Very interesting exercise. Pardon the my impromptu critique, but I hope this helps:

1) the Western. Sunrise isn’t much of a hook in a western, but this particular one sets a tone that I enjoy. I would rearrange the presentation of the sentences. Here, starting with a character focus immediately brings the reader into the world of Hitch, and tells the reader that the description is the way Hitch saw the world (rather than a disembodied, phantom description):

The red of dawn forewarned bloodshed, that much Hitch knew. The black wolf stood leaning against the wooden railing of the hotel, cigarette in hand, surveying the town of Broken Gulch…. Etc etc

That's a good point, thank you.

2) the drama. This one is perhaps the weakest of the five. It’s hard because you want to start with the actual story, instead of just merely describing the character’s place of comfort.

This one you really need to pack a punch. Try:

Jesse’s life ended the same moment she saw Brian walk down the street paw in paw with that ursine bitch.

3 and 4 are good hooks. No comments there.

5 is interesting. I’m not getting a comedic tone from the hook. It’s also odd that the 1st person POV lacks the kind of flair that makes 1st person interesting. For example, a car person would never call it “the muscle car”. Maybe more like:

Black smoke billowed from under the hood of the Camaro ZL1. Yes, again. Because why wouldn’t it? This piece of shit had failed me at every turn in the past… etc

That does make sense, thank you. Got some good areas to work on.

Thank you so much for your help.

You’re welcome. Have fun writing <3

I always do! And hopefully I'll enjoy better writing.

I can tell you I snerked at the last line in paragraph five. As the BFG would say: well done you!

Hee! I'm always glad when I get a smirk

I'm going all out here. The goal is to provide my relatively unfiltered reactions to hopefully help you and anyone else reading get an idea of how I process when I read. I'm not saying it's the right way, but it is my way.

1. Immediate impression: Ew. Runny eggs and blood, while highly visual, made me almost want to stop reading right there. It set a tone that speaks more to horror than a western. It took away from what I should care about, the characters. Pass.

2. Immediate impression: Boring. Talking about a diligent worker sitting at a coffee shop is too much normal. I don't care enough about the character to really get involved in her surprise at a guy with another girl. We don't even get told why she cares. It doesn't say whether the guy is her crush, boyfriend, or brother.

3. First impression: Could have been promising. But a guy fully aware he is stepping into the lair of a monster while wielding a bad flashlight is just foolish and erases any chance I would root for him. I know horror is filled with the trope of idiots making bad decisions, but you don't want to start there.

4. First impression: Too inner monologue. The guy is jaded, that's fine. But we don't know why. Nor do we get a description of why the girl gets his attention. Her just being there isn't enough to draw me in.

5. First impression: this one almost had me. Maybe I've got a penchant for people fighting against the universe, but it was a unique setting that prompted a lot of good questions, making me interested to see how he got into this situation. I'd say the comedic element actually destabilized that.

Thank you so much

1 actually had me wondering if I had enough eggs in the refrigerator. *^^*

1 to 4 was just too cliche and without substance.

5 seemed to be promising as a first-person story, but lacked a little something to it.
To be honest, a hook isn't something you need to strive to create within a story.

The characters should really come first, and then from those characters, you can create the plots that will center around them. *^^*

Keep writing!

Thank you! A flaw I'm discovering here is that when I write sometimes I center the writing around the scene instead of the character.

I want to sell books. I want to be a best selling author one day, so I've got to fix certain flaws within my writing.

Yes but the characters create the scene, not vice versa. *^^*

When you have the right characters, the scenes will follow, as long as your characters have a good backstory, an origin, etc.

True.

I feel (and of course I could be wrong) but character creations aren't really my big weakness. My biggest weakness as I see it now is a more passive voice in writing. The type of writing that makes it look like you're watching someone from a window in your room rather than being beside the hero. That's the type of stuff I'm trying to eliminate right now.

Thank you so much

Writing FA comments so I don't have a strikethrough, so bear with me. Square brackets will represent cuts, inequalities will represent additions, and asterisks will represent notes. Transpositions and substitutions will be marked as cuts and additions. I'll follow with why I'd make the moves I did.

[The sun had just broken over the horizon, the runny egg light spilling with the red blood of the coming day.] The hotel/saloon for Broken Gulch was open for business, technically, <but the people here weren't early risers.> [Just no one came in this time of day before. The way the sunlight seemed to dim for the darkly dressed black wolf] <Just as well. The sun broke like an egg on the horizon and the way it bled red told Hitch *that there would be trouble. [The red of the dawn was to bring bloodshed] <Red dawns meant bloodshed>. [as sure as it had every single time before in Broken Gulch.]

-first cut:
A bit purple, and not as engaging as the line that follows it. I get what you're going for, but I'm with Jimmy on this. It's better to lay on mood and imagery after the reader knows what they're supposed to be looking at and has seen some signs of life (the saloon). Plus the sun description can be slimmed. See later addition.

-second cut and substitution:
Same information, a bit leaner + an implication about the kind of people who live here. It's a bit less specific than yours, though. If you wanted to stick closer to your original line, I would simplify to "but the place was a ghost town that time of day".

-Addition of "just as well":
Primarily to smooth sentence structure to deal with the re-order, but also gives Hitch a reason to take note of the place being empty, given he'd be used to it.

-sun description re-addition:
Same as before but fewer words and after setting the scene. Might be even better to push it to after meeting Hitch, like Jimmy says, but I don't think it's strictly necessary.

-note on what the dawn tells Hitch:
There's an opportunity here to say a bit about who Hitch is as a person. You're going to explain in the next sentence that red dawns mean bloodshed, so what does that mean to Hitch? For example, when I was editing it, the line "told Hitch he was in for a long day" came to mind. That would suggest a much more jaded, cynical Hitch. Not that that's who he is, but you could apply the same idea in any direction. If he's protective of the people around him, maybe it frightens him. Etc.

-simplification of the bloodshed line:
Predicting violence based on the color of dawn is pretty esoteric, and doesn't have the backing of actual oral tradition like "red sky at dawn, sailors take warning" does. Since this is something Hitch believes, we're inclined to think he's a bit of a mystic. I would sit on that for now and not specify how he knows. You could get into why he's so sure later.

At a friend's, but I'll try to cover the others later. Hope it helps.

Thank you so much!

This indepth look gives me more than one way to look at these paragraphs.

Though now I have to be careful of plagiarizing you when I rewrite them, heh.

This helps a lot. Thank you!

Don't loose sleep over it unless you're just after a problem to solve for the fun/practice. If I edit somebody's work and the result ends up getting used that's just a compliment.

That said, you know your own intent better than I ever could, so I wouldn't doubt there's something to be gained.

Haha, well if it sounds close to what you gave me I unintentionally did it with the best of intentions.

I got a novel I have to read and edit soon (my first completed. Yay!) So, this is partially to help me with that.

If you want strikethrough on text like this just highlight the desired text, click any of the bold, italic or underline buttons, then replace the letter in brackets with s on both ends.