It's sort of a discipline I picked up from screenwriting. Basically, you might as well not bother to write those epic car chases and gripping dramatic scenes in the second act if you can't grab the reader's attention in the first few pages, because they're never going to get to them. Give me a hook, something to make me want to turn the virtual page.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'