Hooking ... not as easy as you'd think

By Pamela

Before I could tie my own shoes, I could bait a hook. Before I learned to drive a car, I learned to row a boat. Long before I became adept in the kitchen, I filleted fish on a pier. Such was the life of a kid who spent summers at the lake.

Me with my brother and sister:
learning the art of hooking at an early age.

But hooking fish and hooking readers are two different skills. Fish are pretty easy. A fat juicy worm, a shiny lure. Readers? They tend to be a little more particular.

At our recent retreat, my goal was to improve my hook. But before I could fully embrace the challenge, I had to know more about what the heck I was doing.

Author Nathan Bransford says a book's hook is "the quest and the central conflict, described as succinctly as possible, designed to make someone want to read more." Every novel, he says, is a quest--a journey that takes the reader from the beginning of the story to the end. The conflict is what your character must overcome to get from points A to B. Put them both together and you have it. A hook!

In Noah Lukeman's The First Five Pages, he devoted an entire chapter to hooks. (Chapter 14, if you're reading along.) Literary agent Donald Maass talks about hook in Writing the Breakout Novel. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find any credible book on writing that didn't address The Hook.

But the term 'hook' is thrown about pretty generously. Hooks open chapters, end chapters, begin paragraphs and generally appear throughout a novel. They're what keep us reading when we're really too tired to do so. We just can't put the book down, darn hooks!

What concerned me about my manuscript was not the hooks that appear throughout my story. It was THE HOOK. That one element that makes my book The One someone will want to read. It's what pulls readers in even before they decide to purchase the book. It's the bait that gets them committed to spending hours of their precious time immersed in the story.

A hook is sometimes apparent in a title. For example, Nathan says Snakes on a Plane reveals the movie's hook. Quest? Get the snakes off the plane. Conflict? Ahem, snakes + plane. Conflict, natch. In Moneyball, the hook is: Baseball manager on a budget takes an unprecedented approach to building a winning team. Showtime's Dexter has a unique hook: A Miami police forensics expert moonlights as a vigilante serial killer. Dexter's quest? Catch and kill criminals. Conflict: keeping those close to him from finding out what he does after hours.

For me, my hook was present in the story; it just didn't become known until chapter four. Maybe even five. So making my story's hook stronger simply meant moving chapters around (and tweaking the details) so that the hook now appears in chapter two--the beginning of chapter two. And who knows? Before I'm done, it might become chapter one.

For now the challenge continues: keeping the reader involved in the story so that he or she stays with it. The only way to do that is to raise the conflict, keeping the line taut. And as a result, land my fish once he's caught--all the way to the end.

Who are you again?

By Pamela

My husband has spent most of June and July's work weeks on the road. Last Thursday he returned from a long week of driving and visiting his employees with his boss in tow. After dinner that night, he simply got up from the table and walked out the door. I watched his back as he retreated down the sidewalk and into the neighborhood. My son asked, "What's wrong with Dad?"

My good friends Elizabeth and Joel.

I knew that look. To a much greater degree our military folks experience it when they return home from long periods of service. On one hand, they're glad to be home. On the other, they're overwhelmed when family issues and responsibilities smack them upside the head. Or when they realize: life goes on without them. And sometimes it goes on just fine. When I asked my husband later, why he just walked out the door without saying anything, he said, "I didn't think anyone would notice I was gone." 

When you put aside a manuscript, it doesn't go on without you too well. It remains there with unresolved issues, awkward sentences and all, just waiting for your expertise. Getting reacquainted with a set-aside manuscript takes some work. And even if you take the time to reread what you've already written, it still may look back at you and say, "I didn't notice you were gone."

Here are a few suggestions for reviving a work in progress:

• Introduce a new character
• Implement a new storyline
• Take a chapter and rewrite it from another character's point of view
• Change a decision a character made--if he said no to a job offer, make him say yes
• Add a prologue, preferably from a different time period than the rest of the manuscript
• If you already have a prologue, consider incorporating that scene into your manuscript, thereby eliminating it as such
• Change a character's name, personality, motivation, hair color, back-story, etc.
• Take a major scene and really amp up the conflict
• Write a sex scene involving your main character--even if it doesn't belong and you'll toss it immediately
• Take a scene you've written and rewrite it taking place in a different location

Any other suggestions from those of you who have resuscitated a manuscript?

A visit with Sara J. Henry, author of Learning to Swim

By Julie

Today, we welcome Sara J. Henry, author of Learning to Swim (Random House/2-22-11). Sara is getting lots of good buzz and great placement for her debut novel. It's a featured alternate of Doubleday Book Club, Literary Guild, Book of the Month Club, Mystery Guild, and Doubleday Large Print.

I’ve “known” Sara from the Backspace writers’ forum for a few years and have watched her journey from posting first chapters for critique to posting cover art and links to thrilling reviews and interviews for Learning to Swim. Sara was also the thread that connected me with Quinn Cummings, providing us with our very first author interview at What Women Write back in 2009.

From the publisher:
When she witnesses a small child tumbling from a ferry into Lake Champlain, Troy Chance dives in without thinking. Harrowing moments later, she bobs to the surface, pulling a terrified little boy with her. As the ferry disappears into the distance, she begins a bone-chilling swim nearly a mile to shore with a tiny passenger on her back.

Surprisingly, he speaks only French. He’ll acknowledge that his name is Paul; otherwise, he’s resolutely mute.

Troy assumes that Paul’s frantic parents will be in touch with the police or the press. But what follows is a shocking and deafening silence. And Troy, a freelance writer, finds herself as fiercely determined to protect Paul as she is to find out what happened to him. What she uncovers will take her into a world of wealth and privilege and heedless self-indulgence – a world in which the murder of a child is not unthinkable. She’ll need skill and courage to survive and protect her charge and herself.

Sara J. Henry’s powerful and compelling Learning to Swim will move and disturb readers right up to its shattering conclusion.

About Sara:
Sara J. Henry has been a columnist, soil scientist, book and magazine editor, Web designer, writing instructor, and bicycle mechanic. Learning to Swim is her first novel.

JK: Welcome, Sara, to What Women Write! The inciting incident in Learning to Swim happens in the very first few paragraphs:

If I’d blinked, I would have missed it.

But I didn’t, and I saw something fall from the rear deck of the other ferry. It could have been a bundle of trash; it could have been a child-size doll. Either was more likely than what I thought I saw: a small wide‑eyed human face, in one tiny frozen moment as it plummeted toward the water.

What I did next was a visceral reaction to those small eyes I thought I saw. Without conscious thought I vaulted onto the railing I was leaning against, took a deep breath, and dived. It’s amazing what you can do if you don’t stop to think.

(Hooked? Read the rest of chapter 1 here!)

Talk about a heart-pounding dive into the story. Readers often want to know where writers get their ideas in general, but I’d love to know how, specifically, this idea was born.

SJH: I had lived in the Adirondacks for four years, and was on a return visit, driving along Lake Champlain, the huge lake that separates New York state and Vermont, on a misty, overcast day. For some reason I imagined a woman on one of the big ferries that crosses the lake at its widest part, seeing a child fall in from the opposite ferry and making the split-second decision to dive in after him.

Then I had to build an entire novel around that one scene, which wasn’t particularly easy, I’ll admit.

JK: Learning to Swim crosses genre lines in ways. It’s generally classified as suspense, but it’s also a good old-fashioned whodunit with a bit of a literary feel and a love story at its heart. This could sound like a novel with a split personality, but never fear, readers, it works and works well.

How did you and your veteran agent, Barney Karpfinger (who also represents author John Lescroart and for decades represented Jonathan and Faye Kellerman – not bad company, Sara!) decide to pitch it to editors when it went out on submission?

SJH: I grew up reading old suspense novels by Mary Stewart (Nine Coaches Waiting; This Rough Magic; The Ivy Tree; Madam, Will You Talk?) as well as my father’s Travis McGee books by John D. MacDonald, and they definitely shaped my writing. The two of them were masters at blending genres – Stewart is considered one of the founders of romantic suspense and MacDonald was an extraordinary storyteller with a deeply introspective hero and gritty plots.

I never wanted to write a run-of-the-mill mystery or thriller, although I certainly enjoy reading them. And I wanted a heroine who could be any woman, an ordinary woman thrust into extraordinary circumstances. One agent who read the first forty or so pages told me I needed to cut out anything that wasn’t suspense, but I thought that agent was wrong – that all the additional elements were what made this novel work and would make it resonate for readers, and I stuck to my guns.

One advantage of well-established and greatly respected agents is that they don’t need to pitch hard, because editors know them well and know the type of authors and projects they represent. (They pitch well, but not hard, if that makes sense.) Barney told editors over the phone how the book opens, and the gist of his cover letter was this one sentence: By turns disturbing and moving—and always compelling—this novel of suspense marks the beginning of a significant new career. I had discussions with editors from three houses and no one had a problem with the blurring of genres – or if they did, they didn’t mention it!

JK: In one of your first blog interviews with Dawn Kurtagich, you tell the interesting story of writing and then rewriting Learning to Swim, stating that the rewriting is when the story really came together. We have lots of aspiring writers in our reader audience, and many of us have heard that famous mantra: “Writing is rewriting.” But that can be a bit of a mysterious concept. In your situation, what did rewriting really mean? Did you throw away the manuscript and start from scratch? Or …?

SJH: Definitely not from scratch. In fact the first chapter is pretty much how I wrote it originally, as are other key chapters. I’ll answer this question in two parts, because I really rewrote in two basic ways. The first was straightening out a very muddled middle part of the book: characters were thin, the pacing was slow, and the plot needed a lot of work. I’d written the book very quickly, because I knew if I’d slowed down I would have convinced myself I couldn’t do it.

But then I had to work out an involved plotline and re-engineer it into a book that was already written. As I’ve said elsewhere, I thought my brain would break, and I’ll never again do it that way. I also had to improve the pacing – at one point the characters go off to Home Depot, and there the book slowed to a crawl. (Going to Home Depot is now code for pace slowing down.) But at the end of this, I had a book that worked.

What I did next – and this was in several passes – was a complete relayering. Some scenes remained untouched, but others needed life breathed into them. In places I’d done what I call “cheating” – skipping over details or how a character felt, sometimes because the scene made me uncomfortable or was difficult to write. I reworked each of these scenes, imagining it from each character’s perspective. And along the way I truly learned to write. I learned the power that one word has to change the impact or flow of a scene, and I learned how moving a paragraph from one place to another can alter readers’ perception entirely. And I’d say I fell in love with writing all over again.

Finally – and this was well after the manuscript was accepted – I took a good look at the last four chapters, in which I’d crammed in every possible detail of explanation. (Reed Farrel Coleman told me, “I’m surprised you didn’t explain nuclear fission while you were at it.”) I told my editor I had to redo them, and he didn’t object. I rewrote those chapters, condensed them to three, and read them aloud over the phone to Reed – who is the best critique partner imaginable – and kept honing them until they worked.

Never underestimate the value of reading aloud, even if just to yourself.

JK: I know a little about your own world from interacting with you on Facebook and reading your blog posts on occasion. Would you share with our readers how your own unique world reflects that of Troy’s?

SJH: Like Troy, I rented a big house on Main Street in Lake Placid, New York, and rented out rooms to a batch of mostly athlete roommates. And like Troy, I was the sports editor at the local daily newspaper, and had a wonderful golden retriever/German shepherd mix dog named Tiger.

Troy likes computers and likes to work on bicycles, as I do - and she likes being able to do a lot of things. My dad gave me a fully stocked toolbox when I was 11 – but also gave me a sewing box and showed me how to knit. So while I can darn socks and cut hair, I also know how to roof a house, because my father showed me how to snap a chalk line, lay shingles, and pound in roofing nails. He was a nuclear physicist, not a roofer – but he strongly believed that people ought to know how to do all sorts of things.

JK: From that photo, I think it's obvious Tiger has been one of a long line of well-loved dogs!

Sara, when we try to define that mysterious quality known as writer’s voice, we know it has something to do with who we are and where we’ve been. How have other aspects of your own history informed your writing in general and also in writing Learning to Swim?

SJH: In one way or another, just about everything I’ve ever done and every person I’ve met has informed my writing. I can’t explain it any better than that. Clearly I never dived off a ferry after a small child, but I’ve experienced many of the emotions my characters have, and knowing a wide variety of people certainly helps you develop believable characters.

JK: I’ve pitched Backspace to our readers at What Women Write many times over the last few years. I’ve witnessed the value of being involved in an active community of writers, both online and at a local level. Of course you need to be a fantastic writer with a lot of good ideas and a lot of perseverance to become a published author, but what has being an active member of the Backspace forum meant for you on your journey to publication?

SJH: I followed my friend Jamie Ford to Backspace, but because my novel was in the final stages of polishing when I joined and I acquired an agent soon thereafter, my experience there isn’t quite that of some other unpublished writers (and because I’d written and cowritten several nonfiction books, I wasn’t technically unpublished).

What Backspace has given me is friendships, and an enormous amount of support from the people I’ve met there. Backspacers have been marvelous to respond to posts and generous in their praise. Writing is a solitary occupation and Backspace has made it markedly less so.

JK: Finally, what’s up next for you?

SJH: I am finishing up the sequel to Learning to Swim, and then I’ll be polishing that and doing some publicity and book touring for the first novel. And I have Books 3 and 4 roughed out in my head, and I’m eager to start writing those.

JK: Sara, thanks so much for being our guest on What Women Write. We wish you great things as a fiction author, and I can't wait to read the sequel to Learning to Swim.

Learning to Swim is available for preorder at all major and independent booksellers, and will be available to buy next Tuesday, February 22.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received an advanced copy of the book mentioned above gratis. Regardless, I only recommend books I've read and believe will appeal to our readers. I am making this statement in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”