Writing style
Characters (including, wanting to hang out with a character)
Emotion
World (including, wanting to be there, sounding real)
Situation
Items
Unanswered questions (curiosity)
Juxtaposition
Time bomb
Fresh take
Bait and switch but with caution
In media res
Combinations of any of the above

Any more?

A hook that promises exploration of a world we'd rather not visit in person but would explore with interest from the safety of an armchair.

There's a lot of literature that does this, exploring what it's like to be an orphan, a victim of violence or war, in autobiographical form.

Dystopian SF works this way too, exploring miserable futures in hope of avoiding them--1984 was one such classic.

I've encountered anecdotes about writers who communicated with their contemporaries. Whitman, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson touched base with each other and influenced each's writing. Ezra Pound, the Fitzgeralds, Faulkner, and Hemingway met regularly and discussed writing, sometimes contentiously, always passionately. In science fiction, there's Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin, the Killer B's.

I have a small group of writer-readers that serves my purposes in parallel with online writing workshops. I have yet to find a good match with a novel writer, though. Too many issues to address, too much clutter, not enough subtance, little, if any, return so far.

Say you advertised in the library or got involved in the local night school as a teacher of writing, and assigned your students to find the examples you're looking for. (Heck, having their students do their research is a time-honored tradition of university professors, why not you?)

My group is a result of cultivating contacts. Sometimes it's been less than ideal. A lot of false starts with writers who were merely looking for an approving audience and not in engaging meaningfully, egos that get in the way of the process. Lately, my recent breakthroughs came as a direct result of discussion within the group, and some influence from discussions on forums.

Online correspondence does one thing that face-to-face doesn't. It forces the conversation into the written word, which is in the final analysis the medium of the craft. Allowances for completion of a train of thought without interruption and time to reflect are other advantages online has over face-to-face discussions. But for me, the biggest advantages are not having to travel to meet, additional incurrred expenses are low if not nonexistent, not having to meet in settings that unsettle my crowd agoraphobia, and not having to adjust my appearance and behaviors to accommodate other's sentiments, like, I smoke. And lastly, not being put in an awkward position by carbohydrate bribes or confronted with requirements to make purchases at a vendor venue, say, in food and beverage service establishments, like where the local writers' groups meet hereabouts.

I'm trying to find like-minded writers on line. How many do you see coming out of the woodwork here? I'll just keep trying. Maybe again next year.

Is there any 13-line part of one of these books that you could quote in a "Help Me Find Examples" topic here?

If you pick one thing at a time that you'd like examples of, then we could get a discussion going on that one thing. And then we coul get one going on the next thing, and so on.

Suppose we started with backstory. Now there is a limited but crucial subject that everybody could probably use some exercising in.

What are the reasons for backstory?
According to BETWEEN THE LINES, there are four main reasons.
1) raising the stakes
2) revealing motivations
3) expressing innermost fears
4) revealing obstacles
Can anyone out there think of any others?

And, how is backstory accomplished. What are the vehicles for it, as BETWEEN THE LINES puts it?

Summary
Dialogue
Flashback
Introspection
Dreams and nightmares
Prologues

You can talk about them all you like. I have books and books which do that very thing. But examples teach by showing rather than telling and that's where the whole process breaks down. Few if any examples exist to show what all the talk is about.

Why not use this approach instead of the study-and-discuss approach that you're finding so hard to establish? (I think it's almost certainly doomed because you have to find writers who want to read the same standard texts as do you, who want to explore the same issues, who share similar tastes in reading, and who are at roughly the same stage of writerly development--a vanishingly small set of people, methinks.)

To your question about backstory, the main reason for having a backstory for me is to establish the milieu, its history, technology, politics and the relationships between them, in order to understand, as the author, the motivations for the characters and the constraints within which they must live, love, learn and fight. Backstory lends authenticity, richness and texture to a story. Without it, events, locations and technolgy can appear contrived, with their use as plot devices transparent to the reader. I write as much or as little backstory (in a document separate to the story, for my reference only) as I feel I need to write the story.

It doesn't all have to be given to the reader. I think the most powerful way to deliver it to the reader is in the natural flow of the story. Vehicles that might or might not be implied by your book's list include having a character to whom things must be explained (Star Trek's Picard needs everything explained to him by one or another officer), not explaining it at all and leaving it as texture (Firefly's characters swear in Chinese but we're never told why; their swearing adds colour and we can tell from context what they're annoyed about) or having the main character just go visit an expert for an explanation (James Bond learned about gold markets from an interesting eccentric).

Another way to present backstory is to insert a scene for the purpose. In Goldfinger, for example, it's important we understand the lethal nature of Odd Job's hat, so the movie contrives to have Odd Job throw his hat to behead a stone statue at the end of the golfing sequence; later, our sense of jeopardy always increases when we see the hat, and more when he takes it off and prepares to throw it.

But here's the thing: I think that finding fresh ways of giving the reader the backstory is a big part of the art of writing fiction. I've read about it in more than one writing book and feel I've learned what I can from analysis. Now, it's down to crafting my fiction such that the backstory is woven into the fabric of the story: it's as though I understand the weaving process, now I must learn to use it to produce the patterns and textures I want.

For a book on writing that includes examples, have you tried "The Craft of Writing Science Fiction that Sells" by Ben Bova? It includes four parts, on character, background, conflict and plot. Each part includes a chapter on theory, a complete short story written by Bova, and a chapter on practice which analyses how the theory was applied in the story.

I think the main reasons for the lack of response is the time of the year (upcoming holidays) and tight schedules. I spread myself very thin - and as much as I would enjoy the scholarly discussion, it is already hard for me to find the time to actually write.

Either fortunately or unfortunately (depending on one's POV), I studied all of the technical mumbo-jumbo (the why's and whenceforth's) in college, and I don't think any of it necessarily made me a better writer. Many of my ideas about writing are now considered archaic, and I am having to relearn much of the art according to today's standards.

Regarding your question about back-stories: I used to do indepth biographies and geneologies of my characters. I have always been interested in history, and I patterned much of my early approach to writing after Tolkien. That said, I now find that my writing has a natural tendency to flow both directions. By that, I mean that as I am writing a story and the character acts or reacts to events or "tells" a little about himself, I automatically create a back-story. I suddenly think about possible prequels to how he/she got to this moment.