How can I hook the reader and imprison him/her in the aquarium of reading?

[Writer’s_Magic]

What do action, questions, and sounds share? Right. They are hooks. But how do I hook my reader effectively and imprison them in the aquarium of reading?
I mean the same hooks every time. That’s boring. But how can I create an original or creative one? It’s very important. You want that the reader finishes your work. So, write your best tips down, please.

 

[skip.knox]

My best tip is to come up with one that *you* like. You have to please yourself first. Next best tip: return to books you have loved, ones that hooked you. Examine them to find out how the hook works. Next best tip: practice. Write hooks. Write scores of them. Most will be bad, but you'll start to get a feel for what you like and do not like.

To use an analogy, I could ask someone what goes in to making a sad love song, and I would get answers, and they won't mean a thing until I pick up the guitar and practice and start writing my own. What I've found is that tips are far more relevant once I have experience with a thing than they are when I'm a beginner.

 

[FifthView]

I would suggest using that one thing, deepest inside and almost certainly secret, that always seems to go unaddressed in the works of others, and use that as your foundation stone. Stay true to it; have faith in it.

This may be only me, but when I run across something in my reading that seems so foreign to me but is fleshed out in living color by another, I'm almost always hooked.

 

[Devor]

If I had to come up with a single tip, or how I do it, just to get someone started, it would be to find some kind of event and give it a surprising tone or some personality.

It didn’t matter that her camera was shaking when a moving car shot up into the air on a torrent of sewage from an open manhole cover. It didn’t matter that she missed Chat Noir pull the driver out in time or that she didn’t get the lucky shot of the lucky charm dropping into Ladybug’s hand. Helicopters and high tech camera equipment would catch the action better than she could. News reporters would get all the details on Pipeline and her gross sewage powers without any help from the Ladyblog.

Alya needed to use her connection with the superhero team to get an answer to one good question....

That's from...... well. You can also think about Harry Potter:

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.

It's not an event, that's true - it's more subtle and advanced than that. But it's still the surprising tone and personality, a weird and over-the-top way of saying, "Hey, we're normal" - that's where the strength here comes out.

I'm not going to tell you how to write, or that there's only one way. But if you're struggling, and want a simple formula to get you started, this is it: Take an event, however small, and give it a surprising tone. The surprise juxtaposition creates curiosity = hook.