The challenge: 100 first-page story hooks in sixty days. Just the first page (or less), and it has to hook the reader to want more.
Today represents the end of a 68-day journey (I didn't make it in 60 days). I learned a lot, which I blogged about here. It made me a better writer. It gave me an almost completely inexhaustible supply of stories to write should I end up needing some. It was hard.
If you'd like to read the whole list, you can either scroll back through my blog here on Steemit, or you can go here where you can consume the 54 pages of story hooks at your leisure. You can even leave comments as to which ones you like best. I'd appreciate that.
Number 99 revisits a novel I wrote called The Temple of Steel and Sand, and the protagonist, a mob enforcer-turned-hunter named Marcos. I had a feeling I'd be seeing him again.
Number 100 is the beginning of an essay I haven't written yet. Call it a manifesto, if you like.
Ninety-nine:
Marcos lifted the lid of the dumpster. The stench that rolled out was so thick it was almost visible. Was visible, in the form of clouds of flies boiling out of the rusty green box. Marcos let them clear, then gulped a breath and peered into the dark space.
It took a second for his eyes to adjust, but even before they did he could see the bold stripe of a suit and a sharp shine on the shoes. Emilio Saltalamaccia’s bloated face came slowly into focus, and Marcos let the lid slam down.
That answered the question as to where Marcos’s right-hand man had been the last two days. It did, however, raise a new one, and that was who did Marcos now need to kill.
One Hundred:
I don’t just want to write. Anyone can put words on a page.
I want to write things that make people laugh.
I want to write things that make people cry.
I want to write things that change people, that lift them and hold them and let them go, not to fall, but to fly. To write lines that are worthy of song and poem, that someone could carve in marble and no one would ever ask why they had done such a mad, foolish thing.
I want to make things live, to see them sing and dance. I want to touch the sky and hear the Creator laugh for joy.
And I will do the work that makes it so.
~Cristof
P.S. This series is the brainchild of The New Creatives, which challenged us to create 100 of something as a way of attaining mastery of a particular art form (or beginning the process, more like). This is my attempt. #TNCmy100