Ellen McCarthy - Writing Hooks

Intrigue and suspense are the tent poles of a good crime novel.  No other genre relies so heavily on hooking in the reader from the start.  You cannot have a slow burning crime novel, it just does not work.  Understanding and doing are two different things. With that in mind, we asked Poolbeg Crimson author Ellen McCarthy to tell us how. 

So you want to write a book and the question playing on your mind is where do I start? With a strong character, a vivid scene or as Stephen King says, start with a ‘what if’ question? I think Mr King is on to something because there are so many situations we have all faced on a daily basis that could have gone horribly wrong; those squirming little fears that burrow into our brains making us jump at shadows – what if I got into the wrong car when I hitched as a kid? Why is that person sitting directly behind me in the cinema when the theatre is completely empty? The more innocuous these moments seem; the more frightful the potential consequences.

When writing ‘Silent Crossing’ I started with a scene. Melanie Yeats the central character woke up alone on the floor of her kitchen. As her eyes travel upwards she sees someone looking in through her window directly at her. I saw Melanie clearly – she was a complete mess – at rock bottom, isolated and alone and I wanted to know why. The book grew from there. That visual image did its job anchoring Melanie in my mind’s eye - exciting my curiosity as to why she was so low that morning. What was her story? But the scene never made it into the book. As the book progressed I didn’t need it any more. Once you’ve started and the characters are ready to run that’s where I think the hook really becomes important. You grab your readers in the first few sentences. I started ‘Silent Crossing’ with an unnamed driver in 1992 Boston.

“A searing pain was starting to retreat to a dull throb, allowing him to finally open his eyes and focus them. All he could see was a shattered windscreen smeared with a film of red blood.”

It was a long way into the book before you found out that he was or how his story connected with Melanie’s. That was my mission – hook the reader into the two story lines and keep them with me until finally the two stories came together and all was revealed.

Mickey Spillane once said ‘the first page sells the book. The last page sells the next book’.  When writing my first novel “Guarding Maggie” I wrote the prologue introducing a man with a lot of anger and a deeply held grudge as he followed an old man to his death. Then I worked out the last chapter, which revealed his motives. But now I needed to cross the forty plus chapters in between. The best way to do this was to treat each chapter almost as a book in itself – make it so that they have to get to the end and can’t wait to start another one. This is the way most people read – a chapter at lunchtime with your coffee or a couple of chapters before you go to sleep at night. You’ve hooked the reader and you have to make the intervening chapters worthwhile so they want to stay to the last page even if that means keeping them up all night.

But readers are tough, none more so than crime readers. They enjoy the puzzle of a good crime novel; being tantalised with the expectation of a big reveal along the way. To do this, be your own harshest critic – weed out any self-indulgent meanderings, which can drag the pace and slow the narrative while keeping an eye on baggy prose. A crime reader expects to be challenged. Introduce your main characters early; draw them and your reader into your mystery. Drip feed information, do not reveal too much too soon. Leave a trail of breadcrumbs and lead your reader towards the end. 

Is a carefully thought out plot necessary to achieve this or can you let yourself write to the end and see where things go? I tend to start and see where the book takes me. I think that if I’m surprised by what emerges, then so will my readers. A word of warning, if you can write yourself into a corner, you may need to back track and pick up the thread somewhere else or start again. The secret to a good book is rewriting. That’s how I weave my plot together and keep the story sharp – lots of rewrites. To help me at this point I take out a blank sheet of paper and write down in a few lines what the book is actually about. Think of it as a sales pitch to yourself. My pitch for ‘Guilt Ridden’ was the following.

‘A manuscript drops on Amy Devine’s desk. Is it fiction or does the writer really know what happened to her cousin Ruth who disappeared without trace, fifteen years previously. Where is the writer leading her?’

Following this, do a short analysis of each character, their motives, back-story and relationships to each other. Do they ring true? Are they still relevant to my pitch? When I do this I see a number of possibilities for the ending. I hope this enables me to give the reader a satisfyingconclusion……….. or an unexpected twist.

(c) Ellen McCarthy, August 2011

For more on Ellen, visit http://www.ellenmccarthy.ie/