The opening element of your story that grabs the reader's attention and makes them need to keep reading.
A narrative hook is whatever you put on your first page (or in your first line, your first paragraph, your first scene) that makes the reader unwilling to stop. It can be a striking image, a provocative statement, a character in trouble, a mystery that demands an answer, or a voice so compelling the reader would follow it anywhere. The hook is not the same as the inciting incident or the plot. It is the bait. Its only job is to buy you enough of the reader's attention that they stick around for everything else.
You can write the greatest climax in literary history, but if nobody makes it past page three, it does not matter. Readers, agents, and editors all make snap judgments. Your hook is your first impression, your elevator pitch, your foot in the door. In a world where readers have infinite choices and limited time, a strong hook is not optional. It is the price of admission.
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." One sentence hooks you three times: the firing squad, the time jump, and the strangeness of discovering ice.
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun." The hook is pure voice. Adams's tone is so distinctive and funny that you follow it willingly.
"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Nine words that create mystery (what is Manderley?), nostalgia (why can the narrator only visit in dreams?), and dread (what happened there?).
Unless the weather is genuinely unusual (Orwell's clocks striking thirteen) or the waking moment is disorienting (The Maze Runner), these openings are so common they signal 'nothing interesting is happening yet.' Start where the interesting thing is.
The reader does not need to understand your world before they enter it. They need a reason to care. Hook first, explain later. Context without curiosity is just homework.
A hook is a promise. If you open with a dead body and then spend 200 pages on a romance with no connection to the murder, you have broken the reader's trust. Your hook should be a trailer for the actual story you are telling.
An over-engineered hook feels desperate. The best hooks feel effortless, like the story just naturally starts in the most interesting place. If your opening line took you three weeks to write and it shows, simplify.
Write five different opening lines for the same story, using each hook type: question, character, action, statement, and image. Read them aloud and notice which one makes you most want to write the next sentence. That instinct is telling you something about the story's natural voice. Pick that hook and write the first full page.