How to Engage Readers

I’m reading Elizabeth Strout’s Anything is Possible, which is, in a nutshell, about regular people in a small Illinois town coping with dysfunctional childhoods, dysfunctional parents, dysfunctional marriages…stuff pretty much everyone goes through to some extent.

Strout hooked me in the first paragraph. How does she do that? I reread the first page to see if I could unlock her secret. The words, the phrases, are so simple. They don’t say much, but they say enough to want me to keep reading.

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