Reddit reviews Writing Active Hooks: The Complete How-to Guide

The problem comes when you take your reader's interest for granted. Your reader's interest is a fickle resource. If you just start infodumping indigestible blocks of text cut-&-pasted straight from your worldbuilding files, then of course they are going to lose interest. They didn't sign up for a lecture or a history lesson; they came to you looking for a fun story. So you have to make it fun for them. You can't pull the business of I've suffered for my art, now it's your turn.

Basically, you should take it as given that your reader isn't going to care about anything you write unless you first make an emotional connection with them. You need to bond your reader to your writing so they are emotionally connected to what's happening in your story.

Please take a look at Mary Buckham's Writing Active Hooks. As a fiction writer, you need to apprehend your reader's attention, and then actively maintain that attention through your story. You can do this by employing various conventions.

For instance, although there are a number conventions you can use, probably the best is to make your reader identify with your main character. If you can do this successfully, then your reader will visualize themselves in your MC's place, and they will become very emotionally involved. If your MC is in trouble, they will have to keep reading to make sure your MC is going to be okay.

If you like history, and you think about it, your favorite parts of history are stories, and they involve historical figures that you've come to identify with to some extent. You might even recall an epiphany when it first occurred to you that an historical figure was a real live person, just like you and me.

If you're going to write fiction that's primarily expository, you need to make your characters into real, live people for your reader. It also helps to construct an interesting narrator with a slightly unreliable personality, rather than simply use an objective, emotionless point of view.

I would suggest you get someone else to write your blurb, someone who has read the manuscript. You can trade blurb writes with a fellow SF writer. Ideally, you can find a writer within your sci-fi subgenre with whom you can swap beta reads & blurbs.

FWIW, I've found Mary Buckham's guide on Writing Active Hooks to be invaluable. I had been writing for years and years before I finally stumbled upon the concept of hooks and how to manipulate them.

A reader's mind needs to catch on your hook; you need to apprehend their attention.

One way to use a hook is to set a time/space limit, like they had to make it across town and into the forest before curfew. It's like lighting a fuse. Now there's narrative tension burning in the back of your reader's mind for the rest of the scene.

Also, readers only care about people they've been introduced to. The Talerians lost more than a million lives in the war against the Tarelians. Ah, that's a shame.

People still think the forever war is going to last forever, but the Arek know this isn't true. What people? All people, some people? Hawaiians? Netflix subscribers? Anyone we could care about? What about the Arek, do they all know it isn't true, or just specific Arek? I think you want to personalize it and make it immediate and real. The Talerian refugees still think the forever war is going to last forever, but the cluster of blasters pointed in Ben's face made him realize that wasn't true.