Monday: Hooked on Hooks Critique

Please send your hooks our way (thegoodhook(at)yahoo(dot)com). Until then, here's another one from Kimberly Zook in a short story titled "An Abbreviated Mother."

Evelyn’s shapeless gray shirt and jeans faded into the crowd as she picked at the only blip of emotion registering on her face: bewilderment at the women surrounding her on the pier. The newly minted wives chimed and jangled in their charms as they arched upward in their stilettos. Less complicated wives, the ones draped in sleeping newborns, beckoned their toddlers to jump higher on the San Diego pier as the naval ship sailed under the Coronado Bridge. Evelyn drifted with the crowd down the pier, feeling foolish as she continued to wave farewell to hundreds of strangers on the ship, her new husband among them. Stan stood somewhere behind the reflective glass of the bridge, destined for an eight month deployment.  Evelyn turned toward the throng of recently married wives until an insistent tug on the hem of her shirt reminded her of her new station in life: a stepmother to Stan’s children, Jack and Zoe. Evelyn looked down at their round faces stained with the salty residue of tears and asked, “What now?”

 

Monday: Hooked on Hooks Critique

The Good Hook is on vacation this week.
To give you a clue of where we've taken our pen and paper, we give you this week's hook:

Monday: Hooked on Hooks Critique

This week we have Jennifer Kircher Carr sharing her opening to "Pastlives" with us! Please share your thoughts in the comment section.

After ten years of little contact with his brother Jake, about a month ago Bryan started receiving calls from him. At first Jake told Bryan that his common-law wife had left him, and hinted that he’d like to come up from Virginia for a visit, but soon Jake speckled the conversations with references to reincarnation – old souls and instant karma. “Our paths are laid out for us,” Jake told him. Though the conversations were odd to Bryan, he listened. Jake had been removed from his life for so long, since their father died, really, and he didn’t realize until now that he longed to have a brother in his life again.

Monday: Hooked on Hooks Critique

Every Monday we will host a writer brave enough to share with us a hook of their own! Be it a first sentence or a first paragraph, the opening will be their own writing. Readers can chime in with their own critique of the hook in the comments below.

Writers please email us at thegoodhook(at)yahoo(dot)com with your submission and we will notify you what Monday it will be posted!

Since this blog is still in its infancy stage, we'll start with one of our own:

"A Fire to a Face" by Kimberly Zook

My previous brain expired at the age of 10. Before that, life was all hotdogs and slingshots. Sex was irrelevant. At summer camp, we joked about the names of our Pennsylvania towns without grasping their meaning. Blue Ball and Bird-in-Hand got you absolutely nowhere. Intercourse led to Paradise, whatever that meant. But bodies, bodies! Those tender carousels of hormones, those were relevant. We maintained a constant three foot radius from the bodies of female campers. Oh, the horror of K-I-S-S-I-N-G taunts scattered among the pellets of tar on the track as we hurdled over them with a singular, all-consuming fear: Exactly how many holes did a girl have between her legs?

What works? What doesn't?
Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Hooked on Hooks Critique

Tinkering with that first sentence or the first paragraph of your WIP?

Here at The Good Hook, you can share either one and the readers of this blog can give you their thoughts on it!

Please send your first sentence or first paragraph to thegoodhook(at)yahoo(dot)com, and we will let you know the day your hook will be posted so you can let all of your followers know to stop by and critique your hook.