How to Write a Hook for a Novel

It’s a truth universally acknowledged in the publishing industry: if there’s one thing any writer needs to ensure success for their novel, it’s a good hook.

It’s how you’ll grab a reader’s attention, whether that’s someone in your target audience browsing bookshelves or a literary agent you’re pitching to. A compelling hook is what will capture the reader’s interest and get them invested in your fiction writing. Whether you’re writing a romance novel, sci-fi, or any other genre, you need a strong hook.

A hook is something different from your first line or first chapter. While a corker like the clock striking thirteen (a classic example of a great opening sentence) can work wonders to make someone keep reading once they’ve started, a hook for our purposes is something different.

It’s like an elevator pitch: a perfect hook is the one that makes someone want to pick up your book and start reading in the first place. It should have a strong voice but is almost always written in the third person (even if your novel is in first person).

So, how can you create an effective hook that forges an emotional connection with your target readers while also creating intrigue that will compel them to dive into your story? In this article, we share tips from bestselling author Jack Jordan, who offers his own great example of a hook and walks you through the process so that you can create suspense for your own story—whatever it may be.

A great hook is the key ingredient

Notes from Jack Jordan

During my years of writing and publishing books, I have learned that a good hook is the most indispensable component.

Characters, setting, book cover... These all play their part. But the one key trait the majority of successful novels have—the thing that helps them stand out—comes at the start of the writing process: it’s writing a great hook.  

A good hook grabs the reader’s attention

You’re probably familiar with the idea of writing a hook. You might have heard the concept referred to as the hook, the pitch or the elevator pitch.

Whatever you call it, the role remains the same: a sentence that sums up the premise of your book in one or two lines and makes your target audience want to find out more.

It’s the line you recite when someone asks you what your book is about (and saves you going off on a panicked tangent); it’s the pitch you give to reel in an agent and a publisher, and the line that your publisher’s sales team will use to entice the book buyers for retailers. It’s the line booksellers will use to hand-sell your book to potential readers. Crucially, it also helps you, the author, to know if you have a strong idea on your hands.

Pitching your hook to agents

Some people call this the ‘Elevator Pitch.’ This imagined scenario is the perfect way to describe the hook: a short yet effective description of your book to pitch to someone during a short elevator ride, to reel them in before they reach their designated floor.

Imagine it: you’ve found yourself in a lift with your dream agent, and you have five floors to pitch your novel to them. It’s just you and her, and she has asked about your book. Having a hook to hand gives you and your book the best chance to shine. It sounds scary, but having your hook tucked away in the back of your mind, one that is short yet powerful in delivery, immediately sets the tone for the conversation—or submission—that follows.

If you can perfect your pitch early in the process, it will make everything that follows infinitely easier. You can use it in your letter to agents. They can use it to excite editors. An editor will use it to pitch to their team in-house. The sales team will use it to talk to retailers. The publicity team will use it to talk to journalists. Eventually, it will reach and engage readers too!
—Lizzy Goudsmit Kay, Editorial Director at The Novelry

If you say the hook enough times, it’ll become second nature and you won’t have to think of it much at all. The hook for Do No Harm is ingrained in my mind and can be recited in under ten seconds!

How to write a good hook for your novel

‘But how can I possibly sum up my book in a single line or two?’ I hear you ask.

To show how I write a hook, I’ll share how I came up with the one for my novel, Do No Harm.

The first step to writing a hook: finding your idea

The first step is the idea itself.

People get book ideas in different ways. Some think of a plot first, while others discover their characters and then create a plot to place them in.

For me, it was the moral dilemma at the heart of Do No Harm that presented itself first. I was fascinated by the thought of a surgeon—whose job is to save lives—being pressured into taking one away. These sorts of high stakes in fiction grab the reader’s interest and stand out a mile in an elevator pitch.  

So, I had the plot idea. Now I had to make it real, believable; I needed to discover what would motivate the main character to betray her Hippocratic oath. For something as drastic as killing a patient on the operating table, the motivation must match the deed in intensity.

What could motivate someone to consider something so awful? And better yet, how could I attract readers to not only believe the situation but also want the surgeon to get away with it if she chose to go down that path?

I often write about mothers who would do anything for their children, and the motivation for my main character in Do No Harm quickly became that her child had been abducted. She would only get her son back if she went through with the horrendous deed.

Now I not only had a plan to grip the reader’s attention with the moral dilemma, but I also had the character’s motivation, the reader’s sympathy, and the very question at the heart of the book:

Which is stronger, a doctor’s oath? Or a mother’s love?

I then had to plan who the patient and antagonist would be—the final pieces in the puzzle.

With the high-concept moral dilemma and the high stakes of the character’s motivation, these two aspects had to match the same intensity. Once I had those, I would be so much closer to writing my hook.

How to find the idea for a book

Notes from The Novelry

Often, a writer will start off with an idea involving someone in a sticky situation with:

• a problem to solve
• something they badly want
• being faced with a hell of a dilemma

Start by being unpopular 

What do you feel so strongly about that it could make you quite unpopular at a dinner party? Something contentious, objectionable, or arguable? Think of things commonly accepted by others, and consider if you could take an opposite view. Why do we write? If not to put into words the things we cannot say?

What’s the problem? 

A novelist has questions, not answers. If you have the answers, write non-fiction. A novelist writes to find the answer. It’s why we keep writing, and it’s why readers keep reading: to find something out. So you want to raise the question from the outset and keep it simple. 

• How to deal with a traumatic event?
• How to cope with male/female relationships?
• How to find intimacy?
• How to get rich quick?

Choose one you like. Now give it to someone else (a fictional character) to deal with!  

Who’s the person? 

A novel is a moral journey. Typically, a novel forces the main character to take a moral journey of change. You will need to consider who that person is. 

Start by giving your question or one of your own harder problems to someone ill-equipped, less-equipped than you, to cope with. For example, if your problem is that you are unable to find the intimacy you crave, you might come up with a main character who seeks intimacy in wildly inappropriate ways.

Now apply pity 

You need to feel for the person taking the journey. You don’t have to like them. Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley is a con man, but we know Patricia Highsmith liked him; maybe she even secretly admired him for being unlike her.

It’s a good idea to have someone who is not like you as the main character to spend time with. All the things you throw at them become the events of the plot. This will become your story arc.

Own it

Not there yet? Take your most-loved book of all time and consider why you love it.

If it’s a genre, a period of history, a speculative treatment, science fiction or fantasy, or a human psycho-drama or thriller—now’s the time to own up to it. What is it that you love about it? A mood? A place? A sense that anything is possible or that everything is impossible? Humor? Mischief? A flight of fancy? Great moral power? Doom? Name that novel in one!

Now—there’s your treatment. It says a lot about who you are and how you like things done. This could become your voice, style, or treatment.

Point and counterpoint

One notion in conflict with another spring-loads an idea and traps the reader inside the confection of your fiction, rattling between point and counterpoint.

The result is that the reader goes: WHAT!

And that’s how we want to keep them from start to finish of their reading experience.

Here are some little ironies for stories:

• Policeman turns to crime
• Man who doesn’t like women becomes a woman for the love of a woman
• Teacher learns lesson from students

So start by looking at your main character’s occupation. The killer nurse? The most tender of ironies often make for the greatest stories.

Consider the story for the screenplay of the movie The Lives of Others, in which the eavesdropping spy is infected by the love of a couple so that, though his job is to betray them, he finally defends them at his own cost. Damn, that’s perfectly sad. 

Irony works on a line-by-line basis, too, as a prose technique, and a reading of The Great Gatsby will show you that F. Scott Fitzgerald juxtaposes adjectives all the time to keep us alive to the beautiful possibilities stowed in little ironies.

If you can load your title with irony, too, you’re ahead of the game and can leave the elevator without a pitch. Consider Judge on Trial by Ivan Klima and Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig. The Good Soldier is good when you know the context. Titles that defy our expectations by pitting one beautiful thing against something ugly work well, like Love in the Time of Cholera.

Your hook—your idea—should be very clear. Look for irony and juxtaposition for top marks. It’s a hook for a reason. It has a point and a twist.

The second step to writing a hook: dissecting your idea

Notes from Jack Jordan

As you can see, writing a hook is astoundingly simple once you’ve fleshed out the premise of your novel. You’ve already done the work!

All you need to do is break down the key parts of the novel’s concept and feature them in your killer hook:

• What the book is about
• Who the book is about

And finally:

• What is at stake

Example of how to write a hook

Using this formula, the hook for Do No Harm became:

An organised crime ring abducts the child of a leading heart surgeon and gives her an ultimatum: kill a patient on the operating table or never see her son again.

‍Which is stronger: a doctor’s oath? Or a mother’s vow to protect her child?
‍—Jack Jordan’s hook for Do No Harm

Let’s break this down even further. When writing this hook, I included multiple key bits of information:

1. The protagonist, her job, and the novel’s setting: leading heart surgeon
2. The antagonist: organised crime ring  
3. The life-changing moment: given an ultimatum  
4. What’s at stake: never see her son again
5. What must be done to resolve the issue: kill a patient on the operating table
6. And finally, a question tied to the very premise of the novel—the moral dilemma—to leave the reader thinking: which is stronger: a doctor’s oath? Or a mother’s vow to protect her child?

In one line, this hook explains who the protagonist is, what they’re up against, and what they must do to survive, followed by a question that the reader is left to answer.

Once you think of your hook in this way, you’ll be able to write hooks in your sleep!

Now it’s time for you to write your hook. If you already have one, put it aside for now and see if you can come up with another using this format.

How to write a hook in 5 steps

Just answer these five key questions to write a killer hook:  

1. Who is the novel about? What keywords can you use to describe your protagonist? Is she a surgeon? Is he a father? Are they an addict struggling to get clean? What is their primary role or trait in your story?
2. What is at stake? What will your protagonist lose if they don’t achieve their goal? How can you describe your plot scenario in a way that has the recipient widening their eyes?
3. What must the protagonist do to achieve their goal?
4. Who or what is standing in their way?
5. And finally, what is the reader reading to find out? What lingering question (whether asked directly in the hook or whispering in the background) are you leaving the agent in the elevator with?

Have a play with this—not just with your novel, but with some of your favorite films or books. Practice really does make perfect. Can you write a great hook for your favorite book or film using this format?

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Examples of novel hooks

Examples from writing coaches at The Novelry

Below, I’ve laid out some examples of great novel hooks describing books written by the lovely writing coaches at The Novelry:

• Summer Fever by Kate Riordan: Married couple Laura and Nick move to Italy to save their marriage, purchasing a villa to host paying guests—but when their first couple arrives from America, it’s clear neither Madison nor Bastian are who they claim to be, and their quickly forged close relationships threaten to unravel the couples at the seams. One villa, two couples, but will either survive the summer?
• The Oleander Sword  by Tasha Suri: A magically gifted priestess and a prophesied empress must work together to destroy a tyrant emperor, for joining forces is the only way to save their kingdom from those who would rather see it burn—even if it threatens to cost them everything they hold dear...
• The Rumor by Lesley Kara: A mother shares a rumor at the school gates with devastating consequences...‍
• Hold Back the Stars by Katie Khan: A couple is falling through space with only 90 minutes of air remaining, intercut with their love story on a utopian Earth. Will they live? Will they sacrifice themselves for the other? And why are they in space together in the first place?

The thought of writing your hook might be slightly daunting, but having it tucked in your back pocket, ready to whip out at a second’s notice, will make your life so much easier in the long run!

No more scrambling to describe your book. A clear, concise description will reel in agents on submission and make a publisher desperate to read on. Follow these five steps, and you’ll have yourself a killer hook and an audience desperate to find out more.

Examples provided by The Novelry: hooks from famous novels

The most successful books of the past decade often have hooks that are easy to summarize in one line. For example, the hook for Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder: a stay-at-home mom becomes worried she’s turning into a dog.

Take, for another example, The List by Yomi Adegoke: a woman gets sent a whisper network list of ‘men to avoid in the industry’ and is ready to publicize it when she finds her own fiancé’s name on the list...

In Beth O’Leary’s The Flatshare, the title says it all: Tiffy and Leon share a bed. Tiffy and Leon have never met.

Here are even more examples of successful hooks:

• A woman starts reading a novel that mysteriously appears on her bedside table but soon realizes the novel is about her and is telling her darkest secret, which she thought no one knew... (Renee Knight, Disclaimer)
• The lives of light-skinned Black twins take a separate turn when one runs away to live a life passing as a white woman, and the other returns to the Deep South town they grew up in... (Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half )
• Lolita as told from the girl’s perspective... (Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa)
• The serial killer isn’t on trial; he’s on the jury... (Steve Cavanagh, Thirteen)
• Two children get on a train; only one gets off... (Andrea Mara, No One Saw a Thing)
• Kidnap a child to save your own... (Adrian McKinty, The Chain)‍
• A baby is abducted when the parents are at a dinner party next door... (Shari Lapena, The Couple Next Door)
• A curious Indian chef finds herself mixed up in murder... (Suk Pannu, Mrs. Sidhu Investigates)
• Gina is about to marry her boyfriend. George is about to join a cult lesbian pop band. Gina and George are the same person. No wonder Georgina is Double Booked... (Lily Lindon, Double Booked )
• When 16-year-old Deka discovers she cannot be killed, she faces an impossible choice: join an army of near-immortal girls or be destroyed... (Namina Forna, The Gilded Ones)
• In a world where fairy tales are recent history, two friends team up to break an ancient curse... (Angela Woolfe, Roxy & Jones and the Great Fairytale Cover-Up)
• Three nuns play the lottery... (Anne Booth, Small Miracles)

As you can see, the most effective hooks often combine intimate relationships with high-stakes crises.

At The Novelry, we teach story first, so the hook of your novel is the critical component to get right as early as possible. With one-on-one support from our team of bestselling writing coaches, you’ll come up with a one-line hook that fills you with excitement, ready to pitch to agents. Here are some examples of hooks from published graduates of The Novelry.

Hooks from graduates of The Novelry

• London, 1873. Mrs. Wood is London’s favorite spiritual medium, but when she takes on a young protegée, her livelihood is threatened... (Lucy Barker, The Other Side of Mrs. Wood )
• The day Scarlett dies, she takes the chance to go back in time to the one moment that could have changed everything... (Becky Hunter, One Moment)
• Three women get ready for one man about to be released from prison. One needs him, one loves him, and one wants him dead... (T.J. Emerson, The Ideal Man)

How to start writing your book

Notes from The Novelry

The moment you start writing is perhaps the most exciting of the writing process. But don’t worry if you also find it daunting! You have the whole world at your fingertips, with only the looming blank page as your (not insignificant) obstacle. And while all this freedom is one of the wonders of creative writing, it can also produce uncertainty. With no clear program or step-by-step process, it’s no wonder so many people have questions about how to start writing a book.

So if you’re right on the precipice, about to begin writing—or even if you’re just toying with the idea of writing fiction—know that you’re not alone in your doubts and curiosities. And know, too, that writing a book isn’t as formidable a task as it might seem.

For now, don’t think of it as creating an entire book or obsess over the shape your writing career might take. Instead, go step-by-step, one writing session at a time.

At The Novelry, we’ll help you to bite the bullet and start writing the best story of your life. We’ll help you create a realistic writing schedule and a sustainable writing routine that brings not just productivity but joy. We are, after all, the home of happy writing!

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