How Emily Henry hooks the reader

Romance or romantic women’s fiction or chick lit or whatever we’re calling it these days often gets a tremendously unfair rap from a craft standpoint. I don’t think most readers and critics appreciate just how tricky it is to hook the reader and keep them engaged in a way that’s very common in the genre. The bar is super high.

To be sure, a sentence like “My whole body heated until I felt like lava, burning and liquid” won’t likely be read aloud at a future Nobel Prize ceremony (it’s required by law to include at least one lava simile in a romance novel, but I’d delete “burning and liquid,” we know what lava is!). But there’s a reason so many frazzled people turned to romantic women’s fiction during the pandemic. These are often highly readable, breezily smooth books, with genuinely moving depth. And if you have ever tried to write something like that, you know it’s wildly challenging indeed.

One of the current masters of the form is Emily Henry, whose new novel Funny Story is currently lighting up the bestseller lists. I want to turn to the opening of her 2020 hit Beach Read to show some of the craft underpinnings that set up the page turner to come.

Turning exposition into a scene

Writers often have a challenge on their hands giving readers sufficient information from the backstory to help set up what’s to come, but not so much that you bog things down. When it doesn’t work, it may take the form of the dreaded info-dump when the reader’s forced to wade through a lot of heavy-handed “Here’s What You Need to Know” information. Henry, on the other hand, turns the crucial backstory into a scene.

After an engaging, conversational opening few paragraphs about what makes the protagonist, January, a hopeless romantic, Henry deftly transitions to exposition with these two crucial sentences:

“It started when I was twelve. My parents sat me down to tell me the news.”

I love these two lines. So simple! But do you see what she’s doing with the second sentence? Henry is not just telling us January’s mother had cancer, “sat me down” turns it into a specific scene happening on a specific day.

It’s almost the barest amount of physical description necessary to get the reader to picture the scene, but “My parents sat me down” is so vivid, right? You don’t even need to know what room it is, it’s probably the living room, or maybe even that formal living room no one uses in those big houses. “My parents sat me down” gives us what we need, and it’s a smooth transition from there to establishing the crucial dynamics between January and her parents that comprises a significant portion of the plot.

It’s not mere information, it’s a scene. And it’s handled so smoothly you might miss it.

Swiftly establishing hopes and dreams

Once the important backstory has been established, Henry quickly transitions to establishing how that history cemented January’s hopes and dreams. And her dream is not something bland and generic like “From then on I always wanted true love,” Henry crafts an extremely vivid and specific image that can only come from one particular character:

And that was the moment I realized: when the world felt dark and scary, love could whisk you off to go dancing; laughter could take some of the pain away; beauty could punch holes in your fear. I decided then that my life would be full of all three. Not just for my own benefit, but for Mom’s, and for everyone else around me.

There would be purpose. There would be beauty. There would be candlelight and Fleetwood Mac playing softly in the background.

Whenever I’m editing novels, I always push authors to make the hopes and dreams extremely specific, all the way down to the fringe on the new couch the character is going to buy with their new promotion. It’s those tangible details that help us understand what makes characters tick.

Henry gives us candlelit Fleetwood Mac. I can just picture the curtains gently blowing in the breeze. I love it.

Introducing the complications

Hopes and dreams are great. But what are the obstacles that are in the character’s way? Why doesn’t January already have a life with a softly playing Fleetwood Mac soundtrack?

Again, Henry doesn’t simply tell us why, we pick up in a particular scene on a particular day and the present day narrative begins oh so smoothly like so:

Now, at twenty-nine, I was miserable, broke, semi-homeless, very single, and pulling up to a gorgeous lake house whose very existence nauseated me. Grandly romanticizing my life had stopped serving me, but my fatal flaw was still riding shotgun in my dinged-up Kia Soul, narrating things as they happened:

January Andrews stared out of the car window at the angry lake beating up on the dusky shore. She tried to convince herself that coming here hadn’t been a mistake.

This isn’t just voice, it’s not just information about her circumstances, she’s also weaving in specific physical description as well so we can start to imagine our surroundings.

She continues to add more complications and more exposition as the scene goes on, including the crucial bit of information that January was on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time as her college nemesis Gus.

We’re barely five pages into the novel and Henry’s already covered so much ground! The bang for the buck in every sentence is almost insane.

Transitioning to the plan

We know January’s ultimate hopes and dreams, and we see the gulf between that vision and her present circumstances, which sets us up to want what January wants. We want her to close the gap! If she gets there in the end, it will feel like such a triumph!

But what does January need to do in the meantime? I’m glad you asked:

I wanted to argue that I wouldn’t even be here by [the Fourth of July], but I knew it wasn’t true. It would take me at least all summer to write a book, empty the house, and sell both, so I could (hopefully) be catapulted back into relative comfort. Not in New York, but somewhere less expensive.

Vivid and clear plan established. We understand January’s motivations and how she intends to get there. She needs to sell the house and a new novel so she can begin to turn the corner in her life. We are oriented around the north star of January’s ambitions.

Since the reader is primed to want what the character wants, we’ll feel engaged wondering if she’ll succeed or fail.

Raising the stakes

We now have January’s overall hopes and dreams, the more realistic plan in the here and now, and enough context to understand her present circumstances and how far away she is from the goal.

Henry quickly gets to work raising the stakes by adding complications and obstacles: Rude and rowdy neighbors… Writer’s block triggered by her faltering belief in Happily Ever Afters… Her literary agent is breathing down her neck for her to deliver a manuscript…

Henry keeps looking for ways to raise the pressure, close off the easy off ramps, and turn the screws. January can’t just sit down and crank out a manuscript, and the pressure is steadily rising. Henry doesn’t release the pressure until the novel is finished.

The literary agent thread alone is a masterclass in steadily escalating the stakes as the agent gets more and more frustrated and sets harder deadlines as the novel goes on, leaving January nervous that her agent’s going to fire her. And it’s just one element of many that increases what’s at stake if January fails.

Kicking off the main plot

With all of these ingredients established, Henry has all the setup she needs to click the final element of the plot together around Page 30 (very minor spoiler to come–it’s in the jacket copy):

At the local bookstore, she discovers that her rude neighbor just so happens to be her college nemesis (and secret crush) Gus, a literary novelist who openly disdains romance novels and has some problems of his own.

It’s hard not to be hooked here! All the crucial story elements are in place to kick off a character arc. We know what January’s “Happily Ever After” might look like, but wow does she have a long way to go, which makes for a journey that’s at times triumphant and wrenching. And there’s plenty of intrigue and mystery as we wonder how (and whether) she’ll get there.

When you combine the craft underpinnings with Henry’s wit and charm–her X-factor is this uncanny way of making you feel like you’re in on a private joke–you have yourself, well, a breezy Beach Read with quite a lot of heart.

Impressive stuff!

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Art: Strandpartie fra Lönstrup o Danmark by Christian Vigilius Blache