Three ways to hook a reader

• Explosion: The DaVinci Code. Strong verbs, violence, action, set up
the exotic locale and bigger than life characters.

• Character Hook: The Sun Also Rises and David Copperfield. We’ve got
heroes and boxing champs in the opening sentences, followed by some
contradictory sort of info that fleshes out our characters.

• The World: Lonesome Dove. You just can’t beat blue pigs—in
context—for setting a world. Note that we don’t learn a lot about
Augustus but we do know a fair amount about his world almost
immediately.

So—decide what kind of opening paragraph you want, in general terms.
Then, in three or four sentences, do what these examples did. If you get
stuck, stay tuned. We'll talk about templating some opening paragraphs tomorrow.

A word of caution: pick one way to hook. Don’t try to do a character, action
and world hook all at the same time. Sell the small details, set the hook, then
move on to the rest of the story.

This is all taken from my ebook First Pages at BAMWriters.com