Although I agree that's good advice, I wonder how many people (not editors, but readers) pass judgment on a story when reading the first page or so.

For myself, I finish every short story I start reading. I feel it's a small investment of time, and I want to know what the writer had to say. I usually buy a novel because of good reviews or because I like the author. Again, I plan on reading it through.

I tend not to even form an opinion about whether I like something until a couple scenes in (for a story), or a chapter or two (for a novel).

I may be atypical, because my purchasing decisions are pretty premeditated (I subscribe to magazines, I order books on line, rather than "impulse buy").

Of the two I can recall, one didn't give me a clear protagonist. A hundred pages in and I don't know WHO this story is about. That one was by a famous author, too. Maybe that's why it got published.

1) For a known and beloved author, I don't need the hook, I will buy without reading, whether online or in print. The same goes for a known anthology editor, or a magazine I like.
2) For book or short story by an author unknown to me, and that I'm reading for free online or from a library, I'll often pick it up with just as brief a glimpse.
3) If I'm going to spend money on an author new to me, no matter how popular, or how well recommended the book comes, the hook better be very good, and very interesting.

There are simply way too many interesting books out there to spend time on something that takes too long to catch my interest.

Having said that, I usually finish short stories, since they take so little time, and will give the library books two or three chapters to really hook me before I give up.

Carol

P.S. I do have a tendency to give up more often on books I get from the library, because I browse far & wide from my usual categories of reading. My selection criteria is much less picky than when buying, since I'm not really taking a chance. I've found absolutely wonderful, mind-stretching reads, though!

Having said that about short stories, though, I think we get too hung up on "hook". I may be uttering some kind of blasphemy, but I think all this emphasis on the first 13, or hook, kind of misses the point.

A "hook" can just be good writing. Is the writer in command? Is there confidence? Do we trust the first few sentences to deliver to a satisfying conclusion?

For example, O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and Jackson's "The Lottery" are famous short stories, but I don't think there's anything inherently "hooky" in the opening. Based on some of the criticisms of the first 13 challenges, I can imagine what our criticisms of these first 13 would be, and I don't think they would be good criticisms.

Not to say one can't have some kind of hook. Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" comes to mind; I mean, if that doesn't hook you, nothing will.

Again, though, I think we've become too focused on a "hook", the first 13, instead of telling the story the way it should be told: the best of our ability and with confidence. I don't know anyone that would put down a story after the first 13 lines or first two paragraphs. Maybe after a page, but not before.

Aristotle speaks of a story's dramatic action beginning with a first cause. He doesn't go into detail about what a first cause's purposes and wherefore's and how's are. He notes that it properly belongs in a beginning, not in a middle or ending. I understand a first cause to be an inciting or exciting moment in a story, when a reader becomes aware of a protagonist's predicament, as soon also as does the protagonist.

Freytag goes into greater detail about beginnings, but avoids Aristotle's terminology. In The Technique of the Drama Freytag amply covers what makes a dramatic opening. Passionate characters coming into collision, internal and external struggles upsetting the emotional equilbrium of the focal characters, action and reaction, and unity of purpose and problem and desire. In my shorthand flashcard, logical causation, tension, antagonism, and dramatic magnitude in character, context, and predicament are the parts of beginnings that are critical, as well as necessary throughout a story. In one passage Freytag summarizes the principle;

"Without forcing all possible cases into the same uniform mould, therefore, the poet may hold firmly to this: the construction of a regular introduction is as follows: a clearly defining keynote, a finished scene, a short transition into the first moment of the excited action.
 The Exciting Force.--The beginning of the excited action (complication) occurs at a point where, in the soul of the hero, there arises a feeling or volition which becomes the occasion of what follows; or where the counter-play resolves to use its lever to set the hero in motion. Manifestly, this impelling force will come forward more significantly in those plays in which the chief actor governs the first half by his force of will; but in any arrangement, it remains an important motive force for the action."

A story's plot begins movement with the exciting force (keynote). Readers are immersed through the exciting force.

For me, the priority of a beginning is establishing a sympathetic connection between a reader and a story's premises or the protagonist. The feature of which is giving a reader reason to care about the protagonist's predicament (complication of the exciting force), which should (must) elicit an emotional response in a reader, ideally a cluster of pity and fear. Then suspense is built in by posing and artfully delaying the answer to the question of how will the protagonist address the predicament, middle; and what will the accomodation to the outcome of the predicament be, which is the ending.

Any delay in establishing the sympathetic connection is, to me, fatal to a story, incorporating and maintaining suspense notwithstanding. Sympathy and suspense drive the vertical movement of plot, tension.

I think a hook is still important. The sooner I'm engaged with a book the better I like it and the more I push it to other people. Also most of us on this site love reading but I know lots of people who think of reading like exercise. They think it's a good thing to do and they want to get around to doing it, but they don't. A hook at the beginning helps.

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So when you start reading a novel of the OSC's Shadow Saga and the first thing you see is an email, does that act as the hook?

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If your name is Orson Scott Card it does.

With novels you better have an interesting story from page one. A good idea on the back cover can get me to try page two, but if I feel your writing is lame -- you aren't going to sell me the book. Not at the bookstore. The library -- I might give you a few pages, but the idea should be interesting and the execution at least on a journeyman level.

I do read some mind candy. But even there the writing has to be a professional level of competence.

I'm not forgiving of a hack piece. There are several authors whose work dropped in quality and I subsequently stopped buying.

There enough well-written novels out there that I don't feel any obligation to suffer through something that wouldn't rate even an honorable mention from WOTF. I'll read poor work to critique, but not for leisure.

For me, "hook" is a very general term. I can be hooked by a concept, an idea, a problem, a character, strong imagery, surreal juxtaposition, attractive writing style, optimistic energy, an author's name, intriguing blurb or an editor's recommendation, to mention but few.

For a novel, I give it more time, but it's still got to grab me. I might stop after 50 pages if the story still doesn't interest me. If the writer is clearly not to my taste I would stop sooner.

I did buy a book today after looking at Page One. The hook did intrigue me. But the main reason was the track record of the writer---the book itself was a collection of old (and some very old) short SF stories by a writer I generally like to read (though not a writer in my top ten or twenty.)

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is because first readers in a publishing house have so many stories they have to read in a limited amount of time. That's why they normally don't read past the first page if the story doesn't grab their interest.

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My experience has indicated to me that this just isn't always the case. Now you do say "publishing house" so maybe your refering specifically to major publishing companies...but my experience submitting to a wide range of both online and print magazines has indicated that many of them do NOT have some sort of rule about only reading the first 13. A friend whose a slush reader for a minor publication told me he almost always reads the entire thing. I've gotten many personal responses from various editors that included feedback that indicated they had to have read all or most of the piece.

Personally, I've been reading so much lately, that I just don't like having to wait 10-30% or even 50% of the book before it gets to what the heck is really going on. Give me something worth investing in NOW. I don't NEED 50+ pages of "set up" I know we're writers and want to show off how much work we put into making the characters and the world they're in but ....*sigh* we can do better to entertain from the get go and we can keep them hooks on every page. (Ever read a book you just COULDN'T put down? THAT's what I'm talking about.)

Just my two bits

The following transcript gives a bit of an insight into what the editors at the bigger spec fiction magazines (both online and print) think.

http://www.abyssandapex.com/200704-editorial.html

My interpretation of their discussion of the hook is as follows:

1) A bad three or four paragraphs is going to get your story put down straight away. By "bad", it clearly has to demonstrate that you can't get the simple mechanics right. After that, how much time they give the story depends on how big the magazine is and the slush reader's patience. A good 50% of editors at the bigger magazines will only give it a page. If they've got 1000 stories to read through, 10 that are good enough to publish and 1 slot for publishing a story by an unknown, it's not the story that takes until page 5 to get going which is going to be chosen. In all cases, it's better to have a good beginning than not to have one. They're not going to wait until the end for the story to "make sense" because their readers won't either. They read until the point where they think their readers will. If all goes well, they forget about the hook and go deep into the story.

2)A "hook" can be a lot of different things. As per a quote from the transcript, if you write well enough, you can get away with anything.

Regards,

Short stories that come my way, if published, I'll read regardless. Stories offered for publication consideration, I'll give them a chance. If the first sentence doesn't contain dramatic movement, that's it, I'm out. Having read many, many manuscripts for scrutinizing what works and what doesn't, if the first sentence doesn't contain dramatic movement, the rest is unlikely to be worth reading. I know that's harsh, but after seeing the same defects in multitudes, there's going to be little benefit from reading on and finding only further identical defects. I'm burned out on critiquing in general.

The ones that stall after a good first sentence, I'll give a longer read. If dramatic movement progresses, if the story continues to moves forward, I'll read it for the enjoyment of it. If not, I switch hats and disappointedly assume analysis mode. If the story throws me out sooner or later, doesn't move me, I decipher why, and figure out what might be done about it. If I've read all the way through without noting any egregious disruptions, I'll go back and look for less apparent defects and determine where the story went awry. I do that last with published stories, too.

But there is another type of book that will feel like it's leading up to something climatic. I call these types of books sleepers. They seem very uninteresting and not saying much at all at the beginning, but something in the back of your mind tells you to keep reading, and the author will drop a bombshell off in your lap that'll knock your socks of and leave you saying, "Oh... my... God!"

I love these types of novels, and one of the best I've ever read was TREASURE BOX by our very own Orson Scott Card. I was so bored with the first few chapters and almost quit reading when Mr. Card hit me with that bombshell. The rest of the book was one of the best I've ever read and did not disappoint.

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Just curious extrinsic, how do you define "dramatic movement" in the context of a single, first sentence?

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A workable definition is a feature that stimulates emotion. How's it done? Situating contrasting ideas, a collision of characters, robust verbs and nouns, in medias res, struggle, passion, at least one of any of many possibilities is needed. There's no singular method, per se. How's it defective? The weakest I see regularly is a static tell of what a character is doing, He sat on a stool watching the bird on the branch. The gerund verb is a tip-off, the nouns and pronoun nondescript. Sitting, standing, waiting, watching, etc., telling static action that's not dramatic, per se. Forms of to be constructions are another tip-off, but not necessarily so. He was sitting on a stool. But the opening of many entertaining stories begin with such constructions. From Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities;

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct
the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present
period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its
being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree
of comparison only."

Beautiful prosaic aliteration in repetition of "it was," however, the concepts sing with contrast and opposition, resonate with my experiences and stimulate my emotions. As an introduction, for me, it promises a story full of emotional strife and potently posed questions that I'm eager to see answered. Conspiratorial first person plural, too, a sublime appeal for sympathetic resonance. In the old style of drama, an introduction establishes the backstory and introduces settings and principal characters at the beginning and eventually gets around to the first cause and exciting moment. Today's fickle readers don't care for that structure, but it still works for me as long as there's dramatic movement from the first sentence.

My favorite of Aesop's Fables, "The Miser and His Gold."

"Once upon a time there was a Miser who used to hide his gold at the foot of a tree in his garden; but every week he used to go and dig it up and gloat over his gains. A robber, who had noticed this, went and dug up the gold and decamped with it. When the Miser next came to gloat over his treasures, he found nothing but the empty hole. He tore his hair, and raised such an outcry that all the neighbours came around him, and he told them how he used to come and visit his gold. 'Did you ever take any of it out?' asked one of them."

In the first sentence is the enticements of wealth, the vice of greed, establishing an emotionally stimulating beginning. A collision of characters in the second sentence.

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In my critiquing experience, I've seen quite a lot of stories that start out with an ordinary character, doing his everyday ordinary routine, and the prose itself is good but nothing out of the ordinary. With many stories I suggest starting the story at the time when the protagonist's life changes. Starting with a day like any other makes it very hard to draw the reader in.

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Sadly, I expect that characterizes some of my stories...in the sense that the plot launches in the first scene, but not necessarily in the first sentence or first paragraph. As a reader, it would never occur to me to balk at reading four or five paragraphs of a character's daily routine before an intriguing, irreversible event happens. (In fact, I kind of like the sense of orientation it provides.)

The only books I can recall not finishing are:

"Atlas Shrugged" mostly because Rand's philosophical ideas were moronic and heavy handed.

"Dark Tower: Book 1" by Stephen King, because I didn't like any of the characters, and didn't care to read 7 books about them.

The agent/editor and the reader, who's bought the book.

If you don't get the start right for the agent/editor, you'll never make it to the reader. So as a survival technique, the interest has to be piqued as soon a possible.

It's a pretty safe bet that readers are more tolerant. However if you bruise their interest, they will put it down.

On a personal level, nothing makes me drop a book faster than massive gratuitous sex or excessive profanity. I have had some hard times slugging it through on longer books like Neal Stephanson's Quicksilver. I haven't given up, but it's a tough read in places.

I'll usually pick up a book by an author I like without reading any of it at all - I expect that they can deliver.

For authors I'm unfamiliar with, I'll read the first page or three in the bookstore. I'm less concerned with my attention being grabbed by something amazing (unless it's a thriller), than with the writing style and the pace. If it's going nowhere, it's too wordy, or replete with overt spelling and grammar errors (it does happen!) it goes down and I check out the next book.

As such, I typically read the first page or so of a novel, and then flip randomly to somewhere in the middle and read an excerpt. Too often have I read a book that started off great and that nosedived in the middle but I slogged through for stubborness alone. Some may call this a dangerous habbit (the random middle reading) because you can accidentaly learn something that was supposed to be a suprise, but it helps learn whether a book is written consistently well or if it just has a polished opening.

For short stories, I am far more lenient and will read the whole thing once I've started. Though a good start always improves my enjoyment of the story.