Grab your favorite novel or short story. Open it to the first page and look at how it began. What hooks were laid in those initial words? Enough to make you read on, I'll warrant.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity...

Perhaps one of the most powerful first lines ever came from Charles Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities. How did you feel reading it? What questions did you ask? What did you want to find out? The line has so many hooks that it runs like a barbed wire fence.

What was the best of times? What was the worst of times? How can you have both the best and worst times at the same time? Which was the age of wisdom? What was so foolish about the age? Hold on! Did he just say that this age was both wise and foolish? Are we even talking about the same age?

Moreover, Dickens made the scale of this thing bigger and bigger with each new statement. It started off as 'times', then 'age', before we're suddenly into an epoch. This feels too large not to know about!

... it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way...

Ok, this is now sounding like an absolute calamity. It's an emergency of life and death proportions. We'd better find out what's going on.

Thus Dickens hooked us into A Tale of Two Cities.