@Doublelattemama has asked why I’m limiting the hooks to 150 words. Is that really how long a novel’s hook is supposed to be?
Well, the first part of that answer is that that’s as long as I can handle if I’m doing multiple hooks for free every week. I had to put a limit on it or face the possibility that I’d get something from someone like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who wrote most of his novels as all one paragraph.
But the other part is the part that really matters, and that’s that if you don’t get more than 150 words’ worth of my time, you don’t really get more than that of an agent’s or new reader’s time, either. The standard format for a manuscript is to start halfway down the first page and double-space. Assuming around 250 words/page—which is also standard—that means you have around 125 words to catch an agent’s interest with your first page and inspire them to keep reading onto page two. If they get to the bottom of that first page and are yawning, well. . .they’ve got a whole stack of other writers’ sample pages to get through today. They’re in kind of a hurry.
And new readers are even less loyal!
The shorter the hook, the more powerful the punch. You don’t just want the agent to get to the bottom of your first page awake. (The new reader will give up before that, but agents tend to be pretty courteous.) You want them to get there in an all-fired hurry to keep reading onto page two because this book has got them in its grip.
Take a look at To begin with, Marlowe was dead—. He packed it all into a short three-sentence paragraph. AND he got an allusion to Dickens in there, too! (Which I missed until he pointed it out.)
All you need to do with a hook is grab the reader’s attention, make them curious about your story, and give them an unexpected little flip in the air off the end. If you can do that in one sentence, I say go for it! It helps if they can tell something about the genre right off the bat, but you still have a decent-sized half-page in which to make that clear while you get both their lapels firmly in your fists—before they arrive at that yawning Abyss of Decision called the bottom of the page.