What Is A Story Hook?

Let’s get back to some very basic elements of story, since the past few chapters have been a little head-spinning, deep, and oddly esoteric. Whether you’re writing a pilot, a feature, an epic fantasy novel or a small YA series with some juicy romance, or even if you’re sitting around a campfire enjoying the last few days of warm weather and telling ghost stories, the most basic element of a story is the hook. Even though the idea of a hook is simple enough, really understanding how it works and why, will help you in so many ways. So, what is a hook? In very general terms, it’s what grabs your audience’s attention. It’s why your audience will see your movie, watch your show, read your book. It’s the reason for the entertainment. I’ll say that again. It’s the reason for the entertainment.

Think of it this way. We’ll use coffee as an example. You go to the grocery store and find the aisle that sells the tea, coffee, and whatever else the grocery store chain thinks you need to buy aside from just coffee, and you pick your favorite brand. You go home, you open up the bag of ground up coffee, put a paper filter into your Mr. Coffee, pour some water in, and you push the “brew” button. The water slowly trickles into the basin, the water soaks into the coffee grinds, and then drips into the pot. The heated plate beneath the pot keeps the created coffee nice and hot. Then what? You drink the coffee.

So how the hell am I going to compare this process to storytelling? The coffee and water is your hook. The brew button is your story. The brew button is your entertainment. Without pushing that brew button, the coffee and water just sit there. Have you ever prepared your Mr. Coffee with the water and coffee grinds and then forget to push the brew button? In your early morning stupor, you waddle into the kitchen, half asleep, wiping the crust from your eyes, you put the coffee and water in and then just walk away. About 20 minutes later you check out the coffee pot and, “Oh hell. There’s nothing in here!”

Now let’s take a more direct and story specific approach and we can get off of the coffee metaphor. Using the Jim Carrey movie, LIAR LIAR, as an example, if it doesn’t have the hook of “a lying lawyer physically unable to tell the truth for 24 hours”, you just have an absent father ignoring his kid for an hour and a half. There is no resulting entertainment. And what do I mean by “resulting entertainment”? It’s the “then what”. It’s the 2nd Act. It’s the moments throughout the middle of the movie that present the memorable lines, the funny interactions, the lessons that the audience will learn right alongside the Main Character, all because of the very basic conceptual set-up. And that conceptual set up is different than your story’s structural set up, but I don’t want to go off on a huge tangent here.

Here’s an even more specific explanation: a hook is a unique situation that allows for a recurring moment which then allows for your character’s emotional flaw to be exposed over and over again which then allows for theme to be expressed and an adventure to be completed.

Ladies and gentleman, that is all a story is. Setting up an interesting character within an interesting situation that allows for that situation to be repeated in a fresh way. Look at a sit-com. The literal and simplified definition of a sit-com is, “situational comedy”. The situation is what you’re tuning in to see every single week, but even more importantly, you’re tuning in to see these great characters living within that situation every week.

Look at the show Lost. In spite of it not being a sit-com, what’s part of the hook for Lost? A bunch of strangers crash land on a remote island, and through their need to simply survive, they discover that the island has mysterious powers and terrible secrets.

That hook tells us nothing about the characters involved, at least not on a personal level, but it does tell us the situation in which the characters will live and experience a story. It’s just the coffee grinds for now. The water (and eventually the brew button) is the unique cast of characters who each have their own personal secrets and agendas (and storylines and pursuits) while living within that “crash land on a mysterious island” situation.

What happens when you put the two together? You get a tasty cup of coffee that will fuel your morning writing sessions. And you can even put some sugar or honey or cream in there just to spice things up. This tasty cup of coffee is why you go through the entire bag of coffee grinds and then go back to the grocery store to buy more. It’s enjoyable. It wakes you up. You become addicted to not only the caffeine, but the comfort of the morning coffee routine.

This is why you write and tell stories. To entertain. To keep an audience wanting more. To give them a set of recurring moments so that they A) will enjoy watching them over and over again, and B) become engaged in the characters who are playing out and living through those recurring moments. And what is it that results from these two elements being combined? Hook and characters? The coffee, water and the brew button? Emotion.

Consider the elements within what I’ve been discussing here. A hook equals an interesting situation that involves an interesting character that then can be repeated in order to create an entertaining adventure. The key element within all of this is character, but more importantly, the character’s emotional flaw. And even though I’ve talked about the flaw a number of times, I still need everyone to truly understand what a flaw is. Emotion is inherent within the emotional flaw, so it isn’t that the person is an alcoholic. It’s the reason for why the person is an alcoholic, but – and here’s the catch – it’s not the outside influence that caused the alcoholism. It may be part of it, but it’s not the true, deep down flaw. In other words, a person is not technically an alcoholic because his wife died in a car accident that he caused, for instance. No, he’s an alcoholic (and thus his emotional flaw is...) because of his inability to forgive, to let go, to accept his faults, I could go on. That then results in a possible emotional flaw of, “hyper-critical, accepts defeat too easily, a pessimist to the point of subconsciously pursuing his own suicide.” That is why he is an alcoholic.

And look at what those character descriptions create. They create action and reaction within the world he is currently living in. And what’s the true point of this Substack? Those descriptions create a character who will react in a certain way within a certain situation. Putting the character with the flaw together with the interesting situation is what creates the interesting story. Emotion is created from the flaw, which is living within the interesting situation, to slowly become corrected through repetitive moments until finally, it breaks. In a feature, the breaking point is the end of the 2nd Act, and the 3rd Act is when and how theme is stated because...? The flaw is fully exposed, accepted, and thus in some big or small way, corrected. That then states/shows theme, and your audience leaves the theatre thinking you’re a brilliant writer because they just had an experience that they can relate to in some individual way.

There isn’t that much more you need to get from me. I know it sounds like I’m simplifying things, but well, I am, because the elements themselves are simple. They are basic, but you have to understand the basic elements in their entirety before you can consider your script or story to be fully developed. Because really, the execution of the hook and the characters and the story itself is truly the most difficult part.

I really hope that you understand what I’m discussing here is why you write. At least in a very general sense. Granted, you all have your own personal reasons for telling a story, and I hope that you do, but when it all gets boiled down and at the end of the day, it is the responsibility of the writer and storyteller to inflict emotion within the audience and reader. Basic. That emotion comes from giving the audience an experience of, “I’m not that character on screen, but I understand what she’s going through.” That, folks, is the basic definition of art. Participation without needing to know exactly the situation.

So get out there and create your own version of art. Get out there and create something that you feel connected to, because if you’re connected to it, others will be too. But you have to understand what your story’s hook is so that you fully develop that hook with a character experiencing multiple moments that express that hook over and over again.

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