own gems first, and trust me, those gems are almost always found at the end of your draft – your last chapter, last paragraph or even your last sentence. Why? Because writing is thinking on the page, and our thinking gets clearer as we go on. You will be able to create a compelling opening once you know exactly where you are taking your reader, and who knows, one of your “gems” might just become a perfect opening line.
Once you have a clear idea of your direction, there are several tricks of the trade you might employ to grab the reader’s attention:
“Baby, I was Born This Way”
Here’s one you might want to avoid: the chronological approach. You probably noticed that noteworthy memoirs rarely start at the very beginning of a person’s life. Memoirs are snippets of a time in a person’s life, not a full autobiography, so unless you are writing about your early childhood or your birth was somehow pivotal to your entire story, you may want to avoid pure chronology.
There are exceptions, of course, such as Elie Wiesel’s first line in Night: “I was born in the middle of a great famine, and that was not the worst disaster of my life.” Wiesel’s approach is effective, of course, because he is employing another great technique in the opener: setting the context and tone for the rest of the book.
Covering Context
Note how Weisel’s first line quickly covers historical backstory (i.e., famine) that helps to provide context without going into unnecessary detail – another good ploy for an opening. The reader knows they are going to learn about a disaster worse than famine, in this case, the Holocaust.
Steve Martin uses a similar approach, covering a lot of ground in just the first few lines of Born Standing Up: “I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.” It’s concise, grabs the reader’s attention, and sets out a clear path for the book.
In Media Res
Steve Martin also promises to take the reader to the “refining” and “wild success” part – to the good stuff – and that good stuff is a great place to start. This approach offers a way to avoid the chronological conundrum: take the reader right smack in the messy middle.
Movies and television shows do this all the time. I just watched the first few episodes of The Morning Show during a long flight. I assumed the episode presented first was from season two or three, because it immediately started with a crisis: the firing of a co-anchor for sexual harassment. But I double-checked and found it was, indeed, the first episode. I was immediately sucked into the show because I had all kinds of questions forming in my head, “Wait! Exactly what did he do? Did his co-anchor know?”
I kept watching because I wanted my questions answered, and a good opening for a memoir can do the same thing. Mary Karr does this well in the first line of The Liar’s Club: “My sharpest memory is of a single instant surrounded by dark. I was seven…” The reader immediately wonders what happened in that single instant, and boom… we’re hooked.
You might take the reader into the middle of an argument or an important conversation by starting with dialogue. Elizabeth Gilbert does this in Eat Pray Love: “’You are going to change your life,’ my mother said to me.” Who doesn’t love a good mother-daughter tussle? The opening dialogue provides character insight, backstory, and the central theme of the book.
Create Mystery
If the middle is too messy for you, you might consider starting with the end. It might seem like a spoiler alert, but if you give just a taste of the end at the outset, you create a mystery that hooks the reader. Take Jeanette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, for example, which starts, “I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a dumpster.”
While that scene is not technically how the memoir ends, it definitely suggests that Walls is going to explain how her mother came to be digging through dumpsters while she is sitting in fancy clothes going to an event of some sort, and she does not disappoint!
Another good example of this technique is found in the first line of Alice Sebold’s The Almost Moon: “When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.” I don’t think I have to tell you what questions are swirling around the reader’s head after that line!
Be Unpredictable
Not only was Sebold giving us a sneak preview of the end, but she was also employing another technique: begin with a bold or surprising statement. You may want to start with a strange, recurring thought you have now or had at the time of the memoir. You might make yourself vulnerable (another good technique!) by starting with an unexpected truth or a confession.
Take Patric Gagne’s new memoir, Sociopath, for example, which begins: “Whenever I ask my mother if she remembers the time in second grade when I stabbed a kid in the head with a pencil, her answer is the same: ‘Vaguely.’” It worked on me. I finished the book in three days.
Details Matter
If you have never stabbed a child with a pencil or killed your mother, however, not all hope is lost. Some memoir writers use sensory detail to draw us into their story. They “show” rather than “tell.” Your high-school English teacher wasn’t wrong: showing is usually better than telling, because just like the devil, the hook can also be in the details.
So, you might begin your memoir with a memory and focus on sounds, tastes, smells, and textures. Use unexpected or unusual adjectives to describe your house, your father’s cologne, the oil stain on your driveway. Many authors use this technique, of course, but I’ll leave you with one of my favorites, Dani Shapiro’s opening of Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage. It painted a picture I wanted to immediately know more about.
“From my office window I see my husband on the driveway below. It’s the dead of winter, and he’s wearing nothing but a white terry-cloth bathrobe, his feet stuffed into galoshes. A gust of wind lifts the hem of the bathrobe, exposing his pale legs as she stands on a sheet of snow covered ice. His hair is more salt than pepper. His breath makes vaporous clouds in the cold. Walls of snow are packed against the sides of the driveway, white fields spread out to the woods in the distance. The sky is chalk. A rifle rests easily on his shoulder, pointed at the northernmost corner of our roof” (p. 3).
You’re probably wondering why he is standing, scantily clad, in the snow, sporting a rifle? Exactly. You’ll have to read it to find out. And that’s what a good opening is all about!
About Tina
Tina Goodyear is a board member of Project Write Now and a book inc Peer Artist Leader. She recently completed a draft of her memoir, FROM THE NECK DOWN. When not writing or teaching the art of writing, she helps adult students earn college credit for their work and life experiences.
About book inc
book inc is a writing collective dedicated to helping writers draft, revise, and publish memoirs and novels. Our book incubators and revision workshops help writers realize their artistic and commercial potential.