hook, hold, and payoff

[slrogers]

In trying to understand what makes a good story, I've come to realize how personal and at the same time how universal this can be. From the universal stand point a good story needs a good hook, the better the hook the more compelling it is to dive into and forget everything else that might try and pull you away from the story. The story then needs to hold the "listeners" attention. Very much like the hooks, the hold needs to persuade the "listener" over and over again how important it is to follow the story all the way through to the end. And then there has to be a payoff at the end. The "storyteller" has to deliver on his/her promises that the "ride" was well worth the "price of admission".

Yet for each of those, (hook, hold, and payoff) what makes them compelling is individual. Each person can have very different goals for their life, how and where they find entertainment, and how each element of their life provide fulfillment and enrich their lives to make them more than they would have otherwise been. Some of these individual characteristics can be categorized, like if they are just drifting though life without any real or solid goals or if they are strongly compelled to some very specific goals. Other characteristics can be much more individualized like a strong affinity for purple and pink dragons with social personality disorders which compel them to try and please those less likely to be accepting.

In the processes of trying to figure out what creates a good hook, hold, and payoff I've come to a bit of an epiphany about myself ( http://wordmindjourney.blogspot.com/2013/10/understanding-me.html ). But, here, I realize it is better to get you're views and opinions on the best ways to hook, hold, and deliver. Because there are so many contradictory "suggestions" out there for writers on how best to do this. And for authors that want to try their hooks and such out, I've noticed that some are tried here, I've also heard that the Baen slush pile is a good place to get feed back. What are your views on how to make the absolute best hooks, holds, and payoffs?

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

They depend a lot on the story.

Some stories want a hook from the first line (such as "It was the day my grandmother exploded.") and others want a slow-building woven net of an opening (see The Lord of the Rings).  Some want very definite resolutions, and some want carefully delineated ambiguities where getting an answer either way would weaken the ending. A lot depends on the exact kind of story; fairy-tale retellings and hardboiled mysteries tend to want to work differently, for example.

[slrogers]

They depend a lot on the story.

Some stories want a hook from the first line (such as "It was the day my grandmother exploded.") and others want a slow-building woven net of an opening (see The Lord of the Rings).  Some want very definite resolutions, and some want carefully delineated ambiguities where getting an answer either way would weaken the ending. A lot depends on the exact kind of story; fairy-tale retellings and hardboiled mysteries tend to want to work differently, for example.

That's an interesting point. While I had thought of it as different readers want a different hook, it's amazingly true how different stories want a different hook. While both are true, I hadn't thought as much about the hook from the story's perspective. This is true of the hold and payoff as well. Perhaps the payoff is more obviously true from this standpoint, I just should have realized it about the hook as well. So a deep, personal understanding of the story I'm telling will help me to better understand the hook that I need to create.
Now I guess if I expand this idea, for example, and say that I want a rather complex story that crosses genre and/or age group, then I would have to weave together the hooks in a way that captivates each type of story and each group of readers. Thus my hook should be very unique to my story and readers. (I wonder how many hooks are unintentional, or that the author didn't realize was what would catch a reader?)

[slrogers]

I guess along those lines as well, in order to figure out what hooks (and everything) work for any given type of story, one should read a lot of that type of story.

[slrogers]

As I talk, as I spin this thread of mine, I weave it around you. What was a curiosity at first, with each new line, new thread, it holds you more tightly, binds you more closely. Soon you cannot break free at all, mesmerized and astounded, you've lost any desire to be free of me. You are under my power, my spell that holds you tight, and you are loving it. -- Oh, how I love a good story.

And what I am now starting to realize about the hook and hold (and how intertwined they are) is that each hook from each thread of the story (not just the beginning of the book) is needed to help pull the reader in further, and each payoff as each of the threads play through is a new hold on the reader especially when lined with hooks from other threads all woven together. Each payoff is a shot of the reader's own dopamine, convincing him or her that she can trust you. With each shot of dopamine the reader becomes more and more addicted.

Unfortunately it means that for each of us as authors, we can't get sloppy with any of our threads. We need to make sure that each thread has a purpose well aligned with the story and characters. The more cohesive it all is the better it all comes together for the reader.

But how do you do it? How do you find the hooks that your story needs? How do you recognize the difference between those hooks you think will bring readers in but end up really being distractions, and those elements that you thought weren't all that necessary but really grab the reader's attention?

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

But how do you do it? How do you find the hooks that your story needs? How do you recognize the difference between those hooks you think will bring readers in but end up really being distractions, and those elements that you thought weren't all that necessary but really grab the reader's attention?

Sheer self-confidence, backed up with the technical skill to make it work.

I don;t want my readers to be thinking about whether an element is interesting.  If they have that much critical faculty left at the time the element isn't being compelling enough.  I want them on the edge of their seats. laughing, heartwarmed, or terrified as appropriate.

[meg_evonne]

2 cents worth...  A Hook is commercial, however your Hold and Payoff elements are grounded in the ancient art of storytelling. By definition it is an art. Even the writer following a prescribed format or structure is crafting their words as art. If there was a magic fix that guarantees to satisfy a particular reading community, everyone would have it, instead simply those who are great storytellers.

I think your Hold and Payoff is what some writers call tension and story arc. I'm pretty sure JB refers to this in his writer's blog. In other words, each of your interwoven threads tightens through tension and then is released at a slightly higher level. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. etc. (Another way to say this is to craft a  constriction of tension followed by the relief by a slight break before diving in again to the next level.)

My suggestion is to reach deep into your own heart and your own experiences to add depth and honesty to your writing--if it is compelling and the pace is satisfactory, then readers will find you.

It's hard enough to crank out that first draft; just plug it out. Later in revision and editing, you will fine tune your Hold and Payoff to fix your tension, release, and pacing.

Best wishes on your writing!

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

My suggestion is to reach deep into your own heart and your own experiences to add depth and honesty to your writing--if it is compelling and the pace is satisfactory, then readers will find you.

The failure mode of that is reaching deep into your own heart and experience for things you feel very strongly about that other people whose emotional wiring is different just flat-out can't believe.

[The Deposed King]

The failure mode of that is reaching deep into your own heart and experience for things you feel very strongly about that other people whose emotional wiring is different just flat-out can't believe.

A couple thoughts.  You can't be all things to all people.  I mean sure you can cross Fantasy or Sci-Fi with say Romance or Mystery and have a blend that 'appeals to a wider audience' but in gaining some you'll lose others.  Now if that's what you love.  Fantasy/Romance or Sci-Fi/Mystery then by all means write it.  But Battlestar Galactica for instance lost me as a viewer because it tried to be too many things for too many people and the stuff I was in it for, the sci-fi, adventure and space battles left me feeling cheated.

So I would advise not to 'deliberately' try to broaden your reach too much.  Not as a 'I need to reach a bigger audience!' idea but instead stay true to what you love to read.  So if you love the genre/gender blended whatever pink unicorns and fairies in galactic striding battleships that are falling in love while solving the mystery of who killed the ship's captain and the Federation President then by all means, if you love it, write it.  But otherwise don't.

The other thing I'd advise is don't alienate your audience by trying to specialize too narrowly and/or force feed them your heart wiring.  A simple realization that other people are wired other ways and that its alright for them to enter your masterpiece, play around and have fun on your canvas is perfectly fine.  Say you're a raging polygamist or believe that Social Democracy is the best, brightest, and only, way to go.  Doesn't mean that you have to preach it or make it the sole facet of your society that we see.  Same thing if you've got a raging hard on for firearms and believe that everyone should or shouldn't be weapons trained and/or part of a militia because its great/in-human.  Reasonable and reasonably intelligent people are going to be different with different opinions.

If you embrace any one philosophy or line of thought you 'will' limit your audience, just like the popular Dixie Chicks did when they insulted a large part of their audience and called them stupid.  Sci-Fi to me is about exploring, interacting with strangeness and having a grand old time with a space adventure which (having a grand old time) is precluded by making too many judgements about non-genocidal aliens/humans/or your fellow citizens on Planet Z who don't want to kill/and-or eat you.

I would say that so long as everyone is having fun, and that bad guys are baddies you'll do fine.

To other points: A hook is needed to let your reader know 'why' they should read your book, in your hook you're basically telling them what the pay off is (or part of the pay off) and thus why they and their dollars should pay attention to you and your writing over a thousand other guys/gals or deliberately gender mysterious individuals.

As for the body or story arc and all the insides of a book.  You just have to keep it from getting slow and not leave the readers a place to stop and ask themselves why am I reading this, where's the (insert desired part of the story that's missing).



The Deposed King

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

Say you're a raging polygamist or believe that Social Democracy is the best, brightest, and only, way to go.

Have you been looking back through my off-topic posts or something ?

  Doesn't mean that you have to preach it or make it the sole facet of your society that we see.

Nah, but on the other hand, I'd rather have something sincere and heartfelt that I could disagree with in almost every particular and enjoy anyway (see, most of Daniel Keys Moran's work, for example; I am entirely on the side of the antagonists in the Tale of the Continuing Time) rather than something that's trying to avoid controversy and ends up being insipid or worse, raising blatant questions about its set-up that it falls short of answering.

If you embrace any one philosophy or line of thought you 'will' limit your audience, just like the popular Dixie Chicks did when they insulted a large part of their audience and called them stupid.

Ideally, one could hope to get around this by depicting characters with strongly-held beliefs but writing them in such a way as to show the negatives as well as the positives.  This is however difficult and there are many readers who won't get it anyway because of, sfaict being absolutely convinced that if someone is presented as a hero/protagonist we are therefore meant to find them sympathetic. (As witness a goodly fraction of my on-topic posts; my personal read on the DF is that Jim is doing an amazing job of critiquing the values Harry espouses, without haryr himself being remotely aware of that.)

I would say that so long as everyone is having fun, and that bad guys are baddies you'll do fine.

Meh. Good vs. Evil is easy and has been done thousands of times.  Good vs. Other Incompatible Good, now that's interesting.  (Also heartbreaking.)

To other points: A hook is needed to let your reader know 'why' they should read your book, in your hook you're basically telling them what the pay off is (or part of the pay off) and thus why they and their dollars should pay attention to you and your writing over a thousand other guys/gals or deliberately gender mysterious individuals.

OK, if you're defining hook that broadly, I can't disagree with you; it's the notion that every book needs to start with an action-scene-type hook specifically ("Ford Prefect hit the ground running") that doesn't work for me.

[The Deposed King]

Have you been looking back through my off-topic posts or something ?

Nah, but on the other hand, I'd rather have something sincere and heartfelt that I could disagree with in almost every particular and enjoy anyway (see, most of Daniel Keys Moran's work, for example; I am entirely on the side of the antagonists in the Tale of the Continuing Time) rather than something that's trying to avoid controversy and ends up being insipid or worse, raising blatant questions about its set-up that it falls short of answering.

Ideally, one could hope to get around this by depicting characters with strongly-held beliefs but writing them in such a way as to show the negatives as well as the positives.  This is however difficult and there are many readers who won't get it anyway because of, sfaict being absolutely convinced that if someone is presented as a hero/protagonist we are therefore meant to find them sympathetic. (As witness a goodly fraction of my on-topic posts; my personal read on the DF is that Jim is doing an amazing job of critiquing the values Harry espouses, without haryr himself being remotely aware of that.)

Meh. Good vs. Evil is easy and has been done thousands of times.  Good vs. Other Incompatible Good, now that's interesting.  (Also heartbreaking.)

OK, if you're defining hook that broadly, I can't disagree with you; it's the notion that every book needs to start with an action-scene-type hook specifically ("Ford Prefect hit the ground running") that doesn't work for me.

1
Haven't been going back through off topic posts.  I just pulled what I thought were two random cultural/political positions that generally (but perhaps not always, cause hey its a big world) wouldn't go together and threw them out there.

2-3&4?
Its not so much that I would avoid heart felt positions or water things down until they aren't keenly felt but I don't think it has to be controversial.  For instance my MC in my Spineward Sectors series starts out as an Anti-Monarchy, Prince, and with his culture's default Bias/raging-Hate-on for all things AI.  Over the course of the series, due to the actions of the Parliament and Elected Sector Assembly he is forced to embrase the Feudal-Monarchist model to a certain extent while at the same time becoming disenchanted with the Democratic/Representative Elected model due to all the times they keep stabbing him in the back.  But his unthinking knee jerk 'Rage against the Machine' anti-AI bias runs head long into Real Politic concerns when it comes time to deal with the Droids.

I think that by showing the flaws in both Monarchy and Democracy and then having our character pushed in the direction of the Monarchy side, I can get in the weeds a little bit as our guy agonizes over the 'ideal world' he'd like to live in and the actual world of corrupted elected leaders he has to deal with.  This lets me have a political argument that bypasses most all of the hot button issues of the day by introduce a generally discarded paradim.

And at the same time I get to show what unthinking bias, even built on a well deserved and wholly earned basis can look like, when it comes to the Human Race's former and overthrown AI Overlords.  Then after we get a few looks at some anti-machine bigots we will eventually get to deal with some very much non-AI but very intelligent Droids most of whom deserve our anger (for other reasons) and some of whom do not.  And thus our biases and bigotries will be tested, exposed, counted and measured, yet at no time am I really running the risk of po-oing my fan base by hitting them where they live.  Anyone with the intelligence to see what unthought out extreme positions can give you.  Meaning at the very least big blind spots and anyone who wants to ignore the politics can have a good ride as we smash the bad guys and make a few smart decisions and maneuvers to help us out later on.  Without having to feel preached at, or as if I am foisting some kind of political, social or whatever position on them as we go along.

4
Its almost always about good versus evil, if only because there are very few individuals who don't think of themselves or what they're doing as good and their opponents as bad (if not actively evil).  So I would say to have 'your characters' portray themselves to themselves and others as anything other than good and their opponents (at least initially) as anything other than wrong/bad/or-evil to be a flaw.  That's not to say that the other side is evil or that our side is good.  That's where you as a writer get to introduce nuance, context and in the process of giving the depth expose some of the flaws in our MC's thinking and positions.  I will say a lot of people are looking for a good time when they read books and that to give them a morally conflicted hero who's not sure if he's doing the right thing or is on the right side and wonders if his opponents are just as good as he is, might not be as satisfying a read.  I mean honestly its hard to have a good time, blowing up your enemies, saving the day in the nick of time by stopping your base from exploding or whatever else, if the reader is looking at it wondering if our guy/gal shouldn't have lost.

Now in writing this I have perhaps exposed a bias for a Star Wars, Star Trek, Dresden Files etc fun romp with action in it.  But there you go.

5

On the Hook:  I would say that if you can do 'better' or even 'almost as good' as an action lead in and if that's what you love to write you should by all means write it that way.  On the other hand if your books are suffering because of your lead in hook is flat or off putting or just isn't selling your book to your audience and you've been avoiding putting an action hook in up to this point then....   



The Deposed King

[Sully]

Meh. Good vs. Evil is easy and has been done thousands of times.  Good vs. Other Incompatible Good, now that's interesting.  (Also heartbreaking.)

Book suggestions for that?

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

Book suggestions for that?

Off the top of my head, I am finding it hard to think of genre books that manage to get two opposed sides equally sympathetic and have them both be nice, though I have a feeling I'll remember better examples when I am less exhausted.  MilSF-ish with two fairly equally sympathetic sides, there's always CS Friedman's In Conquest Born, though I've not read it in long enough that I may be misremembering.

I also have a feeling I have read historicals that did this rather well, but again, been writing for the past nine hours, brain blanking.

(ETA: facepalm: how could I forget The Armageddon Rag ?  "On Armageddon day, both armies will think they fight for Good. And both of them will be wrong.")

(ETA2: facepalm x2 combo: much much better example than any of the above, forget I said any of that; Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution series.  The Star Fraction is the anarchist one, The Stone Canal is the capitalist one, The Cassini Division is the communist one, and The Sky Road is the anti-civilisation back-to-barbarianism one; taken together, none of those political positions get exalted over or subjugated to any of the others.  These are brilliant, razor-sharp, highly political books from someone with a lot of experience of political organisation on the ground, and I cannot recommend them highly enough; they are currently available in two omnibus editions called Fractions and Divisions.  They can be read in any order so long as you read The Sky Road last; my experience with US readers is that The Star Fraction tends to be a mite less accessible than the others due to being thoroughly steeped in UK anarcho-leftie stuff.  There is one subset of folks that get a raw deal throughout that series, which it would be a drastic spoiler to specify, but in his unrelated much later standalone The Night Sessions he remedies this.)

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

1
Haven't been going back through off topic posts.  I just pulled what I thought were two random cultural/political positions that generally (but perhaps not always, cause hey its a big world) wouldn't go together and threw them out there.

Fair enough; wasn't sure whether that was specifically targeted friendly teasing or not, as social democracy is as close as a readily definable mainstream political position comes to where I come from, and I'm also fairly out about being actively polyamorous. 

I think that by showing the flaws in both Monarchy and Democracy and then having our character pushed in the direction of the Monarchy side, I can get in the weeds a little bit as our guy agonizes over the 'ideal world' he'd like to live in and the actual world of corrupted elected leaders he has to deal with.  This lets me have a political argument that bypasses most all of the hot button issues of the day by introduce a generally discarded paradim.

That last's the kind of thing that I might not be too confident of if considering potential sales in the bits of the non-US anglophone world that are constitutional monarchies, which are a lot of them, and where that is betimes quite an emotive issue from more than one direction.  (If you're not familiar with it,  I would commend wikipedia's article on "23-F" to your attention.)

Anyone with the intelligence to see what unthought out extreme positions can give you.  Meaning at the very least big blind spots and anyone who wants to ignore the politics can have a good ride as we smash the bad guys and make a few smart decisions and maneuvers to help us out later on.  Without having to feel preached at, or as if I am foisting some kind of political, social or whatever position on them as we go along.

I don't think a book having a political position has to translate into being preachy, though. Preachy isn't to my mind an issue of having overt politics or not, just a failure mode of bad writing.

Its almost always about good versus evil, if only because there are very few individuals who don't think of themselves or what they're doing as good and their opponents as bad (if not actively evil).

I've not actually found this to be true; both IME of RL politics in situations where the concept of "loyal opposition" is well understood, on one hand, and on the other, with a regrettably high number of abusive scumbags who have consciously adopted positions functionally equivalent to "Evil be thou my good" and have actively engaged and delighted in doing things they make no pretence are anything other than evil.  Both of which are types of character one does not see that much of in fiction.

Now in writing this I have perhaps exposed a bias for a Star Wars, Star Trek, Dresden Files etc fun romp with action in it.  But there you go.

Fair enough, and that's not generally my cup of tea (well, modulo that I am of the opinion Jim's critiquing that sort of story at least as much as he's retelling it); plenty of room out there for all sorts of stories.

On the other hand if your books are suffering because of your lead in hook is flat or off putting or just isn't selling your book to your audience and you've been avoiding putting an action hook in up to this point then....   

This would be one of these places where I am pretty sure going with my gut feeling is not sensible to generalise, because to me personally, action scenes, in the sense of swordfights or firefights or what not, are ineffably and irreducibly boring as hell; give me friends caring for each other, respecting each other, and flirting with each other, otoh, and I'm hooked.

[The Deposed King]

Book suggestions for that?

David Weber pulled... well not quite a 180, call it a 165, in his Honor Harrington series vis-a-vis the 'Peeps'.  They started out as these evil dastards.  Then he tried to make them all warm and fuzzy after the counter-counter revolution went down.  Never purchased shares in the 'peeps' are no longer bad and are now reformed business but that's clearly what he's been writing.



The Deposed King