Today, we’re going to talk about writing story hooks. So, what is a story hook? Well, a hook is really just something in the story that grabs your attention or your curiosity and drags you along through the story. A really good story hook is going to keep you turning pages all the way through the book, from beginning to end. A really good story hook is going to be a question that eats at you; it nags you, makes you constantly curious. Story hooks can come in all different shapes and sizes. The question is, how do we create a hook that is going to keep our reader engaged the whole way through?
Hooks come in a couple of different varieties. There are overarching story hooks, there are chapter hooks, there are plot hooks. There are all sorts of different places that you, as a writer, can plant your hook. Now, if you haven’t picked up on it already, the analogy is that of a fisherman. Hooks can be defined as a mystery that engages a reader’s curiosity. At the end of the day, hooks are all about the unknown. What is it that a reader doesn’t know, but is curious to find out? Creating questions in the reader’s mind is one of the most important things that a writer can do. However, we also have to be careful because hooks can turn from something that engages a reader to something that frustrates a reader really, really quickly.
I want to talk about two particular ways to create hooks. The first is with characters. Though hooks can be really created with any kind of story element, characters, I think, are the clearest example of this. Maybe you’ve had this experience: you open up a book and on the first few pages, you start to get to know a character, but there’s something about them. It seems as if they’re hiding something. There’s some piece of maybe their past or maybe the character themselves that is intriguing. And you wonder to yourself, what’s really going on here? That is a character hook.
A character hook can be created in a variety of different ways. It can be created through their engagement with other characters, through their interaction with the plot of the story. So, for instance, in ‘Battlemage Farmer, Book One: Domestication,’ there’s a subtle hook in the interaction between the main character and the quest that he’s been given.
You create hooks with characters by taking two things that should be at odds and making a connection between them. So, for instance, the main character of ‘Domestication,’ John, is a mage. And it’s established really early on that people hate mages. All of a sudden, we have a character hook. Because John is on his way to a village, but I’ve just established that people hate mages. And so the question of how John is going to avoid being discovered is a subtle character hook.
We have another hook in the way that John interacts with the quest that he has been given. In the beginning of the story, it’s established that he has to forcefully restrain the mana around him, or the horse pulling his cart would burn to death. That’s a pretty terrifying thing. And yet the quest he’s on is to start a farm. And so once again, we have this juxtaposition between the very dangerous John and the very benign activity, starting a farm. Now, if you asked a reader what hooked them into this story they may not actually be able to tell you, because that’s the thing about hooks. If they are very big and bold, they’re less likely to be swallowed by a reader. When dealing with character hooks, learning how to take two things that seem like they shouldn’t fit together and fitting them together is one of the most effective ways to create these hooks.
Sometimes, I think writers get the wrong impression about hooks. They believe they need some sort of big hook that’s going to drag a reader from the beginning to the end, all the way through the story. In my experience, that’s not as effective as having tons of small hooks, small things that pull a reader from chapter to chapter.
Again, it has to do with whether the reader is aware that it’s happening or not. Humans don’t like to be manipulated, but they are perfectly willing to be manipulated if they are not aware that it is happening. That is to say, readers will bite the hooks all day long. They’ll continue reading, curious to find out what happens. But if you make a big deal out of it, if you make it something that is really obvious, they’re out. They’ll find reasons not to continue.
In addition to creating hooks with your characters through story and plot, you can also create hooks with your world building. I just put one of the first chapters of a new series that I’m working on up on my ReamStories account. One of the readers gave me some feedback and listed a whole bunch of questions about the world that they had as a result of reading the first chapter. That is a clear example of using world building hooks in order to grab the reader.
In that particular series, the main city of New Emery is this last bastion of humanity’s survival against a terrifying alien threat. Though I never come right out and say exactly what’s going on in that first chapter, I planted tons of world building hooks in it. Small questions that engage the reader’s curiosity, that make them want to turn to the next page just in case the answer is there. Is the city of New Emery alone? Are there other humans somewhere else? Are they fighting a losing war, or are they winning? There are all sorts of questions that you can introduce through your world building that are going to hook readers in, that are going to capture their imaginations and make them want to spend time in your world, and more importantly, read your book.
But this does bring us to a really important caveat to this whole topic, and that is that if you don’t answer those questions, your hooks backfire. Hooks create cognitive dissonance. They create an unanswered question. They create a point of frustration. If that frustration is mild enough, people won’t even notice it. Your reader is just going to continue reading to try to answer the question, pulled along by the interesting bits of information that you’re feeding them.
In fact, I’ve heard it likened to a trail of breadcrumbs. If a bird is hopping along, eating little bits of bread scattered around, and then all of a sudden there’s no more bread, they’re going to turn around and leave. They’re going to fly away, and you’re never going to see them again. That’s the danger of not fulfilling the implicit promise you make when you create a hook. Because if you create a hook, your implicit promise is that you will tell them that information. You will satisfy their curiosity.
Now, the opposite is also true. If you were to create a hook, and then on the next page just dump a truckload of information on them, they’re equally likely to say, “Ooh, I’m not interested in this.” In the same way that a bird hopping along after that trail of breadcrumbs, if they came to a whole loaf, would probably not continue on. There’s enough there for them to eat for a long time. They would probably not continue to follow the trail of crumbs.
So both of these are potential problems, not giving enough information or giving too much information. At the end of the day, creating hooks is about being able to thread that needle, to walk the line between engaging somebody’s curiosity and satisfying their curiosity. And it takes a lot of practice to be able to do it really, really well. But it’s a skill worth learning, because if you can learn it, you’re going to find yourself never running out of readers. And every reader that picks up your books will likely turn into a fan, somebody who wants to read more of your books.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/Izpkjg-bxWk
Thanks for reading and watching.
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