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Where Words Meet

Hooking Up: Judging the “Fangs Fur Fey” Hooks Contest

By Justine Musk

I was a judge in a ‘hook’ writing contest held by the fangs-fur-fey livejournal community (http://community.livejournal.com/fangs_fur_fey). Writers of related genres sent in their ‘hooks’ – that paragraph of a query letter describing the novel in such concise, compelling terms that the agent has no choice but to request five pages, then fifty, then the whole thing, then representation.

The judges were all published novelists who at some point had written a hook that got them all the way out of the slush pile and into your local Barnes & Noble.

Each hook was posted online, as were the judges’ critiques. The idea was to give at least some of the thought process behind the decision-making that went into which hooks were chosen and which did not.

It surprised me how much time and work this contest involved, just to give a two- or three-paragraph critique – and not a particularly well-organized one at that — of each hook. I was given thirteen hooks and only managed to get through eleven – the final two ended up assigned to other judges. It took up massive chunks of my weekend – when I could have been working on my own stuff or hanging out with my family or reading or going to the movies or taking a hip-hop dance class or just blissfully wasting time.

It was my job as judge to select “the best of the lot” – my favorite of the hooks — and then request the first five pages of the manuscript. I will then critique those five pages (which I’ll be doing after writing this essay).

To be honest, there were no clear winners. I am doubtful that even one would prove tight, structured and interesting enough to hook an actual agent’s interest. Which is a shame, because the art of writing a good hook is different from the art of writing a good novel – it’s possible to be good at the latter while totally sucking at the former, and vice-versa.

However, a hook really is your book’s first impression. It implies a lot about your book. Flaws within the hook will suggest to the agent, as they did to me, that those flaws are indicative of the state of your manuscript – that the understanding of what makes for compelling story and character just isn’t there, or that the story isn’t quite ready yet for submission in the marketplace.

Having said that, sometimes – as one poster put it – “the heart of the story will shine through the crappy presentation”. I ended up choosing two hooks as the “best of the lot”, agreeing to critique an extra set of pages, because I saw something through those flawed presentations that I didn’t quite see in the others.

They both managed to convey a complete sense of what the book actually was. They had a voice I felt I could spend some time with as a reader. And something about them struck me as original and lively enough to get under my skin a bit; I found myself thinking about them while I was off doing other things. Which made me decide to declare them winners of this round.

A hook, first and foremost, should convey the shape and arch of your story

And by story I mean: protagonist, setting, conflict, resolution.

The limit on each hook was 300 words – brevity is everything when you’re querying an agent – and I was impressed at how much information people managed to pack into such a short space. But it tended to be the wrong information. The stuff I needed and wanted to know wasn’t in there.

People did seem to realize that details were important – but they just weren’t the right details.

I wanted a vivid sense of who the protagonist was. Most hooks gave me the protagonist’s name and gender — and little more. Age would have been helpful. Profession. Perhaps a touch of background. A hint of the protagonist’s dominating personality traits. Anything that would flesh out the generic shape of Protagonist into someone specific and intriguing, someone I’d like to read a whole book about.

What would have been especially impressive: some inner conflict or wound the character will somehow resolve in the course of his or adventures, some sense of how the character will grow. An inner, personal struggle to both reflect and amplify the external struggle.

Speaking of that external struggle: show me the conflict! After you tell me who the protagonist is – better yet, create an interesting detailed image of that protagonist – show me who or what that character is in direct conflict with. Show me the antagonist to balance out the protagonist (and I don’t necessarily mean hero vs. villain, I mean the person who wants the thing that cuts against what the protagonist wants and needs).

Show me what motivates your characters. Most hooks completely neglected to do this, which is a shame. Think about how much work a character’s motivation actually does: shows a great deal about the character and a great deal about the plot. It shows me how the protagonist and antagonist must inevitably come into conflict. That’s a lot of work done with not a lot of words.

There are two kinds of conflict: the major conflict that shapes the novel and serves as a kind of throughline to drive you through the storyworld, and what my own agent calls ‘line by line conflict’. If the major conflict is the key question or two that the reader becomes anxious to see resolved – will the Rebel Alliance destroy the Death Star and win freedom for the universe? Will our heroes survive? – ‘line by line conflict’ becomes the series of questions that keep the reader actually reading the pages (is Darth Vader Luke’s father? What will happen to frozen Han Solo? Will the characters escape Jabba? Were those Ewoks truly necessary, and did they have to be so bloody cute? Okay, the last doesn’t really apply, but you get my point). Plot isn’t just things that happen (and why), but also how the author deals out that information to the reader: the rhythm of questions being raised and answered and then how those answers bloom into more questions, that makes for a satisfying storytelling experience.

When stories ask too many questions and don’t provide that countering rhythm of answers, readers get bored or frustrated and drop out – think about how ratings fared for once-popular television shows like Twin Peaks, Lost, or The X-Files, amid criticism about how the shows had handled (or mishandled) the questions so compelling to viewers. They refused to actually answer them. Withholding information will keep the reader’s interest – but only to a point.

Many hooks broke the story apart into a list of plot elements. Some of those elements were indeed intriguing, but I couldn’t see how they added up. It’s a bit like listing the ingredients of a lemon meringue pie without showing me the pie itself – I see the flour and lemon filling and sugar and other things, and yes they do look promising, but I don’t see what the final result is, how the ingredients bake into each other, to create something that’s more than the sum of its parts. You have to keep focused on the story, the ‘more’ of the sum of those parts. The pie. If you simply rattle off a list of Cool Things That Happen without showing how they build on each other to create ever-greater urgency, tension, rising stakes, then I will think that the novel doesn’t hang together right – that it’s too episodic, just one thing happening after another while the characters kind of wander around. And by trying to cram in so much, you end up focusing on too little. Some of that extremely valuable wordspace should go towards fleshing out those line-by-line questions (when you raise an interesting question, the natural human impulse is to crave an interesting answer – and then you’ve hooked the reader’s curiosity, a powerful thing indeed.)

But above all, see the forest for the trees, and make sure the agent can, too. Stay focused on the most important elements of the book and how those elements hang together. Show me how they link up to each other, weave around each other, braid through each other. Give me a sense of the motion of the story – how it sets up, complicates, and resolves – so I can get a sense of the shape of the thing, or even just the sense that the thing has a shape at all. That it won’t fall flat. Or apart.

And please, please tell me where it’s set. The setting is a character in itself; a love story set in Chicago will be different from a love story set in West Hollywood which will be different from a love story set in my own hometown of Peterborough, Ontario (in which at least half of the characters would play hockey). Much like character motivation, ‘setting’ is one of those great, fantastic things that conveys so much about your book in so little.

More bang for your word-buck.

Take advantage.

I chose one hook because the voice appealed to me. Originally I wasn’t going to send it through to the next round, but I found my mind going back to it. So finally I just figured, Hell with it. Let’s take a chance. Plot problems, after all, can be fixed, assuming the writer is someone you can work with (and agents do not take this for granted, will often work with a writer to see how that goes before agreeing to take on the manuscript). But a good, developed ‘voice’ isn’t something that can be so easily revised. It’s either there or it isn’t. And if it makes me think that, yes, I might like to curl up for three hundred pages with this voice — that’s a powerful thing indeed.

So what is voice? A strong grasp of grammar and vocabulary should go without saying. Beyond that, it has to do with an ease in handling language, perhaps – but not necessarily – a flair, a love, for words themselves. It has to do with the tone of the writing – light-hearted? Poetic? Colloquial? Sinister and creepy? — and the sense of the storyteller’s intelligence and personality surfacing up through the writing. A good voice rings with a natural sense of authority; you know you’re in good hands, and can surrender yourself to the grip of the story.

Most of the hooks I judged had a flat voice – the writing doesn’t lift up from the page. There were a couple of instances when the writer was actively experimenting with voice – and yay for that – but it just didn’t seem to work: the tone was overly cute or too condescending, or seemed at odds with the nature of the subject matter.

And of course this gets highly subjective. A voice that appeals to one agent – enough so that the agent might overlook some apparent flaws and take a chance on the material – might not appeal to another.

Remember when you’re writing the hook that you are indeed writing. Show me why you chose language as your storytelling medium – rather than filmmaking or dance or theatre or, heck, finger puppetry.

The two hooks I sent through also had something in them – an idea, or character, or situation, or ‘voice’ – that caught my interest, that gave me hope there was something in this story I hadn’t quite seen before. We all swim in the same pool of general mass culture; we have seen many of the same movies, read many of the same books. Make it a point to be influenced by strange and obscure things as well as the popular things; make sure your mix of influences is unique to you, because it will make for more unique fiction.

At least one of the better-composed hooks was rejected because although it presented the story relatively well, the story itself didn’t seem worth the effort. Things just felt too familiar. Sometimes ‘familiar’ can mean that the writer fell back on vague, generic language instead of fleshing things out with detail, and creating images in the reader’s eye. Sometimes it means that the ideas behind the language were just too wellworn to be truly interesting. Does the world need or want another fantasy novel about elves? Well sure, if those elves are interesting in some new way. Show me how they’re interesting. Reinvent them for me. The blurry shape of ‘elf’ just won’t do it anymore.

Yes, this process is maddeningly subjective. That goes without saying.

And the odds are overwhelmingly against you. That also goes without saying.

You fight the odds by writing a structured, focused hook that conveys protagonist, setting, conflict, and maybe some complication/resolution, and through fleshing out the spine of the story with well-chosen details. You fight the odds through your unique, intriguing voice. You fight the odds with the brevity and professionalism of your query letter. Accomplish this, and you will vault yourself into the small group of query letters receiving serious consideration from at least a small percentage of the agents queried (which is why you will play the numbers game and query a massive – massive — number of agents).

To write a good book, you have to read a lot of good books, and some bad books as well in order to learn from others’ mistakes and not make so many of your own. So it goes with hooks. It’s difficult to learn everything you need to know – and get a sense for what makes a compelling hook – just from one critique alone, even if that critique is a thoughtful, in-depth one and the hook in question is your own.

So read all the hooks and critiques you can. Look for the patterns of mistakes, of praise, since the same issues seem to crop up over and over. Develop a sense for yourself of what works and what doesn’t; what makes you want to read the manuscript, and what makes your roll your eyes or shrug your shoulders and move on. The archives at Miss Snark (http://misssnark.blogspot.com/), Evil Editor (http://www.evileditor.blogspot.com/) and the fangs fur fey (http://community.livejournal.com/fangs_fur_fey/) are good places to start.

– Justine Musk

Related posts:

1. Things I Think I Know
2. A Matter of Perspective
3. The Rules of Chaos: Leaving Your Outline in Order To Find It
4. Leavitt Learning Part Two
5. Cult of Personality: Traits of a Writer

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