Great hooks

I recently volunteered to be a judge for a contest to help out a friend. I printed out the entries I'm slated to judge (the contest is all "electronic" but I have to hold something to really be able to read it - and a laptop doesn't count) and read my first entry yesterday afternoon.

Now, I should preface this by saying I often forget to point out the positive things when I'm judging or critiquing. I mostly point out the areas that are confusing to me, are not consistent or where typos are involved. It's not that I don't find things that are really good and strong in a story, it's just that I usually forget to point those things out. (Bad Lucy!)

So anyway, I'm reading my first entry and the first sentence (which is also the whole first paragraph) is great. We're talking great hook, great opening, made me excited to want to read more, kind of first sentence. Really, really good. So good that I actually remembered to make a note of it on the contest entry.

And that's where it stopped being good. I literally had to read the second paragraph about five times to understand what the author was trying to say, and even then I wanted to change it - dramatically. In fact, it could have been eliminated altogether, in my opinion.

This was followed by a page or so of - in my opinion - unnecessary backstory stuff. And then we get back into the story, where I read another page or two before it dawned on me...nothing after the first sentence is in any way, shape or form, connected to the first sentence. The wonderful, perfect sentence that had me excited for more didn't really seem to fit in the story that was unfolding. I made note of that on the entry - where in the story it dawned on me that the story was not connected to the opening sentence.

I finished reading the entry and never did find anything to connect the unfolding story to the first sentence. It was kind of strange to me.

I've heard that you only get a few lines (to paragraphs) to hook your reader, and if you don't, you've lost them forever. I've also heard that whatever you promise in the opening lines (paragraphs) you better deliver, or else expect the same result of the hook.

This entry definitely hooked me with the first line but I was so disappointed that it didn't follow through on the promise it made with that first line. Fortunately that's not part of the judging criteria. However, it does ask you to judge if the story, as presented, can sustain a novel (or something like that). I had to say that it was really hard to tell, based on what was submitted. This is one (and I made this comment too) that I would have liked to either read more or read a synopsis on because I couldn't tell anything about where it was going. We had to judge the "chemistry" of the hero and heroine (even if they hadn't met yet) as well. There was only one male mentioned in the entry and the interaction between him and the heroine was the equivalent of a bartender in a bar saying "here's your drink ma'am," and having no further contact with the heroine. I have to assume he's NOT the hero (meaning the hero wasn't even introduced in the entry), and if he is, there wasn't enough there to form an opinion.

Anyway, I guess the bottom line (or the point of this post) is, hooks are great but they need to relate to your story, otherwise you're just throwing unrelated one-liners into your story. They might be good. They might be funny. But if they take your reader out of the story, or kill their enthusiasm for the story, then they're not really doing their job, now are they?