Category: Writing Tips

2 Secrets for Creating a Compelling Hook for Your Novel

How to write hooks for a novel

Before I dive into the 2 secrets for creating a compelling hook for your novel, I wanted to remind you that the theme for JPC Allen Writes during 2026 is how to write a novel. With four months behind us, we’ve covered:

This month will be about how to write the beginning of your novel. The hook is the opening line or lines that snag the attention of readers so thoroughly that they can’t put your book down. That sounds like a tall order and it is, but keep reading.

No hook? No problem.

If you can’t get past page 1 of your novel because you can’t come up with a creative hook, write a lousy one. It’s not permanent. Consider it an interim hook until the permanent hook arrives. Write your opening lines and then keep going.

Now write the whole novel.

What? What about the hook? Often, especially for first-time novelists, you have to slog through a first draft before you understand your characters and their journey through the story. Only when you’ve reached the final page are you in a position to understand how to create a hook for your particular story. Go back to your interim hook and throw it out or refine it to fit the rest of your book.

2 Secrets for Creating a Hook

The two secrets are that your hook should be meaningful and project tension. By meaningful, I mean the hook should reflect what readers should expect in your novel. The exciting opening sequence that turns out to be a dream, a flashback, or a scene on a movie set is not meaningful. Readers will feel cheated.

The best hooks also project tension, either hinting at the problem facing your protagonist that will soon become clear in the first chapters or plunking the problem in front of readers with the first line.

Here are the first line of my three novels:

A Shadow on the Snow. “I’M NOT FOOLED, RAE. YOU’RE JUST LIKE YOUR MOTHER.”

19-year-old Rae Riley receives anonymous notes that grow more threatening. That’s the mystery she has to solve, and I begin the novel with the message from the first anonymous note. I put the problem front and center in the first line.

A Storm of Doubts. “‘Just stop it!’ The shout made me jerk and get poked by a dead branch of a honeysuckle bush. Wasn’t that a woman’s voice? Not a girl’s, not my cousin Coral’s.”

Since this is a mystery, someone shouting like she’s in trouble creates immediate tension.

A Riddle in the Lonesome October. “‘We’ve got a bit of a situation here at the children’s home, Mal.’ Aunt Carrie’s voice came over the phone.”

The line of dialogue carries tension. What’s the situation? What could be happening at a children’s home? This first line hints at the tension involved in a hunt for a missing inheritance which is explained in the first chapter.

So let me know which opening lines did a great job of pulling you into a novel.

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How to Make a Novel Great with Subplots

How to write subplots for a novel

I’ve written a lot this month about plots but haven’t addressed subplots. Subplots are unique to novels because short stories aren’t long enough to handle them. How do you make a novel great with subplots? Below are three ways subplots improve a novel.

Reflect the theme

In my Halloween mystery,A Riddle in the Lonesome October, Rae deals with fear and how to handle it as a Christian. Her cousin and uncle also struggle with fear after a terrible riding accident. Her cousin and uncle’s battles allow me to explore the theme with different characters, who have different responses to it, making the story richer for readers.

Complicate the main plot

Subplots in mysteries can help obscure the solution. Many times in the novels by Agatha Christie, a lesser crime is woven into the murder, which complicates discovering the identity of the killer. Subplots can add layers of complexities to the main plot, but they must support the main plot. For example, let’s say I’m writing a mystery about the owner an old local theater getting killed in it. So a lot of the mystery has to be set in the theater. My amateur sleuth is a retired teacher who volunteers at a community garden. If I have several scenes where my sleuth talks to friends and strangers at the garden and the only things readers learn is gardening techniques, then my subplot of working at the community garden isn’t supporting the overall plot of the murder mystery.

Inject fun

Subplots can add humor, if that’s appropriate for your novel. In each of my cozy mysteries, my protagonist’s younger brothers, who’s ten, is always working on an invention. It malfunctions somehow, attacking their father, and somehow, I always make the invention a component in solving the mystery. Since I’m writing about a close family, and my teen protagonist has a sense of humor, this subplot works.

Here’s all my posts on plot this month. If you have a question about writing plots, drop it in the comments.

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How to Balance Plot and Character Development in Your Novel

Writing compelling plots and characters

My good friend author M. Liz Boyle posed this question: how to balance plot and character development in your novel. I had to give this a lot of thought because, although I know how I do it, I wasn’t sure how to explain my approach in a way others will understand. I’m a very instinctive writer. So when my story is veering off the rails, I rely on my gut to warn me. Since other writers can’t rely on my gut–and that might get messy anyway–here are some guidelines for balancing plot and characters.

Story Is King

When you write genre fiction, the rules of the genre set the boundaries for your novel. I write traditional mysteries. If plot twist or a character arc doesn’t serve the point of the a detective solving a mystery, I should examine it and either change it into something more supportive or eliminate it.

How do you know if an aspect of your novel is serving the story? You should be able to sum up the main problem of your novel in one to three sentences.

For example, I can sum up my third Rae Riley novel, A Riddle in the Lonesome October, this way:

A hidden inheritance, a family feud, a riding accident, a fake medium and rumors of bigfoot all lead to murder as Rae Riley tries to solve the riddle that will allow her great aunt to inherit a fortune and uncover the secret of the deputy she’s fallen for. 

All those elements have to support solving the riddle because it’s the main engine of the story. All the plot twists and character development need to feed that engine.

But how do you strike a balance?

The best way to strike a balance between plot points and character development is to combine them. In my first novel, A Shadow on the Snow, Rae is getting to know her father and learning how he feels about her and how she feels about him. I can show those feelings through their interactions as they try to figure out who is stalking Rae threatening letters vandalism. If your fantasy novel features a quest, then your characters develop as they meet challenges on their adventure.

But you can still add small tangents.

What do I mean by “small tangents?” Short additions of dialogue or action that aren’t directly tied to the mission of your novel but deliver some flavor to the mix.

In Riddle, rumors of a rogue black bear circulate around the county. Rae’s ten-year-old half brother Aaron invents an alarm to blast music if anyone gets too close to the family’s farmhouse. Now the alarm provides a clue to the mystery, but just for fun, I added that every time the alarm catches a family member, Aaron interviews him or her to see how scared they were to judge the alarm’s effectiveness. As he tells them, he can’t interview a bear if it triggers the alarm.

It’s short, funny, and reveals something about Aaron. Keep your tangents brief and few to increase their impact. The more often you combine a plot point to reveal character, the more compelling your novel will be.

Here are all of this month’s writing tips on plotting a novel.

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3 Tips for Writing Internal Dialogue With Tension in Your Novel

How to write high-tension scene for your novel

Since tension is the key to keeping the plot moving in any story, how do you maintain that tension when you only have one character in a scene? This is a question I often wrestle with because I write mysteries. I often have several scenes where my amateur sleuth Rae Riley is thinking through what she’s learned so far about her case. So how can I write scenes like that without boring readers? Read on for the 3 tips for writing internal dialogue with tension in your novel.

Let’s examine a one-character scene for tension. Here’s the opening scene from my short story, “A Rose from the Ashes”. Rae is in this scene alone.

*****

“Glancing left and right, I crunched across the frozen weeds to the abandoned children’s home. I could not afford to be spotted now. If only I could take a few seconds and snap some pictures. The light from the early December sunset was perfect. Gashes of blood-red light seeped through the clotted clouds, creating an ominous background for the gray stone building that was rumored to be the scene of a murder.

“At the back wall of the home, I slung the strap for my camera across my chest and climbed through an opening that once held a window. I dropped to the bare ground, my long, dark gold braid catching on a loose nail in the sill. I disentangled myself and crossed the dirt floor. The fire had burned the wooden floor away. And the roof and the whole interior. The four stone walls loomed above me like a medieval fortress as the sunset’s rays spotlighted sections of the garbage-strewn floor.

“I knelt by a large fireplace, straining to detect any sound of psychics, ghost hunters, or thrill-seeking high school kids who had come to catch sight of the ghost of Bella Rydell.

“Nothing but a few caws from crows and sighs as the wind sailed through the empty window frames.
A lonely place. Very lonely, stuck on twenty acres of unused county land.

“Shaking off a shiver, I unzipped my down vest and removed the two roses. I laid them on the rusty iron grate of the fireplace.

“These would start everyone in the county talking again.”

*****

So how did I tension to this scene?

Description

I use description to show that my protagonist isn’t entirely comfortable in this setting, using words and phrases like “gashes of blood read light” “ominous,” “a few caws from crows”, and “the wind sailed through empty window frames”. Also Rae shakes “off a shiver.” Here is a post about how to use uncomfortable settings to add tension to your novel.

Foreshadow

Hinting at plot points that will become significant later in the story keeps readers turning the page. “The gray stone building that was rumored to be the scene of a murder” and “any sound of psychics, ghost hunters, or thrill-seeking high school kids who had come to catch sight of the ghost of Bella Rydell.”

Raise questions

Rae lays two roses in the grate of the fireplace and thinks that will get everyone in the county talking. Why? The key to raising questions is that while you can be mysterious, you can’t be confusing. Although readers wonder why the roses will provoke talk, they understand exactly what Rae is doing.

These aren’t the only ways to write internal dialogue with tension. Next week, I’ll discuss what I think is the most underused plotting technique for creating tension and one I rely on all the time.

Who is an author who writes tension-filled internal dialogue?

Here are my previous posts on plot this month.

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How to Write High-Tension Dialogue in Your Novel: a Step By Step Guide

How to write plot in your novel

As I’ve said in previous posts, tension is the engine that propels readers through a story. You can add tension to every aspect of writing, but this week, I’m going to focus on how to write high-tension dialogue in your novel.

How do you start to add tension?

Before you write one word of dialogue, ask yourself–what’s the point of this dialogue? Why do I need this dialogue in my novel? Start with the expectations in the genre you’re writing. For example, I write cozy mysteries for teens. Cozy mysteries almost always mean that the protagonist is an amateur sleuth, someone without official law enforcement or legal authority. That aspect alone creates tension for the detective character investigating the crime. Another expectation of cozy mysteries is that the amateur sleuth will question witnesses and suspects.

So one reason for writing dialogue between two characters is that my detective needs to uncover the first clue in the mystery. With that in mind, I can start the conversation. Since this dialogue isn’t the opening scene, I’ll have to give you some background: the protagonist is 18-year-old Harper. She’s investigating who stole a family album from her great-grandmother’s house. She’s speaking to a neighbor, Mr. Thompson.

*****

Mr. Thompson pulled weeds growing under a bush beside his front porch with a hoe.

I said, “Did you hear about somebody breaking into my great-grandma’s house and stealing a photo album a couple of days ago?”

He kept hoeing. “I heard something about that.”

“It was Friday evening. Did you see or hear anything unusual?”

“I didn’t know you joined the police force.”

“The cops don’t have a lot of time to investigate a stolen album that only has sentimental value. Gram’s really upset about the loss.”

“Then she should lock her doors.”

“A lot of people don’t in this town.”

The hoe flung a clump of weeds. “I wasn’t home Friday night until late. Went to visit my sister.”

My eyebrows lowered. “But Gram saw your car parked on your drive when she got home from the football game Friday night. That’s why she thought you might have seen something.”

He leaned on his hoe. “Your great-grandmothers is over eighty. She got her nights mixed up. I wasn’t here.”

Gram was old but not senile. Why was Mr. Thompson lying?

*****

It’s not bad. Readers have discovered the first clue, but there’s a ton of room to add tension. I have the meat of the scene. Now I need to add some seasoning by adding specific words that show Mr. Thompson’s hostility and Harper’s reluctance to speak to him.

*****

Mr. Thompson attacked weeds growing under a bush beside his front porch with a hoe.

My mouth dried, but I managed to get out, “Did you hear about somebody breaking into my great-grandma’s house and stealing a photo album a couple of days ago?”

He sunk his hoe into the hard ground. “I heard something about that.”

“It was Friday evening. Did you see or hear anything unusual?”

“I didn’t know you joined the police force.”

Hard to believe but my mouth dried even more. “The cops don’t have a lot of time to investigate a stolen album that only has sentimental value. Gram’s really upset about the loss.”

“Then she should lock her doors.” He flicked a clump of weeds from the end of his hoe.

“A lot of people don’t in this town.”

The hoe flung another clump.. “I wasn’t home Friday night until late. Went to visit my sister.”

My eyebrows lowered. “But Gram saw your car parked on your drive when she got home from the football game Friday night. That’s why she thought you might have seen something.”

The hoe bit into the ground again, and he leaned on it toward me.

I drew back.

“Your great-grandmother’s over eighty. She got her nights mixed up. I wasn’t here.” He fixed me with a steely glare and then swung his hoe.

Gram was old but not senile. Why was Mr. Thompson lying?

*****

This is better, but I can add even more tension by dropping in some backstory. But only a dollop. Like red pepper flakes, a little backstory goes a long, long way. One way to keep it under control is to get in the head of your protagonist. What thoughts would be passing through Harper’s mind as she approaches and interacts with Mr. Thompson?

*****

I stepped onto Gram’s front stoop.

Mr. Thompson attacked weeds growing under a bush beside his front porch with a hoe.

Why did Gram’s next door neighbor have to be the most unneighborly neighbor on the street?

My mouth dried, like it did every time I had to do a presentation for class, but I managed to get out, “Did you hear about somebody breaking into my great-grandma’s house and stealing a photo album a couple of days ago?”

…. the rest of the story is the same as above.

*****

So adding a little backstory gives readers information that makes them understand the characters better and the feelings and reactions of the protagonist.

Since this conversation uncovers Harper’s first clue, the dialogue isn’t as intense as it should be if she was confronting Mr. Thompson at the climax. Scenes and dialogues should grow more tense as you approach the climax with the climax being the most intense part of your novel.

Here are more tips on writing plots for novels.

Which authors are exceptionally good at creating tension in their novels?

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