A NOVEL Writing Site.com » Hooks

Processing Contest Entries

lynn — Tue, 04 May 2010 19:48:02 +0000

If you entered our first annual writing contest, you will receive confirmation within a day or two to let you know that your entry reached us and is being processed.

If you do NOT receive a confirmation email from us confirming your entry, please leave a comment or email us at yoursbecausehis@gmail.com to inquire.

Entrants should expect to receive results in early June.

Our thanks to everyone who entered. If you only thought about entering, we hope you’ll join us next year!

More About the First Annual (First Ever) NOVELWritingSite.com Writing Contest

lynn — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 09:00:10 +0000

Again this week, let me remind you about our first ever Annual NOVELWritingSite.com contest.

Hopefully throughout the fall semester, you’ve been trying out some of your new skills on stories of your own. Is it working?

We’re offering you the opportunity to have professional writers take a look at the first twelve pages of your story and give you some positive feedback and ideas.

I realize that may sound a little scary for some people. When I started writing, there were many stories that I didn’t let anyone read. Not friends. Not even family. Sometimes especially not friends or family. I put a lot of myself into those stories, so I was really sensitive about people’s responses. Suggestions that my story was flawed in any way made me feel like I, personally, had failed to meet approval. But who would understand those fears better than a fellow writer? It’s safe to say that your entry will be read by kind and sympathetic volunteers who like stories and like to encourage people who write them.

If that doesn’t make you feel more confident, try this: In at least the first round, no one will know who wrote the story. Names will be removed, so we won’t know who you are until it’s time to send out the results. If this is your debute, we’ll let you “sing from behind the curtain”–totally incognito.

Sounding better?

Here’s what to do:

Select a story that you feel reflects your best efforts–something you wrote independently.
Make sure you’re subscribed by email or RSS Fed to www.aNOVELWritingSite.com. Only regular readers may enter, but subscribing is easy. Just follow the directions in the left side bar under “Subscribe.”
Send the first 12 pages of your story by midnight, May 1, 2010 as an email attachment. Your submission should be typed, double-spaced with 1″ margins, in Times New Roman font (12 pitch size) and saved as a Word document in Rich Text format. Please use a header to show the title of your story and the page number on each page, but do not include your name in the header. If you know the genre of your story, you may include that information also.
In the body of your email, please be sure to tell us your name and the name of your story. If you could tell us something about yourself, how far along you are in your story, or how long you’ve been writing, that would be interesting as well.
Entries will be critiqued by one or more of our contributors.
Categories will depend somewhat on how many entries we receive from writers of various ages in each genre. Winning entries in each category will receive a full critique and a copy of A Novel Idea: Best Advice on Writing Inspirational Fiction, a compilation of tips from best-selling Christian novelists. This is a really good book!

So be brave! Take the challenge! There’s really nothing to lose but your jitters. And don’t forget to subscribe to receive this blog regularly.

Best wishes for a happy new year from your friends at aNOVELWritingSite.com!

Writing Lesson 4 – Building Beginnings

naomi — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:00:39 +0000

Start Your Story with a Writing Hook

“Where do I begin…?” That’s the opening line of a famous song. It’s also a big question we face every time we sit down to write. It doesn’t matter if it’s a story, play, poem, essay, or a letter to a friend. Whatever the case, beginnings matter, and they are one of the most difficult parts of a project to determine.

Many writers simply sit down and speel off the first opening that comes to mind and go with that. It’s like they’ve been trained by Facebook to just dump any old thought. But really good writers rarely keep the first beginning they write. They cut it, shape it, replace it, hammer and chisel it, and in moments of complete exasperation, they stomp on it and burn it. (Kidding! I hope…)

Really, without the right beginning, no one may ever read any further.

Beginnings must have “hooks”, something that’s going to suck a reader in. The beginning of a story you’ve written may inspire you a lot, because you know what’s coming on page 43, but will that beginning inspire someone who doesn’t know and doesn’t yet care?

Readers (and editors) get bored by long, picturesque beginnings describing scenery and weather. And they despise beginnings that try to fill us in very quickly on background information that took place before the story even starts. “He was very young when he was born…” (Ha Ha). That’s called an “information dump”, and just like a garbage dump, an editor will think it stinks! Information dumps tell us all sorts of things about a character’s history that doesn’t have to be told. It’s important that we know their history, but we shouldn’t try to give it all to the reader at once, especially not at the beginning.

Beginnings should introduce us to the main character right away, and we should be able to very quickly sense that they are in a crisis. It can be a big, obvious crisis, like being captured by pirates; or, it can be a more subtle crisis, such as a character learning that her family is going to be moving across the country, and she happens to be terribly afraid of drastic changes.

It is important that beginnings actually start in the right place. Sometimes writers complete an opening chapter, then cut off the first third of it and start there, where it really should have opened to begin with.

EXERCISES:

Select several favorite books off the shelf and read the first page or two. What does the writer do to hook you in? How is the main character introduced? What is the first line? (Copy down opening lines or paragraphs that strike you as a reader. It’ll train you to think about your own opening lines.)
As you read, note any opening passages, paragraphs, or sentences you feel like skipping over. Why do you?
Take a story you’re working on and re-write the beginning another way. It could be from a different character’s POV (point of view), or from a different moment in the action. –Or– Start a new story, and come up with at least two entirely different beginnings. Which one works best and why?