What is a hook?

I’ve just re-read my last post and realised how long it is since I wrote one of these; so I thought I’d share the reason here.

You may remember that in the last post (at the end of April!) I described how I was feeling about my next thriller. I felt that what I’d written already (it wasn’t much, but I’d been sitting on the story idea for well over a year) just wasn’t good enough.

After that I had a long chat with my lovely agent, and together we decided the idea wasn’t worth pursuing. The concept was fine, but it wasn’t thrilling, mind-blowing, or even unusual. And I was already bored with it, after having developed it into a synopsis and thought about it for far too long. If the author is bored by the story they’re writing, you can imagine how it might turn out! Around eighty thousand words of prose: no enjoyment, no thrill, no urge to write every day. To write a good story, you need to be inspired, excited, longing to get going. It just wasn’t happening for me.

What editors are looking for, particularly from a thriller, is the big ‘hook’. It’s so important. Nailing the hook can make the difference between getting an agent or not, getting a publisher or not, and the book selling well or not.

But what is a ‘hook’?

A ‘hook’ is a way of describing your book that, in a few words, attracts the reader to your story. The best ones are short, easy to grasp and highlight the most compelling, unique aspects of your story that make it stand out. It makes someone want to read the book so much that they’ll buy it.

For example, the hook for my novel The Perfect Life is "A woman wins a fortune on the lottery, and that’s when everything starts to go wrong.” Or in The Perfect Neighbour, it’s “When a woman moves into a new house, she realises there’s something very strange going on next door.”

Now more than ever, a good hook is crucial to the success of a book. There are so many options, so many writers trying to get published, so many threats to the industry, that an editor has to be really convinced that your story is a good investment. It’s no good writing a story that’s ‘fine’ — even if it’s well written, by an established author with a great track record. It has to be extra-special.

And that’s what I’ve been mulling over for the past few weeks. I’ve been trying to come up with a story idea that’s really special, and it’s hard! This hasn’t happened to me before, as I’ve always had the next story in my head while writing the one before, so that by the time I’ve finished the manuscript, the next story is already taking shape.

It’s true there are no new ideas, and every story line has already been used. But it’s still possible, and indeed it happens all the time, that you can take a theme and make something quite unique out of it. You can put your own stamp on it, make it yours, and make a success of it.

So for the moment, I’m mulling over a couple of possibilities. I have no idea how long the mulling will take, but I’m hoping to come up with a real cracker! As all authors are. Next time: what (on earth) does ‘high concept’ mean?

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