It is the dramatic question that grabs your reader and holds him or her. It creates a narrow path that forces the reader into suspense that won’t let go. It moves the story forward. All bestseller-kind-of novels have it.
Have you noticed that untrained eyes want you to explain everything in that first line, first paragraph. But it is the “Dramatic Question” that creates the hook.
In my novel, the Mayor’s Wife Wore Sapphires, a mystery/thriller sprinkled with social commentary, I didn’t want it to be clear what was going on. I wanted a question that would create a hook. Even when writing the “who, what, when, where, why, how,” I didn’t want it to be cut and dried. I wanted people to wonder. Here’s what I mean?
“In my country, men like him disappear in the thick of night.”
(I started in the middle of action. This man is not from the United States. This is a threatening statement about someone we don’t know.)
The guest pitched forward from the shadows in the small, but elegant room. A glint of light hit his hair, as slick and black as a crow’s feathers.
(That dark-haired man is unsavory. He wants someone to disappear. Who?)
I could have written it in a pedestrian telling way instead of an action story way