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THE SAGA OF THE GOOD HOOK
A good one-sentence hook in a query letter describing a novel will catch the agent's eye, who, after reading the manuscript, decides to take on the book. In his submission letter to the editor, the agent will use that one-line hook because it influenced his decision to represent the book and the writer. The editor will read the book with enthusiastic anticipation because of that one-line hook. She will go to an editorial board and use it to convince her colleagues in editorial, sales, and marketing that this is a book they should buy not only because it is good, but, more importantly from the company's perspective, because it will make the company money.
When your book comes out, the publisher's sales representative will go to a bookstore and try to sell your book, along with ten or twenty others, to the bookstore buyer or, in the case of independent bookstores, the owner. He's going to have probably about a minute at most to describe your book and get the bookstore owner to buy copies. So what's the sales rep going to say in one sentence that's going to excite the bookstore owner to stock your book? What's the bookstore owner going to say to the customer to excite her about your book? You got it; more than likely, they'll use the hook you came up with in your query letter that got you an agent in the first place.
Before we get to examples of hooks, here are two query letter samples that exhibit the varying degrees of development of a writer's story sense:
Iloohs
This is a good idea, and I would probably ask to see a sample of the manuscript with a synopsis of the story. But the writing is not overly compelling and the presentation's frankly humdrum.
Now, the following is what the writer, Michael Aronovitz, actually wrote to me. The difference, as you'll see, is like night and day. From these few paragraphs on a one-page letter, I knew this was a writer with a potentially good book, and I eagerly looked forward to reading the full manuscript. See if you feel the same way:
At the end of the letter, he included a brief paragraph mentioning his short story publishing credits, which also made me feel this was a writer who was doing all the right things in his quest to get published and was someone whose work I wanted to read.
Which version excites and interests you the most?
Here are some examples of hooks. If you think they bear a strong resemblance to Hollywood's high-concept idea I mentioned earlier, you're quite right. But what a hook does is provide you with a clear beginning and strong focus for your work, as in these examples:
• What would you do if you could live your life over again, knowing what the future will be (the hook for Replay, Ken Grimwood)?
• When an advice columnist is murdered, her best friend wins a contest to replace her in order to solve her murder (Baffled in Boston, Gary Provost's last novel).
• A Memphis law firm is laundering money for the Mafia, and a young lawyer who tries to leave the firm is threatened with death (The Firm, John Grisham).
• Terrorists threaten to blow up the Super Bowl from a blimp (Black Sunday, Thomas Harris).
• A group of explorers, investigating disturbances at sea, are captured by the megalomaniacal captain of a hightech deep-sea submarine (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne).
The last example would not be very high concept now, but in its day—1870—it certainly was.
There's nothing new about high concept: A senile old man gives away everything he owns to flattering daughters who promise to look after him and then turn him out penniless into the streets once they have his money (King Lear, William Shakespeare). Or this one: On Christmas Eve, a miserly old man is visited by three ghosts who show him his past, present, and miserable future unless he mends his ways (A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens).
Not every story has to be high concept, and not every hugely successful story has to be high concept, but the idea of marketing your work this way is becoming more and more important. A good example of a non-high-concept idea would be The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger.
The book is, superficially, the story of a young man's expulsion from yet another school. In fact, it is really a perceptive study of one individual's growing awareness and understanding of who he is. Holden Caulfield, a teenager growing up in 1950s New York, has been expelled from school for poor achievement once again. In an attempt to deal with this, he plays hooky from school for a few days prior to the end of term and goes to New York City before returning to face what he knows will be his parents' anger. Written as a first-person monologue and influenced in style by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, the book describes Holden's thoughts and activities over these few days, during which he undergoes a nervous breakdown, characterized by bouts of depression, and erratic behavior.
As you can see, it is a tough story to nail down in a sentence because it is so dependent on voice and literary merit. Its appeal is more to the intellect than the emotions, a much tougher kind of book to write and sell.
The importance of high concept to you is that it suggests a general attitude you should have about your work, particularly your fiction: the belief that things should be "big," that this journey will be an emotional roller coaster.
A story isn't real life, and very few writers manage to convincingly give us real life that is also dramatically and emotionally satisfying. Private detectives don't really solve murders most of the time. Secretaries from Des Moines don't really fall in love with millionaire horse breeders on vacation in Barbados.
Characters in stories are bigger than real people; they do what we wish we could do. You need to go for the jugular, on an emotional level. Characters should find the courage to act where we would be inhibited; they can have snappy comebacks to put-downs when they occur, not a day later sitting in the car at traffic lights. They are more articulate, their emotions are deeper, their actions are more theatrical. There is more at stake, greater urgency, deeper significance, than in most real-life situations. As you begin to develop your book idea, ask yourself, Is this something bigger than real life that I can make believable? You'll start to develop your hook from this.
HOLDING THE READER'S ATTENTION
How about this for the opening paragraph of a book:
Yossarian was in love. The first time he saw the Chaplain it was love at first sight.
Did that hook you? It certainly worked with millions of other people and turned the book into a best-seller that is considered a minor classic twenty-odd years after its first publication. It's the opening paragraph of Joseph Heller's best-selling antiwar satire, Catch-22.
What about this:
It began on a night when he thought he was finished, when all he wanted was peace.
"Here comes another one," the eager rookie sitting next to him said. "That makes five."
That's the opening sentence to John Westermann's cop thriller The Honor Farm (Pocket Books), about a special prison for dirty cops.
Grabbing a reader with a snappy description is only part of hooking a reader's attention. There are also techniques that can help to keep this interest level high. We will discuss a number of them in more detail as we progress through the book.
Think of the reader as that large fish you are carefully reeling in to the boat. You need to know when to keep the line taut and when to allow a little slack.
The best way to keep the reader hooked is by keeping the hero or protagonist of your story in constant conflict with his environment. This entails putting your main character through a series of changes in circumstance.
There must also be a lot at stake. What sells these days is fiction and narrative nonfiction of extremes.
This doesn't mean that things always need to be extreme in terms of events, but they should always be extreme in terms of the main character's emotional experiences. Your protagonist, in other words, must always care deeply about what is happening, what has happened, and what is likely to happen.
Here are some other suggestions for keeping the reader hooked:
• Each word, each sentence, each chapter
should be aimed at your target audience. The "voice" of the story should not only be appropriate for the story you're telling, but should also be in harmony with the readers' expectations. Consistency is the key. If you write chapters in conflicting styles, you will no longer have the readers hooked; they will get bored and slip the line.
• One classic technique for keeping the reader hooked is to have some sort of "ticking clock"—a problem that has to be solved within a set period of time. The movie D.O.A. (Dead on Arrival) is a classic of this sort of story.
• Each chapter should end with some sort of Perils of Pauline cliff-hanging suspense. James Clavell's excellent novel Shogun is written with this kind of technique, each chapter dynamically leading into the next.
• In some novels, an element of the incredible can be made believable in order to keep the reader hooked and the line taut. In James Hilton's Lost Horizon, for example, an adventurer in the Himalayas stumbles into a fantasy world called Shangri-La, where people remain young for hundreds of years.
• Sometimes controversial material, when handled appropriately, can keep a reader hooked. For example, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn attacks slavery, Lives of the
Monster Dogs deals with our need for conformity in society, regardless of the bizarre extremes we have to go to homogenize our world.
• Genre novels, rather than midlist fiction ideas, and an all-encompassing universal quality to a narrative nonfiction piece can create a sustaining interest that will carry readers through.
• How you tell your story is important. In one sense, all forms of narrative writing are detective stories: the sense of pacing of information, that is, what readers know about the details of the story and when they learn them. How you "peel the onion" will determine whether your readers remain hooked.
• Characterizations should be structured and interesting. Avoid the obvious and cliches.
• Of the four forms of narrative writing—exposition, description, narration, and cinematic action—it is action (that is, making sure things happen) that is the most important in keeping the reader hooked. Is something new happening on almost every page of your opening chapter? Make sure your main characters act rather than react, thus continuing to involve the reader at an emotionally visceral level that will keep her hooked on the end of your taut story line.
EXERCISES
1. Think about your favorite books, films, myths, fairy tales, and so on, and practice writing one-line or one-paragraph hooks for them. The hooks should all begin, "What if," or, "Suppose." How many strong hooks for each story can you come up with?
2. What's the hook for your book? Think about the one-sentence synopsis—something exciting, something compelling—that will make me want to read the book. Write it.
3. Write a draft of the second chapter of your book. Consider throwing away your current chapter one and making this new draft chapter one instead.
Chapter Four
Plotting
So, you want to tell a story. Where do you begin? You've got this idea, but you don't know what to do with it. You've refined your idea to a hook and you have a character, perhaps a couple, so at least you have a fairly definite concept of what you want to write about. If you don't, then go back and figure it out, at least broadly. If all you've got is, "I'm writing a family saga about three generations of Russians in Chicago," or, perhaps more subtly, "I'm writing about a group of kids who are suddenly banned from dancing every weekend," you still haven't got any real idea what it is you want to write.
Define your story idea with "What if..." or "Suppose ..." and suddenly you have the missing ingredients—a character and a potential plan of action. The next thing to do is ask questions of your plot and characters. Why are they doing this now? Why is he here and not there? Why has she done this and not that? Examine the motivation of all the characters in your story, regardless of whether they actually appear on stage, and the viewpoint you finally choose to tell your story. (We'll talk more about viewpoint later.)
THE STRUCTURE OF A STORY
Let's look at the structure of a story and see how that will help you build it.
Those of us who knew Gary Provost, including the many who studied with him, will recognize with a smile what we
teasingly called the Gary Provost Sentence. In fact, I added some punctuation to make it a little easier to read, so below is the new and improved Gary Provost Paragraph:
Once upon a time, something happened to someone, and he decided that he would pursue a goal. So he devised a plan of action, and even though there were forces trying to stop him, he moved forward because there was a lot at stake. And just as things seemed as bad as they could get, he learned an important lesson, and when offered the prize he had sought so strenuously, he had to decide whether or not to take it, and in making that decision he satisfied a need that had been created by something in his past.
Sound familiar? It should. What Gary came up with is the plot for 90 percent of the stories you've ever read, 90 percent of the films you've ever seen—in fact, 90 percent of all stories ever told in all the world in all time. It's as true for narrative nonfiction as it is for fiction.
This is classic dramatic structure. It works because it's storytelling that is most satisfying to the reader. And in case you think this is a newfangled idea, it was actually first defined by an ancient Greek playwright named Aristotle. He maintained that good drama was storytelling that defined character, created atmosphere, and advanced the action of the plot. No one has ever really substantively improved on this beautifully simple yet profound definition. For my money, Norman Mailer came close, when he said in an interview (The South Bank Show, Bravo Network), "The best fiction is where art, philosophy, and adventure all meet."
All narratives, whether fiction or nonfiction, need structure. Without structure a story wanders around in search of itself. And what's worse, it commits the ultimate crime a story can commit—it becomes long-winded and boring. A story must start somewhere and end somewhere, and in between it must move forward in a spiral-like fashion, with a clear-cut, forward-moving line of dramatic motion.
Let's go through Gary's paragraph again. This time I'll stop along the way and talk about the elements of plotting he discussed. Once you understand these elements, whether you're a literary novelist, a nonfiction writer, or a genre writer, you'll be much better prepared to plot a story.
Once Upon a Time, Something Happened to Someone...
This is what we call the inciting incident. In other words, it's what caused the story to kick in. Say your story begins on Thursday. Don't begin it on Wednesday, just to "set the scene and introduce the characters," a classic amateur flaw. Plunge right into the action the moment it starts. Why? Because nothing significant happened on Wednesday. You're not writing someone's life; you're writing the story of a watershed moment in that life. The thing that happened to upset the equilibrium or the balance in his life is the thing that begins the story. That's the inciting incident. That's where your story should start.
... And He Decided That He Would Pursue a Goal.
There's something this person wants. What is it? It's the prize, the thing he's trying to get to, all through the story. What is it your main character wants? In the long run, what does he hope to achieve?
So He Devised a Plan of Action,...
Let's call this the strategy. How is your hero going to go about pursuing his goal, or prize? What's he going to do? What's his plan?
... And Even Though There Were Forces Trying to Stop Him,...
This is the opposition, the conflict. Conflict is the basis of all drama. Your hero wants something, and he's figured out a way to get it. Something has to get in his way, something or somebody has to have a conflicting goal and a conflicting plan—something has to try to stop him. Nobody's interested in reading a story about a guy who wanted a million dollars and got it. People want to read about a guy who wanted a million dollars and had a lot of trouble getting it. There are forces coming a
gainst your hero; there is conflict. It is the emotional "temperature gauge" of your narrative.
... He Moved Forward Because There Was a Lot at Stake.
Ah, the stakes: We've been introduced to what your hero wants, what plan he's devised to get it, and now we learn what this effort will cost him. Nothing of any importance in this life is free. In one form or another, we always pay a price for what we most desire. The stakes in a story have to be high. What are they in yours? Life or death, lovers lost forever, friends becoming implacable enemies—something important we can all relate to. You don't want to write a story about a guy who is going to lose his laptop computer or his comb. It's got to be something important, something big enough to disrupt his life, to change him from what he was into someone else by the end of the story. It's the emotional engine of your narrative. Characters become obsessive about their goals. What price will they pay to reach them?
And Just as Things Seemed as Bad as They Could Get,...
This is known as the bleakest moment. Things are dark and dreary for this person. Everything has gone wrong, and it seems as if the forces of opposition arrayed against him have won. But somehow, from the darkness of his despair and depression, from his failures, he finds the strength to persevere and overcome against overwhelming odds. Again, you're ratcheting up the emotional power of your story.
... He Learned an Important Lesson,
Aha, a revelation. Your protagonist comes through his bleakest moment with a gift—understanding. At last he sees, he understands something about life that he didn't understand before.
Stories are about people growing and changing, about their insights into the human condition. By the end of the story, this new knowledge has changed your protagonist for the better. He is a little wiser and a little stronger. He has a little more faith in himself or in others or in the bountiful nature of life. He has grown and learned a lesson. The narrative's success can be measured by how much readers care, how much they have become emotionally involved in this journey.
... And When Offered the Prize He Had Sought So Strenuously, He Had to Decide Whether or Not to Take It,...