Have you ever read a story and thought “This is going nowhere.”?
You’ve tried your very best to read it because you don’t want an incomplete book muddying your shelves. But there is nothing keeping you hooked.
These stories / books / films / games suffer from lack of hookitus. They are failing to keep our interest and attention. As a writer, you want to avoid this.
So what would be a hook?
Some books begin with a compelling first sentence, for example “It started with a death and ended with a death.” And we are hooked. Who is going to die? We haven’t met the characters and already we are concerned for them. We know one will die soon, before we know them, but by the end of the book we’ll lose some we love.
Another hook is mystery. Let’s take a look a Daphne Du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’. The atmosphere of an almost haunted Manderley in the first chapter sets the uneasy feeling throughout. After being introduced, we are then taken to the beginning of the second Mrs De Winter’s story. We dread Manderley, which is mentioned throughout the opening and later we are drawn to the mystery that is the death of the first Mrs De Winter.
Another hook can be characters. As leads, we have the surly Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and Christopher Boone in Mark Haddon’s ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’. We are drawn into the unusual, as they represent a shift in the people we know and so we are dying to see what they do, safe in a book.
When writing anything, you need hooks. Even if it’s a short story that is only a page long. The longer the story, the more hooks you need. It’s no good having a great first line if it’s never mentioned again. It’s no good having a mystery with no clues or explanation. Its also rubbish to have a complicated character that never does anything.
I’m not saying to cram as many hooks in as you can, that’s not rewarding to a reader. Would you want to read a book where every character from the heroine to the cleaner is a complicated character? It may sound good in practice, but a book is not Downton Abbey. The more hooks you introduce, the more complicated the story becomes and the more prone it is to plot holes. You want the reader to end the book satisfied, not confused asking “What happened to Jeremy’s cat?” and “Didn’t Mrs Smith have cancer?” Now of course life doesn’t end with a pretty ribbon wrapped around it. Its not neat, but a book isn’t life and you should resolve to have all loose ends tied up.
Write the story you’d want to read. If you’re reading it back and not enjoying it, think why – perhaps you’re lacking in hooks and rewards.