The Book Hook Cook Book

October 9, 2008

I love watching my agent kick into gear. I may have issues with her sometimes--as I do with seemingly everything on the planet, at least from time to time--but when she decides to be aggressive in her marketing, it pleases me no end. So having given her the ending she was apparently looking for on The Fortress of Diamonds, and supplying her with a short blurb/synopsis to sell it with, and then also giving her a possible title and story idea for a potential follow-up, she said, "I'll get it out later this week."

Well, actually, later in the day, and to a lot of publishers who apparently expressed an interest in it.

Nothing may happen, of course, that's the nature of the biz, but it does fill me with something akin to optimism.

Anyway, later in the day I had a thought: "I don't know if it's a great book, but it's got a great hook."

Pretty new thinking for me. I struggle with hooks.

But last week, on one of the few nights when I wasn't doing something, I happened to watch a large chunk of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" on FX. If you haven't seen it, it's a movie with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, who are the pair in the title. A suburban married couple who just happen to be high-level assassins, although they aren't aware that each other is an assassin. Their marriage is on the rocks, they're both bored with the suburban man/woman they believe they've married, then they're sent out on separate missions to assassinate the same man, then they're pretty much assigned to kill each other. Mayhem ensues, the sexual chemistry absolutely sizzles and the movie takes off.

As I was watching this--I've seen it front-to-back once and probably half a dozen times in pieces on cable--I thought: If you take the married part out of this, it's a pretty standard shoot-'em-up.

Which was something of a revelation. Because I suddenly understood the hook. It wasn't: High-level assassins are hired to kill each other.

It was: High-level assassins are hired to kill each other... but it turns out they're married to each other and don't know it.

That, my friends, is a hook.

Part of the problem, I think, is the glut of entertainment options we have. Maybe Shakespeare had it easy. What the hell was he competing with? It wasn't a terribly literate population. There was no TV, no movie theaters, radio, CDs. Just a city full of people starved for entertainment with maybe a handful of theaters in the city they could afford to go to. And even then, many of them were probably familiar with his stories--certainly Romeo & Juliet had been around in one form or another for some time.

Can you imagine an age where people only saw a couple plays a year?

Wait, you don't think you see plays? Yes, of course you do. Why, just last night I watched three plays. One was an hour-long drama called "Star Trek: Enterprise" and I saw two more half-hour dramas (bits and pieces, I had to run up to the fruit market) called "Clone Wars." Thanks to TV, by the time your kid graduates from high school they've seen more 30-minute and 60-minute plays than people in Shakespeare's time saw in their entire lives.

Which might be besides the point.

* * *

I sent my editor a really great book,

She said to me, "Sir, I don't see the hook."

"I'm not fishing," said I, "it's got a great plot.

The characters sizzle, the action is hot."

"That may be so," she said with a blink,

"But story and character aren't enough, I don't think.

We have marketing and sales, Jesus, he wept,

The story must be what we call high-concept."

"High-concept," I say, with a wink and a nod,

"You mean a cover with Pamela Anderson's hot bod?"

"Sure," she says, "that will do in a pinch,

"Or a long-haired stud and a maid in a clinch,

But mostly we want something to sell

So you can earn back your advance... does that ring a bell?"

"Vaguely," say I, "but I guess I mistook

the secret of writing a best-selling book.

It's not about words or the writer's good looks,

It's all about dropping a well-baited hook."

Mark Terry