Captain Hook. Are you?

Warning: crass analogy ahead. For all you query virgins like myself, the hook of a query is its ever elusive, throbbing clitoris - untouched, unloved, and sometimes frightening. Learning to stroke it just right takes several failures, feeble attempts of polite but otherwise disappointed feedback from partners, and a very sexy attitude. Like any suave swinger who knows his assets, a writer must know what it is about her story that titillates readers the most.

Yes, I know. Easier said than done. How do you boil down a world down to a sentence or two? How do you take all the tension, emotions, pain, intrigue, and mystery into account? In many cases, it is simply impossible. "The Little Engine That Could," for instance, is about a little engine that struggles uphill (fetched from Nathan Bransford's How to Craft a Great Hook, which was, in turn, fetched from Colleen Lindsay's Some Posts You May Find Helpful). It does not even scratch the surface of an otherwise agonizingly repetitive struggle. But the phrase itself is iconic because it boils down the essential story - which isn't exactly an arc, theme, allegory, or symbol. It really is about a little engine that can. It is conflict. How, then, do we take a boiled down version of our work (just conflict) and make it sexy?

I don't know. I haven't gotten that far yet. I already told you I was a query virgin. But! I did read a hook that I thought was pretty sexy. Written by S.J. Maas querying for her novel, Queen of Glass, to be published in Bloomsdale by 2011:

What if Cinderella went to the ball not to win the heart of the prince, but to kill him? In THE EYE OF THE CHOSEN, the first book of my fantasy trilogy, QUEEN OF GLASS, Celaena Sardothien is not a damsel in distress—she’s an assassin. Serving a life sentence in the salt mines for her crimes, Celaena finds herself faced with a proposition she can’t turn down: her freedom in exchange for the deaths of the King of Adarlan’s enemies.

Not a fan of rhetorical questions, but it still is a fascinating hook. Maybe someone can add to this post a few of their suave hook-writing techniques.