Contest: Pimp My Hook!

While it's good to start in the middle of action this way, this doesn't really have a hook; it just kind of starts mid-scene with nothing to pull us in and establish voice. It needs a more conversational tone, and an opening line that establishes Embyr's voice immediately - not to mention corrections to eliminate some telly writing and incorrect grammar.

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Another slow night. Embyr pursed her lips and looked around the tavern's empty common room. The tables were vacant, the chairs neatly arranged. With a sigh, she turned back to the wash basin and ran a wet cloth over the tankard. Maybe a little too hard, because it slipped from her wet hands and splashed into the soapy water.

"Jumpy?" Katrina leaned on the bar and watched. "Maybe because Death's Horsemen are in town?"

"That's not funny." Embyr frowned, pushed her sleeve higher, and rooted around the wash basin.

This was one of my picks, and I actually don't have much to tweak; your opening line grabbed my interest immediately, though you lost me a little in the following paragraph. Overall, though, good job of immediately establishing POV and the main character's predicament.

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He was stuck. He couldn't believe it.

Jax hauled the hood of his '74 Camaro over his head, propped it up, and examined the engine. He'd pulled over after the thing started to cough and wheeze, but looking inside, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The only problem he knew of was the key cylinder, and he already had a replacement on standby in the trunk - but a faulty key cylinder wouldn't make the engine cough.

It sounded like he’d run out of gas, but that was impossible.

It seems like there are a lot of words here that don't say very much, when you could consolidate and simplify to get the idea across sooner and really deepen your character's POV. You start off with an interesting scenario, right in the middle of an intriguing scene, but it's not really a hook.

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Rachel Brackett's biggest problem had always been avoidance.

She ran from everything. She was running even now, driving down Highway 93 and watching road signs and mile markers that blurred through a haze of tears. She could run for years and she'd never escape the torture of her memories. Never escape her relief, pain, grief, excitement - or the confusion born of the messy concoction. One day she'd be able to get her emotions under control...but not today.

Today, all she could do was run.

She pushed the button to open the driver's side window. Fresh mountain air wafted through the car; just what she needed. Fresh air. Time.

And as much distance from the past as possible.

I'd focus on the creepy aspect above describing how hot the guy is, as right now there's no real sense of danger when she sees him as just another bad boy who might be a little strange and unnerving, but is non-threatening enough that most of her attention is focused on describing how hot he is.

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Great. Her stalker was back.

On a good day, Bryn hated walking home from the bus - and today was not a good day. Not when her "friend" was trailing her again. He was still there when she glanced over her shoulder. A guy like him didn't blend in with the homeless sidewalk campers or the guys hanging out by the pawn shop. He looked like a demented, tattooed manga character, with his pale skin and dark, spiked hair. He didn't look like someone she wanted following her home.

And now he'd caught her staring.

Fantastic.

This is another one that needs to be rearranged to bring your real hook front and center, and avoid opening with dialogue. There are some minor POV slips, too.

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I had to give Dad credit; he never gave up.

"Harley?" He tapped my door lightly. "Do you want to come to church with me today?"

I rolled over in bed and kicked the covers off. "Not today, Dad."

He let out a heavy sigh, before I heard his footsteps retreat, shuffling down the hallway. Every Sunday morning was the same. I'd wake to his invitation, then disappoint him.

Okay, I'm going to be bluntly honest with you: you have a good hook, and this almost made my list, but I was a little too grossed out and it canceled out the intrigue created by the hook. BUT. That doesn't mean you should change it. This is just my reaction, and normally I take a kind of perverse pleasure in graphic gross-out fic, but filthy public bathrooms combined with puke takes two of my squick factors together, which is too much for me in the opening lines of a story - though I could probably take it later, once I'd gotten deeper into the story. Case in point: my love affair with Joe Hill's books. So the operative words here are too much for me. They might not be too much for someone else.

That said, the writing in this is fairly strong, so I only have a few tweaks. I do think the right editor or agent for this would eat this up, and I'm only sorry that it didn't hit the right note for me to request it.

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Is that barf, or my insides?

I prop myself on my elbows and peer into the toilet bowl. Nah. Just barf. Bloodshot brown eyes glare back at me, reflected in the light glinting off the metal toilet seat. When I rub my chin, I find bile globed onto my stubble. I glance at the toilet paper roll. Empty. Damn. I wipe my face on my crusty sleeve instead.

Flies guard the toilet, flanked by a million tiny ants. So much for using the park bathroom to puke and take a piss. I don't need anything with an exoskeleton on my dick or up my ass.

This starts off a little too vague, with detail that confuses more than it grounds or creates a sense of enticement for the reader to learn more. Your hook is in there - but it's your last line. You need to rearrange the order of your information for a cleaner flow, to ease readers more naturally into your world. I took a guess as to where they are, since it's a fantasy and there's cobblestones...a coach? This needs to be established. Otherwise it could be a car, a train, an airplane...we don't know.

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There's something out there.

A chill sense spooks me from my trance. All around me, the air vibrates, urging me to move away from my window seat. I often don't think about how much the air really controls me. It runs up and down my arms and traces light fingers over my spine. A guide. A warning.

I turn, searching for anything out of place. Anything that would make the air come to me. There's nothing inside the coach. I look back through the window, out to the street. Everything is as it should be. An empty street paved in cobblestones. Nowhere to hide.

That doesn't change that there's something there.

This starts off with typos (russle instead of rustle, pocket instead of pockets, and though it's not part of the hook, Entangle instead of Entangled - those kind of things make an impression when someone's considering a manuscript) and comes at it from the wrong direction, with odd sentence structures, telly writing that borders on POV breaks (he wouldn't call himself "the boy" in his own POV)...I'd say completely restructure and reshuffle this.

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The dead hated to be ignored, especially by the few who could see them.

Nonetheless, Avery looked away from the dead girl, stuck his hands in his pockets, and watched the battered ruins of the Emerson Transit. The wreckage rustled in the wind. His grandmother once told him the station had been a real beauty, back in the day. Now it was left to decay, like all the other things in Beaumont.

A shame.

The dead girl scowled. Avery turned his gaze back to her, swallowing against the hard lump in his throat. "All right. Let's hear what you have to say."

Since this was one of my picks, I don't have much to tweak here beyond playing on the themes a little more and punching up some of the descriptions to make them more personal and sensory. I'll be honest, though: if I didn't know this was SF, I might have passed on it. It's the fact that it's SF yet it starts off in such a mundane way that made me perk up and say "Wait, what? I'm curious. What's going on here? How is this ordinary boonies life going to turn into science fiction? Why doesn't our narrator belong in this normal place?" You did a good job of inspiring questions that made me want to know more.

That combined with some pretty solid writing, a good sense of timing, and a fairly strong opening line turned this into a request. My biggest peeve here is use of second-person address. Even when addressing an invisible reader in first person narrative, it bugs me and breaks the fourth wall.

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Nothing extraordinary ever happens in the country.

My life is one speck of nothing in the middle of endless acres of more nothing. I'm surrounded by hundreds of miles of corn fields, forgotten farms, and people who've lived here their entire lives. Most of them have been forgotten, too. Forgotten by the outside world. Many have never even ventured out of the state, let alone the surrounding area.

It's a place for normalcy.

And I don't belong here.

It's already past noon. I'm sitting on the back steps, hiding in case Dad comes home for lunch. I stare across the field behind the house. Once upon a time we played baseball in that field, our bellies full of dinner and our eyes blinded by the setting summer sun.

...oh my god, I feel like such a dick. I remember you mentioning on Twitter that you were refreshing obsessively, not even realizing that in my bouncing around (for a while I was working my way from top to bottom, then bottom to top, then switching again) I'd end up doing yours dead last. I'm sorry. It wasn't on purpose, I promise.

As far as your hook: starting with a character in pain is something a lot of people fall back on, and I'd suggest trying a different angle for something more original. Also, I think changing your sentence structure would create better pacing and flow, and a stronger sense of tension. Lastly, a little more emotional investment and not just sensory detail would help deepen POV. This is a problem I face sometimes; I get so wrapped up in showing and not telling in my writing that I end up neglecting actually giving my characters opinions of their own. They need those to make them real people, and give life to their voice. In this case, I slanted the opening hook to make your main character more actively blame her mother, expressing an opinion and accusation, instead of just offhandedly mentioning she's the cause.

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This time, when the pain came, it was my mother's fault.

It started like a headache. As the seconds ticked by, it washed over my entire body. I think I screamed, but was too far gone to know if it was real or in my head. The arms holding me in place were real. I knew that much. So was my mother's hand in mine, her grip sure and strong. As if she wasn't to blame for this. As if anything she did could atone for it.

I didn't want these memories. I didn't want to feel them, see them, smell them, hear them, but they wouldn't let me escape. For a split second I was back in my parents' living room. Seventeen. Helpless. Struggling to survive.

I'm a little torn on this one. I think opening with dialogue weakens it, but at the same time, in this scenario it's hard to imagine starting any other way. That may mean you need to just come at it from a completely different angle, but I'm going to take a shot at writing it without dialogue for the opening line. Let's see how this turns out. I'm also making tweaks to ramp up the creep factor.

Also, she seems to have an almost aggressive, hostile response to him looking at the painting, which...if she doesn't want people looking at it, why is it on display? And...this ignores the fact that maybe he could have seen her work on the internet?

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Karen Foster wasn't for sale.

She stepped in front of her self-portrait, forcing herself between the painting and a slender, dark-haired man. He retreated. Shadowed eyes in a pale face moved over her, appraising her as he had the painting. His hat hid everything else, save for a sharp slice of jaw.

"This one isn't available," she said.

"I only admire." His voice was strangely flat. Almost hollow. "You possess great talent, Karen Foster."

"Thank you. You've seen my work before?"

"Many times. But not, shall we say, face to face."

"But this is my first gallery showing." Karen frowned and brushed her tangled hair back. "And I'm not in any books."

"I've seen them in my dreams," he answered, with a slow, unsettling smile. "And in yours."

The voice in this is fairly strong, and you have the start of a well-constructed hook; it's more the subject matter that detracts from this one, as there aren't many teens who don't think school sucks - so this doesn't stand out as anything new or original. The hook should tell me that there's something different about this story. I kind of made up some stuff just to demonstrate.

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Some people never know how good they have it until it's gone.

I should know. I've lost everything, gotten it back, then lost it again. Some of it was my fault. Some of it, I couldn't control. Some of it...I don't even know how to explain. Not that these spoiled St. Agnes yuppies would listen. Beautiful day or not, they were the reason school sucked.

The building itself was always under construction, and constantly being remodeled with top-of-the-line installations. Thank the generous private contributions of the Jackson family alumni. The school's busy halls were depressing, full of kids my age who had no clue what it was like to want for anything. Spoiled brats who took their parents for granted and believed respect was their right, not a privilege to be earned.

Unless this is a prologue, I'm not sure why we're starting in the delivery man's POV - and if we're in his POV, he wouldn't refer to himself as the delivery man in his own thoughts. He'd refer to himself by name. There's a sense of detachment from this that, despite fairly solid writing, cuts back on reader engagement.

For this example I'm going to make up a lot of stuff, mainly just to show how we can create a stronger voice for the POV character.

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Mick hated winter.

It wasn't the icy roads or the crappy drivers, though he saw his fair share of that. It wasn't even the predawn pallet sorts when it was too dark to see the labels on the boxes and too cold to feel his fingers. No, it wasn't any of that.

It was standing on the doorsteps, in the muddy slush of someone else's snowy footprints, and wondering if the customers even cared that he was freezing his ass off waiting for them to answer the door.

He tugged on his gloves, covered his ears with his hat, and stepped out into the snowy evening. After grabbing the package and his clipboard from the truck, he headed for the apartment complex. "2...E." Mick pressed the buzzer and stood, his head clouded in the fog of his own breaths, waiting for someone to answer.

Nothing. He rubbed his tingling hands together and looked around. At the end of the street, someone stood beneath the street lights. He pressed the buzzer again. Silence. No footsteps or panicked calls of "just a minute!" He bit back a curse, sucked on his teeth, and turned away from the door.

A girl stood near his truck. The same slim shape from beneath the street lamps, silent and still. He narrowed his eyes.

Close, but not quite. The pacing / timing is off, but it's one of those things where subtle tweaks and rearrangements here and there make all the difference.

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Five minutes late and counting.

I check my watch. A group of band kids shoves through the main school doors. Their instrument cases jostle and bang against me. They don't apologize, or even give me a second glance.

Seven minutes.

A couple makes out at the water fountain right next to me, slurping each others’ tongues so loudly they sound like thirsty dogs.

Ten minutes.

The last bell of the day rings. The buses are leaving.

Where the heck is Annie? I want her to need me, but I also want her to be on time.

This one's actually not too far off; I'd just rearrange the info a little. It didn't really hook me mainly because the setup doesn't present anything that grabs me. We know our main POV character is a waiter or waitress, and she has a crappy customer, but there's not enough personality in the voice to hook me, or enough of a sense of emotional stress / investment to make this ordinary situation extraordinary enough to hold me. Even a little something to show that the tips are important to the character's livelihood would help.

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The customer was recalculating my tip. I could tell from his face; I'd seen it a million times before. Unblinking eyes. Stiff jaw. Brows parallel to the line of his lips. He’d whittle my life's blood from eighteen percent to ten, or maybe down to an insulting fistful of coins that had attracted lint in his pocket all day. Quarters if I was lucky, nickels and pennies if I wasn’t.

Usually, I wasn't very lucky.

“Doesn’t this come with chapatis?” he asked before the thali plate touched down at his table. He pursed his lips like I'd ruined his dinner the same way he'd ruined my night.

Someone had told me what a chapati was. In fact, I was certain several someones had, probably followed by a list of ingredients.

Opening with passive writing diminishes your hook - and really, your second sentence should be your first, with a little tweaking - so that we immediately establish that there's a bizarre situation, and get right inside Crystal's head.

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Crystal had never seen the attic stairs down before.

The attic door was always secured and padlocked, but now the stairs hung out into the hallway like a lolling tongue in a particularly dark and dusty mouth. Her mom said she kept it shut to keep the mice from getting down into the house, but sometimes Crystal thought it was more to keep her from going up.

She could hear scurrying above - feet on floorboards. Her mother's feet. What could she be doing up there?

Crystal hesitated on the bottom step. If she climbed up, she'd finally discover what secrets the attic contained...but the sound of sniffles stopped her.