HOOKED

This weekend I woke up my kids at the crack of dawn for the annual “Hooked on Fishing, Not On Drugs” day. This is an annual event which I’ve missed for the last five years, but I stumbled across the article in the local paper on Friday. I was so excited. My father fished all the time and I always enjoyed the times we went together. This is something I wanted my own children to experience again, even though none of us know how to use a fishing pole.

Kiwi spent the night at her friend’s house (they live in the condo below ours) but came home early specifically to go fishing. My son wasn’t as enthusiastic. We dragged him out of the house kicking and screaming, “I’m an inside person.” He even has a T-shirt with this very sentiment blazed across the front in bright blue letters.

I thought we left early enough, but by 7:30 a.m. we still had to park half a mile away. The lake was packed. People stood crowded along the bank, dodging each others casts into the water. The lake had been stocked with approximately 8,000 pounds of channel catfish. We watched kids pulling out catfish that were larger than they were, but my son was the only one in my family to catch anything.

And he caught me.

Yes, that is a worm threaded on a hook caught in my hair. It took much patience and skill to detangle that darn hook. The same can be said when it comes to writing. We see the word all the time. There is the opening hook in the query letter. It is a sentence intricately crafted to grab the agents’ attention and keep them from hitting the delete button. There’s the first page of your manuscript, which is supposed to hook the reader and entice them into buying your book. There is the cliffhanger ending of your chapter or scene which should keep the person from putting your book down. I’m sure you see where I’m going with this, right?

So, what do you think? How do you hook your readers?

HANGING OVER A CLIFF

As a teenager, I had a bit of a daredevil streak. It’s not that I’m overly brave; I just hate to be afraid. If I was scared of something, I had the overwhelming need to facedown that particular fear. I refused to own it or let it control me.

Plus, I got a kick out of the adrenaline rush. I call it my young and stupid phase. Thankfully, I survived it; although, I had some close calls.

My dad got stationed in California the year I graduated from high school, and I decided I didn’t want to stay by my lonesome in Kansas, so I moved with my folks. I had just finished my first college semester. I still lived at home, and I felt stifled by m parent’s rules. I wanted to live life on my own terms to see if I could. I think a lot of kids on the cusp of adulthood go through growing pains at this age.

I was studying to be a Wildlife Biologist at the time, and I thought it would be a good experience for me to join the California Conservation Corps (CCC). I thought I would be working in one of the State Parks fighting wildfires and communing with nature. Instead, I was sent to San Pedro, CA (basically, Los Angeles), and I worked in the kitchen.

Still, for three months, I was free from my loving, slightly overprotective parents. It was wonderful. And it sucked eggs.

 I learned a few things from this experience:

      1)      I could survive on my own.

  2)      I wasn’t ready to be on my own.

I also learned to never to go dirt surfing off of the edge of a cliff.

There is a brief moment when you’re hanging onto the edge by the tips of your fingers when you think, “Damn, this is stupid.”

The ocean below a 20 feet drop looks kind of welcoming in a terrifying way, especially when the alternative is smashing against the rocks. I was fortunate. I missed both. I fell, hit a rock-free patch of sand, then rolled (a lot) until I fetched up on the beach. I had some bruises and scraps, no broken bones, and a new-found fear of falling/heights, which I combat by forcing myself to climb really high ladders and rappel off of buildings. My kids take after me in this respect. Kiwi almost reached the top of this rock climbing wall

Me, and my son, M- age 4- 2006

Kiwi- age 6- 2006

Which is why I want to acknowledge the importance of CLIFFHANGER.

When a reader gets to the end of a chapter they are faced with a choice: to turn the page or put the book down. You, the writer, want them to keep reading. To keep them engaged, they need to feel like I did while hanging over that stupid cliff and wondering what’s going to happen next. Are the characters going to survive—emotionally, physically or are they doomed to fall onto the jagged rocks below?

 So, how do you deal with those pesky chapter endings? Do you like a good cliffhanger?